It's my personal feeling that most people can tell the difference between "calculated humanity" and real humanity. Most businesses and startups go for calculated humanity because real humanity is something they either don't believe in as an aspect of business, or are afraid to show because omgz what if somebody says something the readers don't like?

Real humanity means being vulnerable and talking about negative stuff, and risking people not liking you. But the people who don't dislike you will like you more. It means being genuine, not just "authentic."

When I left my parents as a teen, I partially supported myself with a Mac news/opinion site. Everybody told me that there was no room for another one, blah blah, but I decided to write like a real (& funny) human being instead of pretending to be a professional journalist like the rest. I earned $600-1000 a month in ad impressions, so it clearly worked.

Same thing worked for my current web site & information products I've created. I'm totally famous in the niche, and I'm not the best or brightest with the actual programming aspect. But my oldest tutorial from 2005 still gets about 15,000 views a month.

When it comes to my new SaaS that I just launched, it's the same thing. The blog is "real humanity" and I answer support requests myself.