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Tag: pandering

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Thumbs Up for Pandering

What fresh hell is this, San Francisco?

Facebook skin at Montgomery BART

You are entering… Emoji Reaction Land. Tread carefully lest ye be streamed!

Facebook reaction emoji at Montgomery BART

glitched-out Facebook reaction emoji

I don’t actually object to Facebook Live, but the Luddite in me finds this corporate skin of a local train station somewhat unsettling. It’s not a new form factor in terms of advertising, but Facebook as a company is a little different from a department store, no? Stepping into Macy’s involves subjecting myself to surveillance, yes, but they don’t try to subsume every moment of my day.

The Facebook-ified corridor felt like a satirical theme park. But all those “omg!” and “lol!” faces were completely earnest. Facebook is papering San Francisco with this campaign outside the train stations as well, and it’s borderline /r/FellowKids-worthy.

Facebook, you’re old. Stop trying to copy Snapchat. It’s giving me secondhand embarrassment. Make do with being the identity system for a large chunk of the world and indexing copious information about our relationships. Yeesh.

The Downsides of Femme Finance

Yesterday a friend showed me Ellevest, which bills itself as an investing service for women. Their tagline:

Ellevest tagline

Thank goodness! The scourge of mansplaining in automated investing will be vanquished!

I find this extremely disturbing, because it’s pure pandering. As far as I can tell, Ellevest is just a fee-charging software layer on top of a basket of Vanguard ETFs. The terms and conditions explain that Ellevest pulls their recommendations from Morningstar. I’m sure Ellevest itself does something, but I’m very skeptical of whether the something it does is valuable.

They claim on the homepage, “We’re not just ‘shrinking and pinking’ an old investment model. We’ve built a whole new approach.” No, you haven’t! You’re just Vanguard with better UX and cynical marketing!

Look, I’m a woman. I believe misogyny exists and I agree that it’s fucked up for finance to be overwhelmingly dominated by men. I consider myself a feminist. I could get behind an investing service that was ethically women-oriented, like a version of faith-based investing.

But that’s not what Ellevest is. Ellevest is normal investing with a ladylike veneer. (Notice all the curly fonts?) Sure, I bet they employ more women than the average fintech company. But they also exploit a historically disadvantaged group, one that’s low on financial literacy, in order to offer a return to their own VCs.

I’ve talked before about how I love the internet’s ability to serve every niche. This is not what I meant.

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