[HN Gopher] Some notes on influenceering
___________________________________________________________________
Some notes on influenceering
Author : tptacek
Score : 247 points
Date : 2024-06-04 20:34 UTC (1 days 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
| ImaCake wrote:
| That's an amazing piece of work. Even in a quick skim I
| picked up a lot of new ideas which speaks to how well the
| author can explain tricky concepts!
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| If a chronological feed of everyone you follow is what you
| want, you'll _love_ the Fediverse because it has so little
| algorithm that it 's actually a flaw.
|
| Although, if you follow lots of people, a chronological feed
| is still just "random posts", because they are the ones that
| happened to get posted just before you looked at the feed. A
| customized feed would be better - some way to up-weight
| insightful posts and down-weight memes.
| righthand wrote:
| Isn't it just automated channel flipping, but instead of
| isolated display space per channel, instead the channels are
| conglomerated together into an endless feed? A never ending
| loop isn't intended to bring joy and happiness and that's why
| it fails. It is however intended to remove control from the
| controller.
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| > If you want to treat your social media as a public journal
| that is cool, but not likely to make you an influencer
|
| I think the key trick is you need to be interesting. A public
| journal can be for some people but probably not most.
|
| I'm interested in a public journal of someone in the top of
| their field, thinking deep thoughts and explaining how they see
| the world.
|
| I'm not interested in a public journal that amounts to: today i
| bought groceries and binged netflix.
| immibis wrote:
| Unfortunately we live in a society which doesn't reward that.
| At all. If you can be content with being the most usefully
| informative guy on the planet and receiving less recognition
| for it than the guy who makes funny faces on TikTok all day...
| good for you. Most people cannot.
|
| One thing that might help with this is actual face-to-face
| connections. Join a hackerspace or something. A smaller number
| of people may interact with you than on your blog, but they're
| a substantially more complex interactions, not just a view
| counter going up.
| 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.
| 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!
| M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote:
| any high-signal sources in particular?
| immibis wrote:
| you just want some to look at? OTOH danluu, prog21, lcamtuf
| (of course). I had more, but I forgot them. Because they
| have low memetic fitness.
|
| Hacker News, compared to Reddit.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list,
| with a few more business-y sources thrown in:
|
| - https://erikbern.com
|
| - https://lethain.com
|
| - https://commoncog.com
|
| - https://scattered-thoughts.net
|
| - https://danluu.com
|
| - https://ideolalia.com
|
| - https://staysaasy.com
|
| - https://collabfund.com
|
| - https://blog.nelhage.com
|
| - https://jacobian.org
|
| - https://equalventures.substack.com
|
| - https://defmacro.org
|
| - https://spakhm.com
|
| - https://apenwarr.ca
|
| - https://scarletink.com
|
| - https://benkuhn.net
|
| - https://cpojer.net
|
| - https://brandur.org
|
| - https://zeptonaut.com
|
| Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for
| any of these!
| 0xmutt wrote:
| Thanks for the list!
| miki123211 wrote:
| Anything that comes from an academic (.edu / .ac.uk / your
| local equivalent) domain, Youtube channels of academic
| institutions (the less professionally recorded the video,
| the better), the Wikipedia references for a particular
| topic.
| tejtm wrote:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
| glial wrote:
| > Closer to the minimal amount of information I need
|
| It makes me wonder what this 'need' is that can be filled by
| memetic drivel.
| sdwr wrote:
| If I had to guess, "memetic drivel" gives off the same
| subconscious signals as safe, healthy communities.
|
| Demonstrating that the speaker is at ease, receives broad
| support from listeners, and can say things without fear of
| reprisal.
| glial wrote:
| That's very interesting food for thought, thanks!
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Meme: contagious idea.
|
| It is easy to remember and it produces a positive reaction
| on the spectator. Quality of information, even veracity,
| are a second thought.
| ghaff wrote:
| Somewhat related is that the type of format that some people
| like to glibly dismiss as clickbait--how to..., 5 takeaways
| for $EVENT, etc. Whether they deliver or not there's at least
| a promise of practical advice or easily digestible
| information that doesn't involve working through 2,000 or
| 3,000 words to figure out what the key points are. I may
| appreciate a good New Yorker article but sometimes I just
| want some highlights.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Yeah 100%. We're all in that mode sometimes.
| gspencley wrote:
| > To be fair, most people aren't really looking for super
| high-signal info anyway.
|
| This is the charitable interpretation. It's not that people
| are necessarily dumb or that "the algorithm" is trying to
| appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's that the vast
| majority of the time, people are "engaging" with the Internet
| in order to seek out entertainment in the first place.
|
| The world wide web began its life as the promise of unlimited
| information at our fingertips. But most people who need to
| engage in "serious" academic research on a topic are going
| directly to specialized sources for that information that
| they are already familiar with and trust. Even on the
| Internet, websites like StackOverflow come to mind when it
| comes to software development. But more often than not I'm
| going back to text books, be it for algorithms or design
| patterns or what have you.
|
| When I'm taking time to engage with the web, even here right
| now on Hacker News, it's because I'm taking a break. I'm not
| engaged in any specific productive endeavour at the moment.
| I'm looking to fill my time and unwind until I'm back to work
| and chores.
|
| I used to think about this when I considered why there is so
| much hate and outrage on social media. My theory is that
| people are on social media because they're on a break, or
| they just got home, or they just got their kids to sleep and
| all they want to do is look at cute cat gifs or watch TikTok
| videos or whatever. Then the news feed shoves a bunch of
| stuff in their face that they disagree with or find
| contrarian, because they're most likely to engage with it,
| and the fact that they're tired and not in the mood to have a
| well reasoned conversation goes a long way towards triggering
| that outburst.
|
| It's a cliche truism to say that the algorithms are giving
| people want they want. I think what people want most of the
| time is entertainment and "easy reading/watching." And so
| there is far more of that than anything else.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Yeah I agree. That was what the last bit of my comment was
| supposed to be about, but I unintentionally underplayed it
| a lot.
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not just unpredictability. It's that outside of doing
| explicitly commercial work (and often even then), the average
| and certainly the median income for a great deal of creative
| work is really low.
| 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).
| jacobolus wrote:
| There is definitely a long-term societal benefit to doing
| both kinds of work. Often work seen by only a few people
| (which might gather only a handful of citations, or none at
| all) inspires a later generation's breakthroughs at the
| frontier of human understanding. (For example yesterday there
| was a post about Hermann Grassmann and his pioneering work in
| linear algebra which got almost no positive feedback at the
| time but 150 years later is considered foundational for whole
| fields of study.) On the other hand making very popular
| material that helps a large number of people to slightly
| better understand old well-known ideas can still have huge
| benefit.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| I am only a little Internet famous, but this matches my
| experience. But I also self-host and stay away from poisonous
| platforms.
| bfuller wrote:
| I am more internet infamous, but my one viral success has
| impacted my life in more ways than I could explain. But that
| one success took 5 years of my life.
| mike_mg wrote:
| Predicting what people want to consume is hard, especially if #
| of impressions is your success measure. More broadly, I have
| been endlessly surprised by how users use my products and what
| in particular they liked. You do tend to get better at feeling
| this out from seeing people interacting with your product, but
| you stand to be bewildered, forever. If only you saw in what
| circumstances people read your posts!
|
| At the same time, some might say it's about the area under the
| curve. If 10 folks get their mind blown by in-depth treatment
| of some curious topic, it's roughly same amount of utils as 1e5
| impressions on some silly quip if you ask me.
|
| I, for one, am perpetually grateful to lcamtuf. I have been
| looking up to him for like 15 years, and he has shaped me
| profoundly by showing what level of focus, productivity and
| insight is possible. You wouldn't think that someone's life
| trajectory can get changed by super detailed CNC lore write up,
| but here we are, years later (: Thanks!!
|
| Also, if you're reading this lcamtuf, I would like to put one
| vote in favour of re-instating the American essays. Pls don't
| pull a Kafka on us! I did read your "choosing how to be
| remembered" post, but still, the fact that you took the
| American essays down feeds right into the topic of this current
| post. I found them positively entertaining and insightful.
| xmprt wrote:
| I think this is more of a quantity vs quality thing. You make
| 100 low effort posts in the time of 1 high effort post. Even if
| there's a 1% chance of the low effort posts getting traction
| compared to the 10-20% chance of a high quality post getting
| traction, on a net basis, the low quality posts will end up
| being more popular.
| jc6 wrote:
| Michael Goldharber - People have limited attention to give
| anything, but unlimited capacity to receive attention.
|
| The Attention Economy has been inflated exploiting the above
| inequality.
|
| Bottom line is the social media is not designed to optimize
| allocation of limited Global Human Attention. It does a fine
| job squandering it. And people are begining to notice.
| winternett wrote:
| Social media destroys the value of intellect because it
| limits the initial exposure of posts strategically in an
| unfairly tiered manner based on popularity. There is no real
| way to reach others unless you cheat or pay for ads now.
|
| There is no real logical explanation to it's utility any
| more, as it serves as a casino for scams and ads, it's really
| no longer a forum for delivering important information and
| developing reputation in my opinion, because the popularity
| garnered on these platforms can easily be bought, forged,
| plagiarized, and sold on the black market, and often if
| you're highly controversial.
|
| Even the people getting attention these days know their
| popularity only lasts for seconds at a time, there is nothing
| durable, and most social media clout is also not very
| memorable in the long term. Eventually {hopefully} real life
| interactions will become more important again after the sheen
| of tech manipulation on art and news wears off.
| dorkwood wrote:
| > The highest engagement content content of mine tends to be
| thoughtless social media comments I make without thinking.
|
| I think this goes deeper than just comments. I've noticed a
| similar phenomenon with artists posting their work. Some of
| their most engaging posts tend to be pencil sketches, rather
| than their most polished pieces.
|
| I think we tend to be more impressed with things that seem like
| they were achieved effortlessly, in general. If I was to guess,
| I'd say it might have something to do with our brains craving
| energy efficiency, and rewarding us for discovering someone
| who's more efficient than we are at some task.
| keiferski wrote:
| > effortlessly
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura
| keiferski wrote:
| I think the dichotomy here is a false one. There is plenty of
| well-researched, in-depth content that does well on social
| media. The trick is that it's also presented in an accessible
| way that provides value at every step, even the "superficial
| glance" one.
|
| The mistake many of the "I spent hours researching this piece"
| creators is that they don't package that content in an
| accessible way. Instead it's a huge block of text without any
| coherent organization or entry point. Ergo it's not surprising
| that it does worse.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > The mistake many of the "I spent hours researching this
| piece" creators is that they don't package that content in an
| accessible way. Instead it's a huge block of text without any
| coherent organization or entry point. Ergo it's not
| surprising that it does worse.
|
| It's like a lot of open source software. Tons of high quality
| effort put together to make great things, but very little
| time put toward packaging it to be appealing to the masses.
| Which is fine if you're okay with that, just don't be
| surprised when the average person isn't setting up a
| toolchain to compile your project from source or not editing
| config files to changes settings that aren't accessible in-
| program.
|
| It's possible hour+ blog posts don't have much of a market,
| but I _know_ super in-depth, informative, hour+ videos have
| some form of a market. At the very least Summoning Salt does
| something right in their videos to get millions of people to
| watch hour long historical video game videos.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > The mistake many of the "I spent hours researching this
| piece" creators is that they don't package that content in an
| accessible way. Instead it's a huge block of text without any
| coherent organization or entry point. Ergo it's not
| surprising that it does worse.
|
| I honestly think this is what draws me to the
| documentary/podcast/video essay genre so much. I have a hard
| time concentrating on reading non-fiction but take the exact
| same material and deliver it via someone with decent charisma
| and the willingness to construct into a narrative story, and
| I'll watch a 4-hour deconstruction of a TV show I don't even
| care about.
| hirenj wrote:
| I actually am beginning to worry about this from a scientific
| publishing point of view. Yeah I know there's editorial board
| meetings where articles are discussed for publication, but
| given that the content is being pushed out increasingly through
| algorithmic channels (google scholar, social media, pubmed
| search, researchsquare), I have to wonder how much choices are
| made to optimise for the channels. What are the metrics
| editorial decisions are measured by? Does channel performance
| factor in?
| brabel wrote:
| Scientists appear to optimise for citations because that's
| how they're "measured" against others. The quality and
| innovation of the research almost doesn't matter if it won't
| get citations, so you must publish something around what
| other people are working on, not on what you believe there's
| more chances of progress. To get citations, you also need to
| "play SEO" on those research search engines, of course (which
| is why every research paper uses as many buzzwords as they
| can fit in it), or make sure you have mutual agreements with
| "friends" to cite each other in every possible publication.
| Most heads of departments require everyone to cite their work
| on everything they publish. It's a wonder that with such a
| idiotic system (ironically coming from our brightest
| educational institutions) science still manages to make any
| progress at all.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| I think it was probably the best you could do before the
| Internet.
| OJFord wrote:
| On a positive other hand though, I think some of that
| (engagement with the low-effort joke or whatever) only comes
| because of respect earnt with the higher effort content.
|
| For example, I read the Money Stuff newsletter and follow its
| author Matt Leavine on Twitter as a result; I'd be much more
| likely to 'engage' on Twitter if he posted some joke (for other
| readers: a cartoon of him leaning forward into an email client
| after a holiday, say) than I would to reply by email with a
| well thought-out and in-depth response with additional
| information/correction on some technical detail say, even if I
| worked in the industry to have that information. But I'm only
| following him on Twitter because of the newsletter.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I agree and it can be very frustrating. You put a lot of effort
| into something and get almost no feedback/traffic (I also don't
| write for money or make money from my blog, but it's nice to
| see people read it) and then you can write a pithy comment or
| post that doesn't dig into the nuance and it will blow up.
|
| Some of my highest upvoted HN comments are 1-2 sentences but
| when I've responded or posted something well thought out or
| detailed it sometimes gets no votes/replies.
|
| I try to "forget" this phenomenon because I don't want to trend
| towards one-liners optimizing for engagement but every time a
| throwaway comment blows up I get somewhat frustrated that the
| well-reasoned reply/comment I wrote the previous
| day/hour/minute was ignored.
|
| Thankfully I've had longer comments/posts gain traction so I
| know it does happen. I wrote a detailed blog post [0] on the
| Kroger (grocery store) app and posted it to HN but it got no
| upvotes (maybe 1-2) and didn't get any comments. Thankfully,
| and this was news to me, the HN mods will occasionally take a
| post they liked that didn't get attention and throw it on the
| front page to give it some more visibility (and then it can
| sink or swim on its own). They did that for this post and I got
| to participate in some enjoyable discussions on the topic.
|
| That's really what drives me to write (which I do rarely), the
| resulting discussion/feedback, well at least it's a close
| second to just getting my ideas down on "paper" which forces me
| to think about them in new/interesting ways. More than once
| I've gone into writing a blog post thinking a certain way then
| I've changed or altered my thinking after putting my initial
| thoughts on the page.
|
| [0] https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/11/krogers-digital-
| struggle/
| et1337 wrote:
| I remember that post, thanks for sharing!
|
| Probably half of my posts that hit the front page got there
| via the second chance pool. It feels like dang is single-
| handedly turning back the tides of the internet by hand-
| picking links.
| 65 wrote:
| Same goes for programming projects. My most popular projects
| are always ones that were very quick to make. If I spend months
| making an app, it always seems like no one cares. If I spend a
| few days making an app, people will use it.
|
| Perhaps it instead is the simplicity of the idea that resonates
| with the most people rather than the complexity of the content.
| Perhaps this isn't a bad thing, either. After all, simplicity
| is the ultimate sophistication.
| omoikane wrote:
| It might be that things that take more effort to produce also
| take more effort to consume. When readers face a choice between
| a well-researched 100 page article versus a short (maybe low
| effort) quip of 100 characters, they are more likely to view
| the latter.
| sleno wrote:
| Funny how it happens like that. Maurice Ravel's most famous
| piece, Bolero, was written intended as a simple warmup for his
| orchestra.
| 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.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Him making this joke is also a product of his expertise. Like,
| it takes at least some experience to have the insight and then
| be able to communicate it in a pithy way.
| 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.
| exitb wrote:
| If the lack of traction takes away from your excitement or
| ability to learn, it best to just skip writing. It's fine to do
| fun stuff just for the sake of it, no need to justify it by
| getting an audience.
| 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.
| port19 wrote:
| Any reason in particular for going with cloudflare pages
| instead of github pages? The latter has served me well for
| years, but I'm wondering if I'm missing out
| immibis wrote:
| Remember that both of these are giant corporations with your
| worst interests in mind, and they will demand payment or
| delete your site as soon as it's convenient for them, so
| don't rely on them too much.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A $4/month VPS hosts my static site and a bunch of other
| convenience things for me. I can swap CDNs if cloudflare
| decides to kick me off (and this VPS can handle a
| shockingly high data rate with just nginx). 100%
| recommended.
| baby wrote:
| Who cares? You can easily switch to a different provider
| hanniabu wrote:
| Netlify and vercel are also great options
| baby wrote:
| Custom domains for free
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Hearing about the CTR of his videos vs his followers is really
| interesting. There's a narrative that once you build up a
| sufficient following then you have a better shot at getting
| eyeballs on future things you make.
|
| But these stats throw some cold water on that. People don't
| magically convert from follower to customer or viewer.
|
| I think these narratives are pushed implicitly by the platforms
| to justify their stranglehold, and the creators themselves who
| have won big. At a certain scale, the model works, but due to
| very uneven distribution of attention, it's tough to be that
| person.
|
| Also, most social media platforms are so infuriatingly mind-
| numbing now with everyone running around speaking in that faux-
| authoritative voice when they're just offering their opinion.
|
| I want a great reset of the internet where the subject matter
| experts are the ones getting attention, not the people who post
| stupid engagement bait all day. But that won't happen.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| This is why you must self-host. And use HN for comments.
|
| You may think I'm joking, but my pure self-hosted website can get
| more attention through HN if I put effort into blog posts.
|
| I have two blog posts that say the same thing, one with a
| ragebait tone, and one that is moderate. HN loved the moderate
| one.
|
| I love this site.
|
| Anyway, I think he hit on the reason: other platforms give you
| bad signals for their own benefit. HN still gives a good signal,
| and self-hosting avoids bad signals from bad platforms.
| trust_bt_verify wrote:
| Hacker news seems to love rage bait and may just align with
| your biases better than other tech sites. This has certainly
| been my experience, I often find people I agree with more
| reasonable before any personal reflection.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| That may be true, but my biases are towards more
| professionalism in the industry, and the VC-backed HN
| community may not like that.
| jfoutz wrote:
| completely unrelated (pretty much)
|
| But this is still one of my favorite parts of the internet -
| https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ amazing, information dense
| guide to actually making stuff. I reached out once to the author,
| who was patient and kind.
|
| I get through my days, I make stuff I do stuff, and I'm generally
| content with that. The author, lcamtuf, from my very limited
| interaction seems "extra". Maybe it really just is writing stuff
| down. Maybe I should do more of that.
| salamo wrote:
| I decided a long time ago that my main audience will be myself in
| the future. A blog post is the output of a project which at a
| minimum forces me to organize my thoughts on something important,
| and usually involves getting my hands dirty to understand
| something at a deeper level. I don't care about SEO because I'm
| writing for myself, not robots. That said, I feel for people
| trying to monetize because I know I never could.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| I decided to stop writing blog articles and my podcast recently.
| It's just a ton of work and non existent gain.
|
| Unless I wanted to do current news and entertainment, traction is
| just near impossible. At some point, there's no point dreaming of
| how things should be, or what could be, but look at the cold hard
| reality that is today.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| One of my most ambitious projects, I spent nearly every weeknight
| for 3 months building a tool. I made a good video to present it,
| and a website. It barely got 100 users.
|
| Then for fun, I randomly made a 60 line bookmarklet, converted it
| to a chrome extension, posted a shitty video, and it grew to
| 100,000+ users in like a week.
|
| The masses absorb drivel, not true effort
| t0bia_s wrote:
| _- Some of my most popular posts are throwaway quips and memes
| that went viral on social media._
|
| That is mine experience as well. Projects I've spent half year
| working on is barely noticed, while almost meme content is
| spreading quite fast. Thats why internet trends are driven by
| entertainment, not sharing a knowledge or making art in first
| place.
| huijzer wrote:
| Same if you compare Linus Torvalds income with that of a famous
| singer or football player.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| I don't know their income. Do you?
| huijzer wrote:
| The following sources are not the most reliable, but I
| guess they will not be an order of magnitude off. If you
| think about it, the numbers make sense. How many people
| have heard of Linus Torvalds versus Bruce Springsteen? I'm
| not saying the one person is better than the other, I'm
| just saying one receives more money than the other.
|
| Linus Torvalds: about $10 million per year [1].
|
| Taylor Swift: about $185 million in 2019 [2].
|
| Bruce Springsteen: about $435 million in 2021 [2].
|
| Cristiano Ronaldo: about $260 in 2023 [3].
|
| [1]: https://www.quora.com/Did-Linus-Torvalds-make-money-
| from-Lin...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_the_world
| %27s_h...
|
| [3]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/2023/10/14
| /highe...
| ghaff wrote:
| Presumably Torvalds has other sources of income but the
| Linux Foundation pays pretty modestly by big tech
| standards. Certainly, some executives/founders make big
| money comparable to big name athletes and entertainers--
| often primarily through stock. But it shouldn't be a
| surprise that big name entertainers and athletes make a
| lot of money (while those on the other end of the scale
| make basically nothing).
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Shitposting is the top of my personal sales funnel. Always has
| been.
|
| I got married to a wonderful woman I met on Twitter about 4 years
| ago. We now live together, slowly conquering Europe from the
| northeast down and to the left. I got multiple interviews and job
| offers from it, too, none of which I could take sadly because I
| planned to move to Finland to be with the aforementioned lass.
| But I knew plenty of others who did.
|
| Shitposting is a game where the rewards to being (smart [?]
| charming [?] really fucking funny sometimes) are
| disproportionately high. I don't use Twitter anymore, but I see
| my involvement with it around 2020-2021 as one of the best
| longshot investments I ever made. By treating it as a gateway
| drug to the experience that is knowing me as a person, and
| discovering to my surprise and delight that many people found it
| extremely worthwhile, I think I permanently deleted any sense
| that I somehow was too dumb, too awkward, too boring to justify
| my being.
|
| It was great!
| tivert wrote:
| > Shitposting is the top of my personal sales funnel. Always
| has been.... I got multiple interviews and job offers from it,
| too, none of which I could take sadly because I planned to move
| to Finland to be with the aforementioned lass. But I knew
| plenty of others who did.
|
| There was a pretty in-depth article about that recently:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/26/nyregion/twitter-lawyers-...
| boneitis wrote:
| > A while ago, I put together an impassioned, contrarian guide to
| photography, illustrated with a number of interactive shots. The
| only traffic it's getting today are confused searches for a porn
| performer with a vaguely similar name.
|
| This has me spinning, even after skimming the referenced piece.
| What is the performer's name, and to what does s/he have a
| similar name?
| CM30 wrote:
| As a YouTuber and content creator myself, this article rings all
| too true to me. Lots of good points here for anyone looking to
| get into this game.
|
| > It's still a chore!
|
| Yup. People often underestimate the amount of work it takes to
| run a blog or YouTube channel in general, and how much of that
| work doesn't involve the content itself. It's no surprise
| everyone wants to monetise these things; doing them for free can
| feel like a second unpaid full-time job in of itself.
|
| > There are weirdos on the internet
|
| Unfortunately. Which makes for a deadly combination alongside
| sudden fame and psychological instability. So much drama can
| basically be summed up as "assholes discover mentally unstable
| content creator" or "mentally unstable content creator hits the
| big time and becomes a worldwide celebrity".
|
| The end result can be an internet car crash that basically
| destroys any hope of a normal life.
|
| And the more popular you become online, the more likely it is
| you'll encounter the rare person wanting to make your life a
| living hell.
|
| > Indifference is the real killer
|
| 100%. Being hated sucks, but seeing something you worked so hard
| on go completely ignored... well, that's arguably even worse.
| Nothing kills motivation faster than the feeling you're not
| getting anywhere, and platforms like YouTube and Twitch only rub
| that aspect in your face even more.
|
| > Follower counts are a lie
|
| Definitely. YouTube is probably the best example, since it seems
| the majority of users find content via the recommended videos
| list and home page feed rather than subscriptions now. But just
| about everywhere is the same, and it only makes it feel worse
| when only about 1% of your 10,000 followers seem to actually give
| a toss about your work.
|
| > Money is the root of only some evil
|
| This is an interesting point, though I'm not sure I agree with
| the example given. Generally I gain followers when I post videos,
| with the only difference between posting more and less stuff
| being whether the number grows gradually or slightly more
| quickly.
|
| Nah, in my opinion, the real root of all evil is that these
| platforms expect their users to be machines. They expect non
| stop, consistently posted content on a daily/weekly/hourly basis
| without fail.
|
| And they also usually don't want you to leave your lane either.
| If you get popular posting about any one topic (whether a game or
| series, framework or programming language, sport, band, etc) then
| they only want you to post about that topic until the day you
| die.
|
| That's the big problem with content creation and social media
| right there. And it's the cause of every issue these platforms
| face.
|
| Why do we get people making meaningless polls about every random
| topic under the sun? Why has AI generated garbage run rampant?
| Why is there so much plagiarism from large creators? How have
| content mills taken over everything?
|
| Because that's how you get things done on the ludicrous schedules
| expected by these platforms. By giving up your humanity and
| becoming nothing more than a faceless machine attempting to
| please the algorithm.
| unclear0 wrote:
| Access audit my entra 8 external unclear.cunt.tv
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-05 23:02 UTC)