Life In 19x19

Quite recently I heard about Flavian Aubelle's project to build a new Go server , which you can find over here https://www.gameofgo.com/
Even more recently I saw this effort by Sinan Dejpov, https://explorebaduk.com/
What caught my eye was the effort they'd put into their brand.

I got the feeling that ExploreBaduk was heavily reliant on AI in its marketing material. If you cast your eye over it, generally it looks pretty slick. The review features in particular made for tasty eye candy.
When you look a little closer though, it contained some really jarring stuff.
"Enjoy the path of improving yourself by winning different achievements and start your journey of self-improvement today." feels a bit like somebody crammed as many buzz words together as possible without caring whether or not they made a coherent phrase.
The video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFscHufS-g starts with a phrase that could of come out of Google Translate in the noughties. "A game of minds played by hearts" and voiced by some AI which just sounds creepy in a kind of Servelan voicing the Cadbury's Dairy Bunny way.
Little things like that seemed kind of crazy to me, so much effort, and yet failing so hard in the little places.

Game of Go does a better job, but still has some suspicious phrases like 'We want to empower beginners to pros' or 'Master your mind'. It generally felt more like it was written by a human, albeit who had perhaps spent too much time rewording their emails to be more in tune with the current business-speak.

Both looked to have really high standard graphics.
With so many servers out there, hard to imagine either will take off without a good deal of marketing power behind them.
Will they be the death of KGS and OGS, or simply the next European Grand Prix.

I think it is just a case of copycatting marketing material that the authors have seen somewhere. Maybe it is more readable and less bewildering than what is the norm. It is probably not something deliberate in this case but I'm pretty sure when Big Business makes this sort of marketing the intention is to overload the reader with nonsense about how great the thing is, until that reader gives up and follows the registration link.

That said. If it is what they authors wanted to say, then I don't see any problem with sentences like: "A game of minds played by hearts" and "Master your mind". Who wouldn't want to learn a mind game that you can play with your heart or to become the master of their very own mind? It is marketing material and the emphasis is on creating a positive impression, not on elaborating on what it is that was meant.

That's a very interesting point about overwhelming the reader with positive babble, I had not considered this technique before, it sounds very plausible.

To explain a little bit more about the phrase "A game of minds played by hearts" , it just doesn't make sense to a native speaker, perhaps for non native speakers it can be more convincing. We have a well known phrase "winning hearts and minds" , this is a 'game between minds', not a 'game of minds', it could be played 'from our hearts' but it could not be 'played by hearts'. You might consider "A mind game played from the heart" , not exactly my favourite advertising tagline, but it would be an improvement.

When you start a new web/tech business it's pretty typical to subcontract the design of the actual website/landing page out to a web designer, who rather than designing a new site from scratch à la 1999 will use a template that, for god knows what reason, all start-ups use these days. ~3 tabs at the top of the page, each tab leading to a near-identical page with 3 text blurbs off-set by a nearly-irrelevant image. It's not a deep statement imo, whenever you start a new business there is heavy pressure to structure your website like this, and that creates the need for the strangely pointless blurbs of text you correctly identify.

Well that is what users want.
Well that is what users want.
Well that is what users want.
In summary, we can find that this is what users want.

Different things seem to put off different people. I shy away from anything that reeks of chatGPT but I'm sensitive to language (while I'm a numbers guy!).

Nowadays I'm more into guitar playing. There's a lot of bad marketing in that area (too), fake shortcuts to mastery abounding. "You only need these 4 chords!", "How CAGED will unlock the fretboard for you!" ... But many people seem to buy into that, ignore all the scam alerts and make their purchase.

More fundamentally, at least in the guitar playing sector, I've found that the most valuable content (on youtube) is rather dense, leaving you with a 1:100 ratio of time watching : time playing. I've funded guys doing this by buying their e-books but I doubt many show that type of gratitude. So I'm afraid that online businesses will have a hard time being both genuine and profitable.