[HN Gopher] Some notes on influenceering
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Some notes on influenceering
Author : tptacek
Score : 89 points
Date : 2024-06-04 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lcamtuf.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lcamtuf.substack.com)
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| > early on, it plays tricks with your mind -- what if I'm really
| as clueless as they say?
|
| > What stings far more is when you get no reaction whatsoever
|
| Wow, even someone like lcamtuf can feel like this sometimes. This
| guy is the author of super-awesome stuff like "The Tangled Web"
| book, the "Guerrilla guide to CNC" and the "american fuzzy lop"
| software. Definitely, his work is the kind of content that makes
| the internet 1000 times better!
| ipython wrote:
| I still remember being in awe of his paper on strange
| attractors - plotting the random number generators from various
| oses and languages in 3D space to discern patterns. That blew
| my mind at the time.
|
| Edit: ah here it is. It was initial tcp sequence number
| generators: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/oldtcp/tcpseq.html
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Having done some blogging that I need to get back to, I have to
| agree with you that follower counts are mostly worthless.
| Platforms like Twitter and YouTube end up with hugely inflated
| numbers compared to your actual audience.
|
| A fantastic following is 1000 people who really care. A million
| random YouTube subscribers might have that.
| skilled wrote:
| The problem is that communities got replaced by algorithms who
| think on your behalf.
|
| The algorithm is by definition _random_ , and yet for countless
| years now it is how most social media sites, including popular
| developer communities, operate.
|
| In the era of the feed and timeline, nobody bothers to check
| "Following" when you have "Recommended" enabled by default. The
| former requires _effort_ , while the latter gives a false sense
| of reality.
|
| Every refresh it is something new and exciting, every time. A
| never ending loop of joy and happiness. Who knows... one day the
| algorithm could even show you in front of the entire world!
| boredemployee wrote:
| >> In the era of the feed and timeline, nobody bothers to check
| "Following" when you have "Recommended" enabled by default.
|
| That's something I really hate and I feel pretty dumb that I
| found just some weeks ago that I can change X's feed to show me
| the posts people who I follow. I wonder if that's true for
| instagram as well because I can't stand to see random posts
| anymore. To be honest, I'm getting tired of it.
|
| i.e: I'm really enjoying going to a record shop to listen to
| music instead of spotify crap. the serendipity is real
| soulofmischief wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I feel like my experience with platforms
| such as bandcamp, YouTube, private trackers, etc. replicate
| much of the serendipity of a record shop, while vastly
| increasing discoverability.
|
| I love going into a record shop as much as the next guy, but
| I do find that I discover more _new_ things which actually
| stick via the internet. I also find that I am able to rely
| more on network-based algorithms for discoverability if the
| community is well-aligned. Even better if I can navigate
| myself when the underlying data is exposed via similarity
| maps, tags and other hypertext.
|
| Recommendation algorithms we see on corporate social
| platforms (Spotify included) generally suck because the
| underlying data is not exposed to the user. That would be bad
| for ad revenue. These platforms enjoy the profound level of
| mind control which they employ towards their users, and are
| loathe to surrender it.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| The best thing I've learned about "influenceering" is to stop
| thinking you're hot shit and focus on being useful (or
| entertaining if that is what you're about).
|
| Years ago I was pumping content out all the time and I was just
| creating the content for the sake of creating it. Consequently,
| the content was mostly pointless and garbage.
|
| If you want to treat your social media as a public journal that
| is cool, but not likely to make you an influencer. If your goal
| is to grow a following, you've gotta be empathetic towards your
| audience and create what they want to see.
|
| If you're trying to entertain, make sure you're actually
| entertaining. Or if like me you're educating, make sure you're
| actually educating.
|
| It seems completely obvious, yet when you're doing it, its easy
| to lose sight of the mission.
|
| Once I "removed myself" from the equation and just focused on
| what is actually useful to my intended audience things improved
| tremendously.
| zackproser wrote:
| This is helpful - thank you for sharing. I've been down a
| mental rabbit hole lately and reached similar conclusions.
| zackproser wrote:
| And, for what it's worth, I also share because I love
| building things and learning. I taught myself how to code
| using free resources online, so it felt perfectly natural to
| publish and open-source everything I figured out.
|
| I also wouldn't mind eventually making some money off
| delivering reliable value to others.
| luu wrote:
| > Some of my most popular posts are throwaway quips and memes
| that went viral on social media. One of my life's crowning
| achievements is this: [witty, throwaway, quip tweet].
|
| > In contrast, some of the work I put weeks or months into
| essentially lost the SEO game and gets nearly zero traffic ...
| Even though I don't write for money, there is an immense pressure
| to produce clickbait -- even if simply to add "hey, since you're
| here, check out this serious thing".
|
| This will be different for different people, but I've noticed a
| moderately strong negative correlation between how much effort I
| put into something and how much engagement it gets (this seems
| likely to be different for people who apply their effort to
| generating engagement). The highest engagement content content of
| mine tends to be thoughtless social media comments I make without
| thinking. Something like https://danluu.com/ftc-google-
| antitrust/, which summarizes 300+ pages of FTC memos and is lucky
| to get 10% of the traffic of a throwaway comment and is more
| likely to get < 0.1% of the traffic of a high-engagement
| throwaway comment. Of course there's a direct effect, in that a
| thoughtless joke has appeal to a larger number of people than a
| deep dive into anything, but algorithmic feeds really magnify
| this effect because they'll cause the thoughtless joke to be
| shown to orders of magnitude more people so something with a 10x
| difference in appeal will end up with, say, a 1000x difference in
| traffic on average and even more in the tail.
|
| I don't think this is unique to tech content either. For example,
| I see this with YouTube channels as well -- in every genre or
| niche that I follow, the most informative content doesn't has
| fairly low reach and the highest engagement content leans heavily
| on entertainment value and isn't very informative.
| Swizec wrote:
| > the most informative content doesn't has fairly low reach and
| the highest engagement content leans heavily on entertainment
| value
|
| Same observation here. I think it's because these channels are
| optimized for people looking to be entertained, not looking to
| be informed. There's an impedance mismatch between high value
| content and what people want while doomscrolling on the couch
| at 8pm or while on a coffee break at work.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| My gut says - and this is very much gut - that throwaway
| content/posts probably tend to be comedic, and sometimes we
| just strike comedy gold. One good, funny sentence can ripple
| very quickly.
| mycologos wrote:
| Doesn't this kind of make sense? Stuff with high personal
| resonance, by virtue of being personal, has a specific
| audience. That sounds trite, but I at least tend to underrate
| how much the stuff I really like is just a weirdly shaped key
| fitting into a weirdly shaped lock somewhere in my brain.
| swatcoder wrote:
| But they're talking about substantivity, not personal
| relevance.
|
| The throwaway jokes and quips aren't more "personally
| relevant" -- their triviality justs generate more engagements
| per unit time/pixel/visit, which algorithmic feeds optimized
| for.
|
| It doesn't mean that users like them more, or that more users
| like them, or that they're more personally relevant. It just
| means that users can be inundated with more of them per
| visit, which means sites can capture more personal data by
| favoring them, which means they can more precisely target
| users, which means they can earn more from ads, which is what
| the whole algorithm engine is about.
|
| Personal relevance isn't involved at all, and that's part of
| the problem.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| My experience on the internet suggests that high-signal
| information usually has very low memetic fitness. All the good
| sources of information I've found have been buried away and
| I've come across them serendipitously.
|
| Not particularly surprising though, entertainment is the lowest
| common denominator so it's much easier for that kind of stuff
| to spread. High-signal information is the complete opposite:
| very few people can actually tell if it's valuable, and it's
| not particularly shareable.
|
| To be fair, most people aren't really looking for super high-
| signal info anyway. Closer to the minimal amount of information
| I need, presented in an easily digestible way, or looking for
| infotainment around something they're interested in!
| brandall10 wrote:
| I see this even on enthusiast discussion forums and subreddits
| where high value content is encouraged.
|
| Very often someone will post some thoughtful, high value post
| in a thread that gets at least a handful of positive reactions.
| But if someone quotes it with some silly quip that's 5 words or
| less, it invariably gets 3-4x the response.
|
| Yeah, sometimes it's a tdlr; situation, but it seems common
| enough even with just a few sentences.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Eric Helms, an exercise physiology researcher out of New
| Zealand who runs a reasonably well-known but certainly not
| viral Internet coaching practice and podcast, both for
| weighlifting, made a comment to this effect on a recent
| episode. If he fixates on engagement metrics, he can see the
| lowest effort cheap shit is what gets the clicks and the
| eyeballs. Books he has published push nowhere near that volume,
| and he can only coach a few people at a time.
|
| But what kind of engagement are you looking for? One of his
| coaching clients is a two-time world champion. Think about some
| of history's great teachers. Jaime Escalante directly ever
| engaged with what? A few hundred, maybe a thousand math
| students in his entire 40 year career? Sure, but he deeply
| impacted these people, and in some cases totally changed their
| lives for the better. Do you want to briefly amuse a billion
| people for a few seconds each or produce world champions and
| paths from the ghetto to the middle class?
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is why the stock market (specifically the Nasdaq) and real
| estate, tech jobs are so great for building wealth . none of
| this unpredictability of having to rely on user/reader
| engagement or guessing the whims of reader or publisher tastes.
| For investing, being successful is as easy as parking your
| money and watching it grow. The creator/engagement economy has
| vastly more losers relative to winners, which makes it
| impractical.
| cjmb wrote:
| Yeap, just +1'ing this too.
|
| One other axis of engagement is "topical relevance" -- and I
| think that does have some overlap with the axis of "effort put
| in". Meaning: putting a TON of effort into a long-form piece
| tends to relate to some original thought or framing you have.
| But a lot of people are explicitly looking _for_ something,
| even if that something is an entertaining throwaway meme
| comment.
|
| If you go too heavily down the "flesh out topic of deep
| personal interest", you can end up too far away from the "topic
| everyone wants to talk about on the internet today" stuff.
|
| Sadly (or not!), I take great enjoyment fleshing out topics of
| deep personal interest, even when they have limited relevance
| to the topic du jour. If it were different, perhaps we'd be
| journalists or more mainstream authors.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| +1 - I've spent months on some videos--research, testing,
| sometimes travelling to different places to get better data and
| video to use. Then I spend a few hours on others. Some of the
| 'big' ones do well, sure, but it's nowhere near proportional to
| the amount of time worked.
|
| I still do those projects because personally I don't feel like
| I'm doing as much good when I whip up a video in less than a
| day from concept to posting. I try to at least have something
| interesting/educational in each video, even if it's just a Gist
| or a new GitHub project someone can fork.
|
| That extra work doesn't result in any extra reward/revenue, but
| at least it keeps me motivated.
| cyrillite wrote:
| It's what I call the comedians valley. Naturally funny people
| are off the cuff and effortless. If they try stand up it takes
| a long time to marry up elite performance professionalism with
| natural talent. For a long time there's an uncanny awkwardness
| to it. The same thing is goes for other forms of memetic
| influence
| bawolff wrote:
| I wonder though if there is a long term benefit.
|
| E.g. people might pay attention to you because of your
| reputation. Your reputation might be based on high effort posts
| (over the long term) even if they get less attention. The lower
| effort posts might get more direct attention but only because
| of your reputation which is indirectly caused by the high
| effort posts which much fewer people read.
|
| Just a theory, i wonder if people who are actually internet
| famous would agree or not (since i am not).
| gowld wrote:
| Surely that throwaway "computer science" tweet only went viral
| because lcamtuf was already famous and had a high follower count
| because of their previous, substantial work.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Very good observation, and I strongly agree. A person's
| shitposting reads differently when they have some name
| recognition in the audience. Especially that of an expert - I
| find myself looking into deeper meaning in a throwaway comment
| that I wouldn't even notice if it came from some random
| Internet user.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Can relate to a lot of this as a very small content creator that
| has been doing it for fun for over 10 years.
|
| On online weirdos - this is very much a thing. You can pick up
| weirdly persistent stalkers and haters and it can be exhausting
| and sometimes scary.
|
| For me, I do it for fun. I find it very frustrating to have
| conversations with followers/viewers that are wanting me to do
| $thing and why don't I open subs to $monetize blah blah and I
| explain that while I do enjoy putting out content, at the end of
| the day this is for _my_ enjoyment and there is zero chance I can
| make as much as I do from it as my day job, so I don 't. It's
| very frustrating and a sad state of affairs that people can't
| seem to grasp the idea of making content _for the sake of making
| content._ That 's how the early internet was, no one was getting
| paid, and it put out arguably some of the best there has been.
|
| Regarding hosting/seo stuff, I always let platforms like twitch,
| meta, YT, etc. manage that for me rather than wrangling SEO hell,
| but I acknowledge the video space is a bit different than the
| blog space. For the writing I do, I wouldn't dream of self
| hosting for the reasons he describes.
| zackproser wrote:
| +1 - I picked up my first semi-stalker / email harasser
| recently from blogging and sending out a newsletter about apps
| I build and open-source. Pretty weird experience.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _but otherwise, it's OK to write about what excites you, and to
| do it as you learn."_
|
| yeah, but what if no one else cares what you write about or it
| does not gain traction
| QuantumG wrote:
| Not everyone cares about that.
| jwr wrote:
| So what? _You_ care. That 's what matters.
| baby wrote:
| > #1: It's still a chore
|
| just use a static site if you can. I think I'm also stuck with an
| old stack and don't have the time to move to a static site and
| I've been paying the price for years. All my new stuff is static,
| pushed on github, deployed by cloudflare pages. Worst was when a
| linux upgrade deleted a bunch of user content, fortunately I had
| set up backups! But spent the entire night fixing things. Now I
| do static site or managed databases.
|
| > #2: There are weirdos on the internet
|
| I agree. The worst is when it's people you know (or even admire)
| who take a direct (or indirect) stab at you and your content. But
| I think you can't let that stop you, because it stops most people
| from publishing what they have in their brain. The more
| successful you are the more haters you'll attract, that's just
| the way it is.
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