The point about the human voice, in this context here, makes me think of voice as a part of design, and the function of "copywriting."

I think of the typical landing pages for most SaaS-type offerings. I might be particularly jaded, but I'm also the target audience for a lot of them: I'm a professional developer who buys such subscriptions, and I'm also a small business founder.

Nearly all of the marketing aimed at me in these roles fails to convince me, and causes despair and distrust in exactly the way that this manifesto seems to outline—so just from this anecdotal subjective feeling, I have a hunch that if you're trying to market to people likely to read Hacker News, this text is valuable.

Like, when you decide to decorate your site footer with the text "MADE WITH ︎LOVE IN SAN FRANCISCO", you're replacing your human voice with a robotic cliché, and the same effect emanates from most of the marketing copy I see.

Also, when you offer a service that you expect me to rely on for my business, and you fail to communicate in an open and clear way about what your company is up to, I agree exactly with the manifesto.

For a recent example, people have been wanting some kind of threaded response system in Slack. The company Slack has said over and over again that they're "working on it" for over a year. They're not willing to reveal anything more than this vague indication that it's somewhere in their pile of post-its. Here's the Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353

The enthusiastic "We hear you!" and the pseudo-friendly emojis, over and over again like a refrain... If Slack were an open source project, this style of communication would be ridiculous. It's condescending. (Though in the same way that Slack's general presentation is condescending, so +1 for consistency.)

So these points from the manifesto are very relevant:

> However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

> This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

> Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false — and often is.

What if Slack's external communication could give this following type of message, instead, for example?

> "Hey. I'm a product manager at Slack. I see lots of people want this feature. I see why: conversations can often become cluttered when topics intersect. Of course, we want Slack to be as useful as possible. So, can we decide on a minimal implementation that we could implement fairly quickly, and still give plenty of value? For example, do you think nested threading is necessary, or is one level enough? I mean, we have the team / channel hierarchy, and we see value in limiting the nesting complexity. I asked @designerperson to produce a mockup of the possible interface, and she should have them done within a few days. But just so you all know, we're working hard on [these 5 features] and this comes after those in priority. You can look at our public Trello board to get some insight into how we're coming along."

To me, that kind of message would be almost a pivotal event in corporate history, and the Cluetrain Manifesto explains why.