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Reviews should all contain brand-unfriendly language (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Most reviews are boring, corporate friendly platitudes and a 5-star rating, but that really doesn't tell you anything about the product. Hell, it may just be a bot regurgitating the products marketing sheet!

But if reviews contained swearing, slander, or other legal minefields you could know it wasn't written by the company.

"This toaster is great, works well, likes to eat forks. Feed it a fork every morning to reward it for a good job."

"What a fucking great coffee machine! Be sure to lick any drips off the scalding hot plate, that's the most tasty part."

"5-stars, mine came with an official statement from the company saying Hitler did nothing wrong."

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[–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

Alas, language doesn't work that way. Consider: newspapers used to refrain from printing swears literally. They'd write something like "——" or "[expletive]", or they'd paraphrase. But then politicians got a lot more foul-mouthed, and newspapers had to start printing more swears just to report what the politicians said.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    During Trumps first regime, German-speaking newspapers (and probably a few others around the world) had a quite intense discussion on how to translate Trumps meandering garbage.

    They could either translate him more loosely, making him sound like a actual human, but then people wouldn't know what a baboon he is. Or they could translate him more literally, keeping his "style" of talking and then everyone would believe that the translator messed up royally, because no human being that's halfway in their right mind would speak like that.

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