I read it in the waiting area of a small hospital in Krabi, while a friend was inside getting 4 stitches in his chin.
He had come off a scooter. Not badly. Or he had walked into a glass door, depending on which version you heard, and I heard both that afternoon.
The post was long and it was good. A man was angry about the fake posts that fill every nomad group now, most of them written by a machine. The ones that start by telling you that nobody talks about something, and then talk about it in the same words as everybody else. He had the pattern exactly. He was funny about it. He had a story about a hostel owner who wrote his own reviews in 4 different styles, and one of the styles had a dog.
I agreed with every line. I read it twice and saved it so I would not lose it.
The last paragraph started with the words: which is why I made this.
It was an app. A free week, and then a monthly price.
You know the feeling when a nice talk with somebody at a bar turns out to be about a business card. It was that. A small drop, somewhere under the ribs.
A nurse came out and said my friend would be another 20 minutes. So I scrolled back through the other things I had saved that month, and a lot of them had the same ending.
A long post about course sellers, from a man who did not want to name anybody. At the bottom was his own course, which was different, because it was honest.
A careful thread about fake reviews on rental sites. At the bottom, a service that checks reviews for you, 9 dollars a month.
And a man in a business group, very upset that the rules would not let a new account talk about his journey. He only wanted to connect with people, he said. 2 replies down he had put a link to his shop. I do not think he is a bad man. Somebody told him this is how it is done.
I had saved all of them because they were angry about the right things. I had not looked at the endings until that afternoon.
I should not have been surprised. It is close to my own work.
I write emails for small companies. The first thing you learn in that job is to agree with the reader before you ask them for anything. You find the thing that already annoys them and you say it better than they could. You make them laugh, if you can. Then you put the link at the point where they feel most understood, which is nearly always the end.
If I am selling cleaning tablets for coffee machines, I do not start with the tablets. I start with how much everybody hates cleaning the machine at 11 at night, when the chairs are already up on the tables and they want to go home.
It works. It works on me. I was sitting in a hospital with the app page open in the next tab, and I did not remember opening it.
For years the pitch out here was the dream, the beach and the laptop. People got tired of that. So now the pitch very often starts with being tired of it. There is so much fake content that the person complaining about it is the most trusted voice in the room, and the selling has moved to where the trust is.
I am not clean in this.
I have 3 short books for sale. I mentioned them at the bottom of a post, after about 1,000 words about something else. I thought about that post a lot, sitting there on a metal bench, with a woman next to me holding a bag of ice to her son's knee.
The rule I came out of that waiting room with is simple, and I use it on myself first. If the complaint ends in a link, it was an ad.
That does not make it a bad ad. The app might be useful. I never downloaded it, so I will never know. I just want to be told when I am being sold something. When it is me doing the selling, I will say so, and I will put the price where you can see it. I am not going to dress it up as being angry on your behalf.
My friend came out with a white square taped to his chin and asked what I was reading.
Something about fake posts, I said.
He said he was sick of them too. Then, on the way to the car, he told me about a cream that helps with scars. A man he follows had been talking about it all week.
This post has no link at the bottom. I checked.
Andrew - No Refunds •••
