> “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.
Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!
It's worse if you read the context[0]:
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?
Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.
It's so weird to see empathy-speak be regularly co-opted by habitual mass manipulators. "I don't know if this will make you feel better... but we're concerned with manipulating the reactions to the reactions as well! See how much we care?" It makes me do a double-take every time someone shows actual empathy, because it's used so often as a manipulative tactic to shield oneself against critiques of soullessness.
Manipulation is emotional more than it is logical, about feelings than ideas, more in women than in men, and therefore for the majority of the audience of tiktok etc
Do you have any objective data for this? In my experience, most subjective claims about men vs. women are unresolvable as either true or false. At best, the discussion degenerates into a Jung-like discussion of anima and animus.
They specifically mention using video game playthroughs for rap songs as an example of targeting based on the audience. I'm somewhat perplexed how or why you turned this into a gendered thing to begin with.
This is not true, in my experience. Men are just as, if not more, emotional and impulsive. Most women I know think way further ahead than the men I know, and improvise much less often. The idea that men are the rational ones is just a silly fantasy to make men feel better, I would argue. Rationality is much more correlated with socio-economic status than gender, I would bet.
I think many men don't even understand what emotional regulation looks like. They tend to spend much of their time disassociated and thinking that it's normal. I tried speaking to my father about emotional health and he thinks it's about being happy, while simultaneously being unable to consider the possibility that he got it wrong, thus demonstrating the point.
There is a lack of emotional health across genders, but on average, I think women are further along than men, simply because they're able to recognize that they are emotional beings much more often than men are.
If talking about a topic made one skilled at or reflected skill, millions of men would be star quarterbacks.
At a macro scale men and women often have different interests. They often cluster around different skillsets because their interests channel them into different activities. But emotional self-awareness isn't an activity, it's an aptitude that fundamentally both men and women exercise (or don't exercise) with similar frequency in day-to-day life. But because women tend to pursue more interpersonal relationships and discussions, they are more adept at the vocabulary, the way men know the vocabulary and rules around football. But, again, it doesn't follow that talking about something makes one more skilled at it. You can juggle tons of relationships and engage in endless discourse about emotional and mental health without having much if any meaningful emotional self-awareness. People with vulnerable-type NPD do this, and at the extreme end the condition is basically predicated on lacking the capacity for a self-awareness most other people, including isolated men, take for granted.
Relatedly, after adjusting for income and social status, it's notable that not even psychologists and therapists have significantly lower divorce rates. That really highlights in my mind that not even an in-depth, systematic, rigorous study of something necessarily makes one more adept at it's exercise, nor, apparently, more likely to meaningfully pursue and develop the skill. Though, presumably they're more adept at judging and analyzing others' emotional awareness and skill given it's the skill they actually apply in their occupation.
I don't see how we are disagreeing. Emotional self-awareness is an aptitude, one that is fundamentally experiential, and so talking about it is inherently difficult. I agree that many people who talk about it are not necessarily experiencing it, including therapists and psychologists, especially if they are using lots of abstractions.
I'm a man who has worked on my own emotional health very intentionally as an adult. I've found there are lots of ways to understand and engage with your own emotions, and they can seem contradictory if you're not thinking experientially.
But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences. They can talk about it very differently from other people. There is a huge multidimensional possibility space for that.
> But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences.
There's potential selection bias here, though. It's more difficult to identify people high in self-awareness who aren't inclined to discuss their own emotional experiences, unless you happen to have frequent, close interactions with them. It's like when people assume learning languages is easy based on their experience meeting people from around the world who speak their language. But you're much less likely to interact with immigrants and travelers who don't speak your own language, if only because those people aren't inclined to engage with people with whom they can't or aren't interested in communicating.
My experience (often unfortunate) tells me that there are many behaviors that masquerade as self-awareness and other reflections of inner state, but don't actually reflect what we presume it does. For example, the stereotype is that women are naturally more nurturing. Nurturing is a concept that encompasses many dimensions, and it conflates internal motivations and feelings with outward behaviors and practice. We presume nurturing implies empathy and selflessness, but there are of mothers who by all appearances (and in fact) are great nurturers, but whose internal mental experience is bereft of those qualities. They're good nurturers because ultimately we can only judge nurturing by the outcome, and it's easy to presume a naturally patient person adept at applying good parenting practices possess the inner state we associate with nurturing. Even children of such people may not realize this, depending on their own capacity for emotional discernment.
Concepts like empathy, guilt, etc, are tricky. Is a person quick to apologize driven by guilty feelings and concern for other's internal state, or are they merely adept and eager at identifying social cues and applying social norms?
In principle women could be, as a group, more likely to possess a greater capacity for and to develop self-awareness. But history and feminism and racism tells me to be highly skeptical of something like this. While biologically it's possible (and I wouldn't at all be surprised), it's not self-evident to me that self-awareness is any more valuable a skill evolutionarily for women than for men, just like intelligence isn't likely to be more valuable a skill for some ethnic groups over another. For example, generally speaking, and from an evolutionary perspective, analytical intelligence is no less an asset for a group performing less stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. hunting) than for a group centered around stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. accounting).
> Manipulation is emotional more than it is logical, about feelings than ideas, more in women than in men, and therefore for the majority of the audience of tiktok etc
I don't think this is necessarily true that manipulation is more emotional than it is logical. On the contrary, I believe that academics and well-educated people are very susceptible to it, especially the STEM crowd. All it takes to be manipulated is someone you trust and who is like you, who is in the same peer group and who speaks the same language as you. It makes no difference whether language is “emotional” or “logical”; enough scientists have reasoned themselves into the most ridiculous bullshit and it were mostly men.
I'm really not seeing the "empathy-speak" you're referring to in that quote or the rest of the interview?
If you're referring to the quote from OP's post, "I don't know if this will make anyone feel better" isn't really appealing to empathy at all, it's basically just preemptively acknowledging what he said may sound bad and so tries to soften it a bit.
It's a rhetorical cliche that has very little to do with anyone's actual feelings.
They're certainly manipulating people with their astroturfing but via slop content like video game playthroughs for rap songs so their actual strategy doesn't seem to uniquely rely on emotional manipulation either. Just following content trends whatever they may be.
Weaponizing "empathy" just seems like a complete red herring that makes for an irrelevant tangent in this context.
Makes me think of a 20-something old running a popular YouTube channel interviewing people for business advice, and in one episode, stressing the important message of their interviewee, that was literally "don't trust advice from people who have never actually done the thing you're trying to do".
That's multiple levels of "you're not the traffic, you are the traffic" right there.
> don't trust advice from people who have never actually done the thing you're trying to do
Probably one of the most important heuristics to have in the age of self-help gurus and influencers. 99.999% of them haven't accomplished anything other than profiting off of desperate and gullible people.
Dang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news, and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric and unsustainable and undeserved success, even if "organic and slow growth" means failure in the end.
Your comment reminds me of a quote by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, that has helped in my lows
> How slowly one advances in a boat that does not float along with the stream in a specific direction! How much easier it is when one can connect with the work of great predecessors whose value is not doubted by anyone. A personal experiment, a construction whose foundations one must dig himself and whose walls one must erect himself, runs a real risk of becoming a humble hovel. But perhaps one prefers to live there rather than in a palace that has been built by others. (Escher on Escher – Exploring the Infinite)
That can be automated quite easily these days. Just make your bot/scraper scan for anything that blames something or otherwise fits narratives that can be used as a vehicle of your own promotion, and hit that.
P.S. Not necessarily implying that the grandparent resorted to that.
I absolutely adore it when stumbling occasionally upon great musicians who have laughable numbers of listens on various platforms, dunno if that's mere chance or the algorithm trying to balance things out, but that surely brings some hope for the pure art.
You wish. It is becoming harder every day to find genuine comments or technical insights at the top of HN sections instead of blind love/hate for trendy topics.
Even among the "genuine" comments most of them are just people spewing things because the monkey brain has determined that it likes it when the number in the top right goes up and has figured out what kind of things to spew to make it go up (dare I say encouraging this state of affairs is the reason some platforms choose to keep score in such a manner).
Does it really matter whether you're reading something written by an AI shill, a human shill or a human (or AI) who's repeating the shillery? You're being shilled at all the same.
Trusted news orgs around the world tend to have centuries of history behind them. If you actually did it right, it should long outlive you, with the speed of growth being largely irrelevant.
Looking at your site, you have a mission statement in your About page that roughly says "scrape other sources for anything relevant and interesting." Nothing about staffing, who you are, who your editors are, whether you even have editors. Every story seems to have the byline "DREAMREAL," which doesn't sound like a person.
It doesn't seem to me like you're interested in running a news org. It seems like you're dissatisfied with your ability to find things interesting to you in a single place and are trying to scratch that itch, probably in a mostly-automated way. I can sympathize with that, but a personal knowledge base with outgoing links to the original sources isn't a news org. By all means, share it. Maybe six other people in the world have exactly the same interests you do, but this is a far cry from journalism and you probably shouldn't frame it that way.
All fair, but: it's not a "news org." News is a business model, and, man, my business is feeding my family; this site's a passion project, fulfilling a need based on what I did back in the mid-2000s: curating stuff that developers roughly adjacent to my skills (i.e., JVM-adjacent) would find interesting. What happened, where, who, why, maybe how.
The site's actually not the main focus - the site's still being developed. The hardest thing about TheServerSide back in the day wasn't the writing or curating - although curation is hard if you're not just echoing press releases or READMEs - it was discovery.
Slashdot, freshmeat, RSS, IRC back then... all just being watched and participated in (I'm an actual developer first, after all) - talking to and with and watching ALL THE SOURCES. I had an OPML to die for, man! ... and I had to read it all, and filter it all, and ignore it when people talked about stuff that readers wouldn't care about.
So BCN's actually an infobot that happens to feed that discovery, in part - it's actually an information stream that yields factoids (infobot, woo!) and other services around that, and part of that yield is information about what's happening, so it HAS an RSS reader, it has github webhooks, it has everything I can think of as input streams, not as a comb filter but just as an information hub that can contain comb filters.
Yeah, there's no marketing; I'm no marketer. Don't want to be. And the presentation of the model is confusing, because I'm no marketer and because the readers don't and really shouldn't care, if it works. And the site's "in process" anyway - I mean, yeesh, it only has 50 posts so far! I'm working on getting there.
And "dreamreal" is a person - it's me. That's the IRC handle I've used for years, and that's actually one of the admin identities for me the bot had first, and it stuck. Easy to change, but honestly, it's not about me and shouldn't be.
But you're not wrong in the slightest.
ETA: it hit me after I wrote this comment that I was posting it under a name derived from my real name, to defend the use of "dreamreal" on the site to someone who posted THEIR OWN comment under "nonameiguess" - which would be an odd name to have in real life. :D
This is great and I wish you all the best. A byproduct of the content abundance age (because that's really what is is) is the expectation that not just growth but fast growth is everything is such a race to lower quality on the whole. It's pretty depressing but ultimately I suspect we will get sick of the lower level far quicker than we probably think.
Thanks. I decided long ago that I wasn't the kind of magnetic personality who'd be able to market a mass site - as a "face" I'm a very poor candidate, and I despise cults of personality, which seems to be the "go-to" for a lot of such things. It's the modern version of "smile more!"
I hope you're right. Not for my own sake, but for everyone's. I'm trying to do what I can to put stuff worth reading out there - and whether it's worth reading or not isn't actually mine to judge; if I make it "worth reading" by SEO terms, it's not actually worth reading all that much, being neutered and hedged to the point of milquetoast oblivion.
This is also fair: it's definitely AI-assisted. I'm not a UI person; I have wonky color perception and synaesthesia, and a lot of experience has taught me that what works for ME in UI is what... uh... doesn't work AT ALL for other people.
So it's a problem: I can "hand write it" and have you say "mein Gott, who came up with THIS rubbish? Are they blind? Are they trying to blind US?" or I can have an AI spin something up that looks fairly bland and normalish, but fulfills the specifications I require, and have users go "this looks like a blog that pretty much anyone would write," except the content was always meant to be the differentiator.
And the UI is actually designed to be pluggable, anyway; what I work on is the backend REST services, and the UI goes through those services for all data - it has no access to the underlying datastreams, at all. Everything goes through https://api.bytecode.news, and the intent was that if someone was an awesome UI coder and wanted to show their stuff, they'd write their UI using CoolThing and I'd put it into the system at coolthing.bytecode.news, and if it totally dominated the "normal UI" I'd promote that to the default UI and just leave the other one out there as a reference (the UI you see is also hosted at https://nextjs.bytecode.news, as the "canonical url" for that implementation.)
That way, if someone's going "ooo I could make Struts sing with this" for some reason, well, the API endpoints are published with OpenAPI; go for it. Show the world.
The UI was always secondary to the concepts that drive the information system, and the content was meant to be more important than how the content looked. I'd rather deliver information than flash.
I didn't mean any disrespect. I just think AI design is the opposite of what you're saying it is. It's flashy and distracting and filled with unnecessary animations that often hinder readability. I think a much simpler design would be beneficial to the readability.
Also fair. I kinda thought the design for the UI was fairly normal - it looks like a lot of standard Wordpress themes would look, with an admin panel, a primary focused "recent post" and a list of other recent posts in descending order of attention. From a UX perspective, I thought it was okay; the animated circuit thing was my idea, but I tried to keep it VERY in the background, I wanted it to be fun and not a focus.
If you have ideas about what a proper UX would look like, I'm all ... eyes? ears? UX is not my thing and I am willing to consider breaking the molds to make something more awesomer if I can.
I'm not going to optimize content for SEO - been on the other side of that, and I think it creates content that's bland and ineffective. Humans gonna human, machines gonna machine, and I'm not paying for ads. If humans want the site to succeed, it'll succeed. Otherwise, it won't. Such is life.
I kind of see what you are saying, but it reminds me of “if you build it, they will come.”
They won’t come, because they won’t even know about it. A more accurate aphorism would have been “if you build it and tell everyone about it, some of them might come.”
Humans probably don’t want the site to succeed, because they mostly don’t know it exists.
If you build it, and it's genuinely, uniquely useful, you won't be able to stop people from coming and inviting others to join.
Telling everyone about it is only necessary if you're indistinguishable from 100 different takes on the same thing, and trying to win a shouting match (this includes hurrying to shout the world down before competitors get a chance).
But as the saying goes, you are not in traffic - you are the traffic. The reason you need to shout is because of people like you shouting.
It is different. If you SEO, you are actively changing content toward worst and less interesting. That is not the same as making the decision between market and not-market.
This man will build a product no one uses and then complain about the world not being ready for his genius instead of using the tools that everyone else uses to give himself a chance at success.
In all honesty and writing it straight: this kind of success you're writing of would best be not achieved at all, as it's poisoning society and civilization.
I'm not talking the success of a Facebook or an Amazon. I think to successfully make an impact in terms of helping fellow humans, reach is a multiplier just as important as the quality of the product.
Hrm. If you're talking about me: I doubt it. I've been a programmer for 30+ years: I've built a LOT of products, some of which got used, some of which ... didn't. If I was going to complain, that'd be new.
And I know how to do SEO and why. And I'm just not interested. "Success" for me... well, I mean, I'd love to retire today based on the brazilians of dollars some mogul hands me for the IP behind the site, but, uh, that's not what it's for. SEO at the service layer? Sure, it has a mode for the bots, it tries to make scanning easy for the machines. But at the content level... nah, I have been watching the world tune information - one aspect of the psyop the OP talked about - for decades, and I can't bring myself to do it.
Also: one of the features of the underlying tech stack is that the UI is actually a completely separate module than the backend API. Different github repo, everything: the site is akshuallyhttps://api.bytecode.news and the UI at the "base url" is just one layer for that API. The goal was always to have multiple interfaces, all tuned for whatever the technology supported best: see https://enigmastation.com/2014/07/09/repost-some-of-what-id-... (from my personal blog).
BCN actually has multiple UIs for it, although I've been concentrating on the content rather than the front-ends - I'm not a front-end guy, so my UIs tend to be impenetrable. The model works. If it's my implementation the other front ends will suck from a UX perspective, because I don't see the UI the same way most people do (there are reasons, they're not important, bottom line is that I avoid UI.)
What would YOU suggest for a UI? I'm very much curious, because I would LOVE for the UI to sing and I would have no idea how to make that happen.
What's your load chain? I've seen some other people (who use Tor through Brave) say that it's slow to load, and I'm curious to fix that - the front end has a cached version that should be rendering pretty aggressively without datafeed updates.
Hmm, It's supposed to be using the device mode. I'll look at the UI code and see if I can fix that. I use dark mode and my eyes work well with the framing, so any information here is welcomed. Will tune.
This is the second comment like that. It was honestly not intended - it was actually me trying to respond in my own context to the post, and WHY I was responding; "why" is more important to me than "what," and I have a hard time saying "this" without explaining why I felt "this" - or at least trying to explore it. I'm working on a site; reading the "this kind of thing is how people do things these days" actually made the concept of working on the site (which I hope has value) harder. That's what I was saying, or trying to; the "advertisement" was context, not intent, or else I'd have tried to post my own thing to HN saying "look at how ossum my seite are!"
HN comments have always been like that, or rather "here's my approach to circumvent that annoyance".
What's your alternative? I prefer that style over comments that stop already at "I hate that", as curiosity should be more than an expression of a dismissive opinion.
I don't think i'm "choosing to fail," I'm choosing to accept the outcome given an effort to prevent it. Sometimes you try and it doesn't work out; I'm not committing the mortgage to the site or the effort, and I'd like it to pan out because I think its progenitor had a raison d'etre, and I was part of it when it was good and I think there's room for it now.
And if the moment's gone, well... that's the way it goes. That's not the same as "choosing to fail."
This is not true though. My two favorite bands from the past year were poorly-attended shows that I stumbled into. You can still seek out good underground, obscure artists - you just have to look for them.
Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
The whole psyop thing is only an issue if you use "popularity" and mass appeal (people following in instagram, etc) as a signal for finding stuff.
The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.
Popularity is the most popular (!) signal because this isn't really about the music - it's to have something to talk about with your friends, whether to bond over shared interest or signal something about yourself to your group. The same is true about any other interest: most people care a lot (arguably, primarily) about their interest being recognized and supported by other people.
Those of us who care about an interest for the sake of that interest, are called nerds.
That's the core of the issue, isn't it? If you're not willing to do the filtering and judging, you depend on somebody else to do it, and those somebodies probably don't have your best interests at heart, nor would they share your specific tastes.
(On a totally unrelated note, calling your potentially-shady marketing firm "Chaotic Good" is genius and pretty funny.)
Something I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10.
Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon.
I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.
Found a favorite band through a similar technique: pile of CDs given from a friend who worked at a music store and no one wanted them.
You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.
Yeah, most of the CDs there were pretty unremarkable; a lot of them were unsurprisingly stuff that was extremely popular (since those have the most CDs available). A lot of the stuff that wasn't extremely popular was pretty bad.
Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking.
Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.
It's not elitist to be part of a very small group. But I get what you mean.
I live in a city where the bands you speak of get pushed further and further away from the downtown core. They're literally in the 'burbs now. It's counter-productive, but it seems downtown is more concerned with restaurants than other forms of entertainment these days.
Years ago, this line formed in my head, and has stuck around - it has been long enough that I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if I came up with it myself, but I think it's relevant here:
"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."
Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.
And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".
I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.
- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.
- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).
- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.
- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.
The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.
But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.
Well, yeah, it's all subjective - and actually quite tenuous - so you won't know good and bad until you actually make the call on it. Maybe you've had the experience even of coming around on some music you previously thought was bad.
Or like: one time I listened to a bunch of new music I had dug up and wasn't sure there was anything I liked. Two days later, I had a song in my head. Turned out to be one of the ones I had listened to. But I had to listen to everything all over again to find it! ദി(ㅠ﹏ㅠ) Glad I did - there were other gems in there.
This isn't new, Theodor Adorno was making the point in the 1940s that taste isn't something formed in a vacuum and then expressed in the market, it's something the market produces in you and sells back. Chaotic Good is just an extension of the same tricks from back when Eddie Bernays was staging fake suffragette marches to sell cigarettes to women in 1929.
The more disturbing implication is that it's not just "everything on the internet" is fake so much as the whole surrounding culture of consumerist societies - and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences.
Mark Fisher is a good read on whether we're even capable of comprehending what it would mean to live outside such a system at this point.
I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning.
I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
I’ve had similar experiences. After watching it for a decade I think it’s a mostly over-active pattern recognition combined with a flood of incoming information. I believe I’m careful with the information I consume, but compared with 25 years ago it’s literally orders of magnitude more.
IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).
I'm sad my second thought about this (after dismissing it as a coincidence) was that it could be used for marketing - "I randomly thought about this book/show/movie whatever, and hey what do you know? The sequel is coming out!". Basically another variation on 'organic' advertising in comments that's been around for a while.
Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I hate advertising, I don't want it messing with real interactions with other humans. I'm not sure how to express the idea, it's like its so pervasive I'm thinking about it when its not even present.
If you check on average every three years, the odds of you checking the very same day the book comes out are about 1‰, which is improbable but not _extremely_. Add that together with all the probabilities of things that would make you think "wow, that's improbable" and we have pretty high odds of something improbable happening.
In addition, there are factors that make it more probable.
- The sequel came out a bit less than 2 years after the first book, which is fairly typical. It means it is a likely time to think "what about the sequel?"
- Doctor appointments and book releases both tend to happen on tuesdays. Especially book releases, so it is possible that you tend to think more about books on tuesdays
- It is possible to think about the book more than once without realizing it, maybe even inquery about the sequel without realizing it, and because the result is negative and unimportant, it is easy to forget. It is not uncommon for me to search something just to find it in my history, completely forgotten
I would put the likelihood of something like that happening by accident to about 1/100, the "noticeable but not memorable" kind, such as meeting the same person twice in a day in a different context, or arriving at a highly coveted parking spot just as the previous guy is leaving.
Okay, I squinted hard at that notation “1‰” and had Gemini explain it to me, and it appears that you made no typos, but I couldn’t let that go unexplained!
Well, you know. Every med student goes through this "I Am An Earthly God" phase. Usually it passes. But the guy isn't obviously in favor of the concept for which his account is named, so there isn't the contradiction here that appears to exist on the face of it. (Speaking of usernames, hello, Grima! How on Middle-earth did you survive that fall?)
Is it possible this is due to a memorability bias, where perhaps you’ve done basically the same sort of thing many times before and just forgot about it because nothing noteworthy happened? Then it wouldn’t be as much of a coincidence.
I had almost the opposite experience a few years ago.
I (after a few beers) found myself idly wondering about an electric folk band I hadn't seen or heard of for a good ten years, and looked them up to see if they were doing a new album or tour.
They'd played a final farewell gig the week before :/
Even if so, this seems like the good kind of priming to me. You were clearly actually interested in this and just needed the nudge to remember.
Preferences and desires have to be the end of some causal DAG with entrypoints from the world outside of your own mind one way or another. Whether or not we're marketers or have any financial interest in the popularity of specific cultural artifacts, we all generally do things like evangelize our favorite stuff to friends and instill values and a love of similar things to our kids. It's overly cynical to have comments like this responded to as if any and all external influences are nefarious and inauthentic. What we want is for people to share the things they actually love rather than bullshit they know is bullshit but have been paid to shill.
I think of the fact I've been listening to Donna Summer so much for the past couple months. I know why it is. I grew up loving disco music and watching Alysa Liu win the figure skating gold medal performing to Macarthur Park reminded me of that love, something I haven't given much attention to in nearly 30 years. It's not "better" than anything else I'd been listening to in the past few years, but it's a lot more fun to sing thanks to 70s idols like Donna largely coming from a gospel background.
Going back a link, I'm reasonably sure Alysa, a 20 year-old who very likely did not grow up listening to disco music, probably picked this as her song for the season because of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and I've read Tim Burton's explanation of how the song got into the movie. He has a jukebox in his house and was listening to the Richard Harris original version of this song, which is one of the more ridiculous pop songs to ever get recorded, but full of wild changes in tone and a very long runtime that lended itself well to an extended wedding sequence interrupted by a police raid. The Donna Summer version playing over the credits is largely for contrast. I don't think Tim Burton or anyone else was motivated by wanting to boost the royalty fees going to Richard Harris and Donna Summer, who have been dead for 24 and 14 years, respectively.
We don't remember the vast majority of advertising we see by design. That's how a) it's designed and b) why it's so dangerous.
It's quite possible you saw something somewhere about it several days if not weeks or months previously and naturally didn't consciously register it. Advertisements are designed to work this way and the memory is a wonderful thing.
It's dangerous because it's manipulative, it removes agency from ourselves and its addictive to the marketeers. It hurts our identity to admit we are manipulated so psychologically we play along with the manipulation and deny being weakened (and they know this).
If I can sell you a book and make you think it's entirely your own choice then my marketing has been incredibly successful.
Or it may not be doing what marketeers and advertising agencies actually planned to happen and it could be just random coincidence.
Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)
> “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.”
Here it is.
I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Google results. The only thing achieved here was that the marketing team gave some money to Google.
I have never been even close to anything marketing related, but I'd assume that measuring its impact is highly non-trivial in the statistical sense. Also, only the companies selling marketing even have access to the relevant metrics and they have an incentive to exaggerate the results (sometimes maybe even internally).
Idk, it seems like the marketing process on tiktok doesn't constitute trying to get people to go out of their way to interact/click with your content, tiktok users are just involuntarily fed content on some level (you don't know what the next autoplayed video will be)... how can it not be trival to manipulate that userbase with, in this case, a band whose music is just-good-enough for mass appeal?
It's such an insane amount of waste that there are rooms filled with cell phones just to churn out spam. The same job should be doable by a single server. I imagine that it's only required because platforms are fingerprinting the phones to check for spammers but obviously those systems have gone from being simply useless to becoming harmful since it's now generating massive amounts of e-waste.
This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
Well, i highly recommend reacting to advertising aggressively in order to store the memory along with a feeling of repulsion (e.g. swearing, middle finger) to attempt to dissaude the subconscious from retrieving it without revulsion in the future.
I think the point of the bit though is to aggressively point out that advertising corrupts our world for their benefit and if advertisers or marketers had a soul they'd realise they were actively making the world worse and move to a different industry. Meaning the only ones the message is for are sociopaths that know what they're doing and don't care.
The commenter is referencing a conspiracy that Bill Hicks faked his death and became Alex Jones. This imo was less stupid some years ago when Jones could conceivably be seen as an exaggerated satirical caricature, though it's very hard to imagine Bill Hicks taking the bit this far now
Well, one thing I've discovered with the advent of AI music is that there are lots of things I like that are not particularly notable. I can listen to the 100th "1996 ESCAPE FROM DATA CITY + Unreal Tournament Mix" and enjoy it. I can't say that I've "discovered" an artist who then went on to become big. Back in the day, on amie.st there were quite a lot of cheap singles that I really enjoyed too but I can't find those artists again.
So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.
Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.
If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
You really don't mind if everything that gets put in front of you is controlled?
What if the people who talk about class war, the people who speak up about US and Israeli terror and torture and atrocities, the people who speak up for the voiceless are never/very rarely permitted to surface by the 'tastemaker' algorithm's controller?
Because it sure seems like that's at least partly the case today, and rapidly getting worse.
Yea... I'm mixed because it feels like something too creative and weird for this sort of marketing, but it's perhaps as weird how they're all over Youtube suddenly.
I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit"
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know.
This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.
PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.
edit to add a solution
the solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)
the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?
if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.
the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.
for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.
edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.
A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.
> A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.
The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't.
I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it.
There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing.
But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.
It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
It's almost a bit like AI speak. The shills will all have very similar sounding content. They'll all hit on the same (ad copy) points. They might mix in a few negative tidbits, but generally speaking you'll catch them all praising the same wizbang features.
Mkbhd is my favorite baseline shill. He practically just reads the product sheet. You know if he says it, it was probably given to him by the person paying for the review and, indeed, you can find the points he brings up echoed in other people's reviews.
On the flip side, I generally trust Gamers Nexus to not shill. Primarily because their lack of playing ball has actually hurt their access.
I've enjoyed your videos as well. They don't come off as a shill particularly because there's a number of products where the negative points you've put out have been strong enough to actually discourage a purchase. They haven't been weak "The colors could pop more".
> It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
Brandolini’s law strikes again: you really have to pay attention to catch a shill. 99% of the time when you’re not paying attention and intentionally shopping for a particular product is when they get you.
Yeah, really does not help that the internet seems to be built from the ground up to reward shilling.
Click on a shill video in youtube and you'll have 20 identical videos on the same topic.
But also, advertisers are smart and you have to assume they know you are on the lookout for a shill. I have to assume the why shilling works will continue to evolve as the way to detect shilling evolves.
I expect we'll end up with something like this in the future [1].
I, too, rely on your web of trust, please don't ever break my heart Jeff!
It makes sense they'd be harder to find, I imagine there are more opportunities to make money by selling your soul than by offering honest review, and people with large investments have large incentives to dilute signal in their favor.
It's sad that so many platforms let it happen, but it makes sense when the users aren't the ones paying the bills. I'm immensely grateful for those that resist though, and if I were a religious person I would nominate them for sainthood or reincarnation or at least a plaque on a nice park bench somewhere.
I agree, but I also think the point about "Is [your opinion] based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience" is really important. Relying on other bloggers is still delegating your thinking to others. Having your own objective measures and your own direct experience is useful, and sometimes it might contradict the prevailing wisdom.
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.
The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.
Those were both narratives going around, but one was clearly winning in terms of volume, and that's what I'm speaking to here. The dismissal towards the open source models has always smelled more like marketing campaigns to me than the actual sentiments of any hackers I know. We all want the open source options to close the gap, but the labs are definitely staying ahead.
My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.
"82 percent of middle school students couldn't tell the difference between sponsored articles and real news stories.
Out of the Stanford college students that were tested, more than 80 percent couldn't identify biased content from independent news sources supported by groups like lobbying firms as being less reliable than a mainstream news source." https://universe.byu.edu/2018/02/09/studies-show-lack-media-...
I like how that article claims PR firms don't lie and then proceeds to discuss how their best PR campaign was effectively a lie.
> We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
It sounds like they did good-faith estimate that there were 5000 stores out there and really believed they had 20% of the market? I wouldn't call that a lie as such.
They made up a number, and then quoted that number to other people (presumably with the intent to benefit themselves) without disclosing that they'd made up the number in the first place. That seems to jump right past 'lie' into 'fraud' or worse.
I have this growing belief that what's wrong with America is that we've tossed a great deal of virtue (both personal and public) into the woodchipper, using a lot of euphemisms like "marketing" or "puffery". And the rot is not in any way confined to marketing - it's just that marketing is a very obvious example of it. The rot has made its way into education, relationships, entertainment, governance, infrastructure, what used to be called 'news', and on and on.
We collectively gaslight ourselves to avoid dealing with the reality that we're constantly defecating in our own minds, contaminating ourselves with patterns of thought and action that are antithetical to our own continued well-being as individuals and collectives. To borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are poisoning the noosphere.
You don't have a growing belief, you have an accurate observation.
This comes up often when bad actors promote the meme "everything is securities fraud". In reality, all cases that they're talking about are instances of _blatant lying_, but they attempt to normalize this even further than it already has been. Effectively saying "it's impossible to run a company and not lie at every possible opportunity!".
The "poisoning the noosphere" is a very good description.
There is someone called Peter Ralston; on YouTube there's a few videos of him and in one bit from an interview he starts on honesty. "Honesty", he says, "is a skill most people don't appreciate". I was really impressed by that "is a skill" qualification. Never thought about it this way. But yes, it is a skill. First you learn it and then it changes you.
To add to what the other poster said, it's a logical leap to go from 5000 stores to 20% share based on having 1000 users. What does the number of stores have to do with the number of users?
It doesn't make any sense and that's because it's a lie.
Yeah but the "good faith" math had a big margin of error, and if I estimate 5k-20k shops and pick the lower number that just happens to make my company look great, that kind of changes things.
>I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns.
"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.
related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been?
But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)
I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
> I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...
I haven't used Cursor much lately, but with Opus/Codex I can program with very few bugs without having to look at any code at all, over months of working on the same codebase. I don't think any other model can do that, no?
edit2: maybe it's because i spend a lot of time being clear with small and surgical asks after doing purely thought exploring prompts to confirm and home in on approaches. At the point I hit build or do Agent mode, Composer is mostly always spot on.
with Opus (haven't tried) maybe people are doing large-scale multi phase and single shot prompts that trigger a swarm of sub agents?
All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.
If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)
> I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic.
Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.
I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.
A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants
> What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing?
I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.
In my eyes:
* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.
* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.
* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.
But Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.
I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence.
> Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it?
Yes, exactly this. It is extremely difficult to get attention these days, no matter how good your offering.
I know the best way to solve a problem with corruption and lack of transparency: involve the government! Nobody could ever pay off a politician. Surely that would only work in our favor.
If a regulation is written well you don't need to depend on the integrity of any one politician because they aren't responsible for enforcement. The hard part is getting the laws passed in the first place because it requires electing representatives that will serve your interests instead of the interests of the corporations who bribe them. It's our job to make sure that our government is working for us. If it's impossible to do that than our democracy has failed.
I had never heard of Geese until all the stories about how Geese bought their popularity. Now I feel I should give them a listen to know what all the fuss is about!
As a musician in a small band: find a venue that sells tickets at the door and just go look at some bands whose name you have never heard of.
If they sell tickets at the door, that means they may not be in one of the big ticketing monopolies. Going for bands/artists you have never heard of will give you a mixed bag, sure, but (1) it will be your mixed bag, (2) you support the ecosystem that creates new bands and (3) it is much more authentic and personal, because it is usally also smaller.
I actually don't think Getting Killed the album is well mixed, what turned me on to Geese was their From The Basement performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 the music and the mixing are incredible. I've followed From The Basement for a while, ever since their collaboration with Radiohead. So maybe this was a psyop, but the music is genuinely really good.
> But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients
The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.
Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.
This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.
The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
For folks that don't appreciate the power of marketing and advertising, I would strongly recommend the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. The point isn't to say "well ackchyually marketing is good," but is instead to say that the human mind has some built-in irrationality, and understanding the our behavioral predispositions interact with the world means that we can make better decisions in life and in business.
I was really surprised that term wasn't used in this article.
I agree it's old, but I think it's reached a new high with short-form content. Now that people don't subscribe to creators they like but rather get an algorithmic feed it's much harder to detect astroturfing.
Like the articles says, these creators are easily identifiable, they typically create multiple videos a day about the same topic. But for the platform that doesn't matter.
as someone who works does marketing,
"first time?"
People paying UGC creators to have ads is nothing new. Posting en masse to fool the algo is, but there's alwasy been bot farms.
And before that there's still the trick of getting published by a low rated news org, then letting journalist at a more reputable organization let them know of this trending news. And so on til you end up in the NYT. FYI this works even when you actually bought placement for those low quality placements
On the upside, the product/service needs to be good if you want to gain traction AND staying power. Psyops are cheap tricks, if your product sucks, then there's no word of mouth and you can't scale regardless of how many reviews you botted.
Drake,Katseye, etc. aren't doing doing well becuase they're doing cheap marketing techniques, they're doing well b/c they have a loyal audience and make good music.
Never thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates and it's an interesting article.
Also, I understand why some people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see.
We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?).
We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language.
The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form.
To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts.
Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
Psyop feels a bit dramatic. Either marketing turned you on to a band you otherwise wouldn’t have found, or your tastes are driven by trends and social/status signals from others. Either way that’s just (admittedly intense) marketing isn’t it? Maybe I’m missing something?
I once worked for a company that bought a spot in the evening news (french TF1). It worked that way: a french minister was visiting a fair and coming to stop in front of the booth and getting a product demo. And that ended up in the evening news. Since that time I kind of watch the news with different eyes.
How much of the Internet is like Moltbook where you don't know the other users are bots? Does the private sector or Government control them? ... How long has it been this way??
Everyone needs to revisit William Gibson's the Blue Ant books. Still holds up as the best distillation of our current times culturally.
On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook
Something occurred to me, I wonder if the "hipster" is a creation of these marketing firms also. What do you do when tastemakers are getting their friends to listen to underground artists you don't make money off of? Flip the script, call THEM uncool and disingenuous posers. They didn't find good underground bands by having TASTE, they only like underground bands because they're narcissistically drawn to being different than everyone else!
The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels.
Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.
I have thought exactly as you do for a long time. Recently a side project of my blew up and it was completely organic. I'm just a solo dev. No marketing budget at all. No PR team.
Made me realize that it's still possible for things to organically get big.
Ambient variety, you know, almost static drone, very niche style per se. Never did anything to promote it in any way. Just released it via my friend's digital label on a handful of platforms.
Never had more than ~100 listens a month, and never expected that to change and earn any substantial royalties.
One day, the friend calls and tells he's willing to pay me some pretty penny, and replies to my bewilderment that just a single track from the whole album blew up, glitched the Matrix and obtained some 10'000s of listens.
I investigated a little bit and found out that the track's title coincided with that of some other, much more popular and promoted band.
So I just happened to ride on those coattails.
Edit: removed extra zero in the number of listens :)
I enjoyed watching Adam Ruins Everything. But it was a bit weird. It didn’t ruin everything. It’s just about how seemingly every American thing is a marketing “psyop”. I’m not an American so learning about how spending X amounts of salary on a specifically diamond engagement ring or something is a Diamond Industry (or something) marketing campaign didn’t really “ruin” it for me since I don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings around it. But I imagine that’s the same for many Americans.
There are many this-is-just-what-is-done “values” that were discussed like this. Not quite as on-the-nose as spend this ridiculous amount of your salary on specifically X ring.
I’m not singling out America here. I don’t think this shows that it is a uniquely American thing. It is just very convenient for me: I’m not part of the culture so I can watch a little from the outside. And America is a big country (we are told) so naturally there are pop-exposes like this. I do not expect the same amount of resources to be poured into my own corner of the world and all the “organic” things that we value. But that show helped me think about all the things closer to home that might be influencing me.
And since then, or before it, I’ve believed that all of society is a marketing gimmick. The asymmetry of mass media is too great in favor of Big Bad Things (governments, corporations).
What a weird feeling. To know (or believe) that you are a spoiled brat in terms of access to information, many conveniences and such (except my mortgage), and that it just comes at the small price of a Panopticon of constant brainwashing.
And so you go about your day. A Special Occassion on this and that day, which is just a marketing campaign to sell you gifts that you are obligated to buy on this Special Occassion. You know it. But you go along with it. Because what are you going to do? Complain at the nearest plaza to drones like you that also knows the truth but go along with it because it’s just the way things are done and anyway no one cares about your particular eight-page manifesto on how society is slightly broken?
As to the article, naive to the point of being suspect, even. This has been going on for let’s say a long time. But as usual the classic outlet is the Evil Corporation with stupid-arse names like Chaotic Good who has some hateable yuppie press release person who just says, Yes, the Internet is bot-filled and there is a demand and we fill it, in fact we are so proud of it. It’s just, hey these people are doing it, look, it’s these people right here.
But the reality is so insidious and rotten that TikTok Comments on Demand Inc. and Korean Executive-created K-pop is just a farcically shallow treatment of it.
Oh no!!! Tell me it ain't so! Someone--like a PR firm--is gaming the system to get attention for their client? No, surely not. Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
> Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
Well I for one appreciate TC for giving us and the masses a heads up of new spins on old astroturf methods. You simply cannot trust the algorithm to be organic. Find trusted people or specific trusted reviewers of things. Everything else you hear could be paid for.
I'd love for this kind of scam to be regulated, at least. "Not a real fan - paid endorsement".
The fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page.
But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms pushing the same thing to people. It’s quite apparent when browsing music on Youtube and finding new discoveries. Everybody in your same niche is pushed the same new bands, rather than the algo pushing different bands to different people, as one would expect.
The reason that I completely missed Geese until the psyop reached HN is probably because it was pushed by TikTok which I don’t interact with, so I was insulated from it until the word-of-mouth phase of the viral spread.
I heard about them a few times before finally deciding to listen to an album. I can't remember if it was Reddit or Instagram. In each case they were just mentioned offhand in a comment, like I should already know about them.
Ultimately, I kind of hate the guy's voice. Sort of reminds me of... Parquet Courts? Who I don't really love, either.
Taqueria style chile de arbol salsa roja is not a psyop. So I don't like the title. But I enjoy the examples in the article -- I am only Geese adjacent, and much closer to actual Canadian Geese on a daily basis, but my daughter has been critical of Geese hype.
They're violating ad labeling laws and the FTC should come down hard on them. While Republicans pretend to be against defunding of police that's only the police for poor people, commercial and rich people police have suffered all kinds of defunding and kneecapping at their hands. We need an aggressive war on slop or democracy is not going to make it.
> “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.
Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!
It's worse if you read the context[0]:
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?
Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.
[0] https://www.billboard.com/pro/digital-marketers-secret-tacti...
It's so weird to see empathy-speak be regularly co-opted by habitual mass manipulators. "I don't know if this will make you feel better... but we're concerned with manipulating the reactions to the reactions as well! See how much we care?" It makes me do a double-take every time someone shows actual empathy, because it's used so often as a manipulative tactic to shield oneself against critiques of soullessness.
Manipulation is emotional more than it is logical, about feelings than ideas, more in women than in men, and therefore for the majority of the audience of tiktok etc
Men confuse their feelings, and especially what soothes their egos, with "rationality" all of the time
If you start from a position of assuming objectivity, you are putty in the hands of anyone who "tells it like it is"
Do you have any objective data for this? In my experience, most subjective claims about men vs. women are unresolvable as either true or false. At best, the discussion degenerates into a Jung-like discussion of anima and animus.
They specifically mention using video game playthroughs for rap songs as an example of targeting based on the audience. I'm somewhat perplexed how or why you turned this into a gendered thing to begin with.
"more in women than in men"
This is not true, in my experience. Men are just as, if not more, emotional and impulsive. Most women I know think way further ahead than the men I know, and improvise much less often. The idea that men are the rational ones is just a silly fantasy to make men feel better, I would argue. Rationality is much more correlated with socio-economic status than gender, I would bet.
I think many men don't even understand what emotional regulation looks like. They tend to spend much of their time disassociated and thinking that it's normal. I tried speaking to my father about emotional health and he thinks it's about being happy, while simultaneously being unable to consider the possibility that he got it wrong, thus demonstrating the point.
There is a lack of emotional health across genders, but on average, I think women are further along than men, simply because they're able to recognize that they are emotional beings much more often than men are.
If talking about a topic made one skilled at or reflected skill, millions of men would be star quarterbacks.
At a macro scale men and women often have different interests. They often cluster around different skillsets because their interests channel them into different activities. But emotional self-awareness isn't an activity, it's an aptitude that fundamentally both men and women exercise (or don't exercise) with similar frequency in day-to-day life. But because women tend to pursue more interpersonal relationships and discussions, they are more adept at the vocabulary, the way men know the vocabulary and rules around football. But, again, it doesn't follow that talking about something makes one more skilled at it. You can juggle tons of relationships and engage in endless discourse about emotional and mental health without having much if any meaningful emotional self-awareness. People with vulnerable-type NPD do this, and at the extreme end the condition is basically predicated on lacking the capacity for a self-awareness most other people, including isolated men, take for granted.
Relatedly, after adjusting for income and social status, it's notable that not even psychologists and therapists have significantly lower divorce rates. That really highlights in my mind that not even an in-depth, systematic, rigorous study of something necessarily makes one more adept at it's exercise, nor, apparently, more likely to meaningfully pursue and develop the skill. Though, presumably they're more adept at judging and analyzing others' emotional awareness and skill given it's the skill they actually apply in their occupation.
I don't see how we are disagreeing. Emotional self-awareness is an aptitude, one that is fundamentally experiential, and so talking about it is inherently difficult. I agree that many people who talk about it are not necessarily experiencing it, including therapists and psychologists, especially if they are using lots of abstractions.
I'm a man who has worked on my own emotional health very intentionally as an adult. I've found there are lots of ways to understand and engage with your own emotions, and they can seem contradictory if you're not thinking experientially.
But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences. They can talk about it very differently from other people. There is a huge multidimensional possibility space for that.
> But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences.
There's potential selection bias here, though. It's more difficult to identify people high in self-awareness who aren't inclined to discuss their own emotional experiences, unless you happen to have frequent, close interactions with them. It's like when people assume learning languages is easy based on their experience meeting people from around the world who speak their language. But you're much less likely to interact with immigrants and travelers who don't speak your own language, if only because those people aren't inclined to engage with people with whom they can't or aren't interested in communicating.
My experience (often unfortunate) tells me that there are many behaviors that masquerade as self-awareness and other reflections of inner state, but don't actually reflect what we presume it does. For example, the stereotype is that women are naturally more nurturing. Nurturing is a concept that encompasses many dimensions, and it conflates internal motivations and feelings with outward behaviors and practice. We presume nurturing implies empathy and selflessness, but there are of mothers who by all appearances (and in fact) are great nurturers, but whose internal mental experience is bereft of those qualities. They're good nurturers because ultimately we can only judge nurturing by the outcome, and it's easy to presume a naturally patient person adept at applying good parenting practices possess the inner state we associate with nurturing. Even children of such people may not realize this, depending on their own capacity for emotional discernment.
Concepts like empathy, guilt, etc, are tricky. Is a person quick to apologize driven by guilty feelings and concern for other's internal state, or are they merely adept and eager at identifying social cues and applying social norms?
In principle women could be, as a group, more likely to possess a greater capacity for and to develop self-awareness. But history and feminism and racism tells me to be highly skeptical of something like this. While biologically it's possible (and I wouldn't at all be surprised), it's not self-evident to me that self-awareness is any more valuable a skill evolutionarily for women than for men, just like intelligence isn't likely to be more valuable a skill for some ethnic groups over another. For example, generally speaking, and from an evolutionary perspective, analytical intelligence is no less an asset for a group performing less stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. hunting) than for a group centered around stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. accounting).
> Manipulation is emotional more than it is logical, about feelings than ideas, more in women than in men, and therefore for the majority of the audience of tiktok etc
I don't think this is necessarily true that manipulation is more emotional than it is logical. On the contrary, I believe that academics and well-educated people are very susceptible to it, especially the STEM crowd. All it takes to be manipulated is someone you trust and who is like you, who is in the same peer group and who speaks the same language as you. It makes no difference whether language is “emotional” or “logical”; enough scientists have reasoned themselves into the most ridiculous bullshit and it were mostly men.
I'm really not seeing the "empathy-speak" you're referring to in that quote or the rest of the interview?
If you're referring to the quote from OP's post, "I don't know if this will make anyone feel better" isn't really appealing to empathy at all, it's basically just preemptively acknowledging what he said may sound bad and so tries to soften it a bit.
It's a rhetorical cliche that has very little to do with anyone's actual feelings.
They're certainly manipulating people with their astroturfing but via slop content like video game playthroughs for rap songs so their actual strategy doesn't seem to uniquely rely on emotional manipulation either. Just following content trends whatever they may be.
Weaponizing "empathy" just seems like a complete red herring that makes for an irrelevant tangent in this context.
Makes me think of a 20-something old running a popular YouTube channel interviewing people for business advice, and in one episode, stressing the important message of their interviewee, that was literally "don't trust advice from people who have never actually done the thing you're trying to do".
That's multiple levels of "you're not the traffic, you are the traffic" right there.
> don't trust advice from people who have never actually done the thing you're trying to do
Probably one of the most important heuristics to have in the age of self-help gurus and influencers. 99.999% of them haven't accomplished anything other than profiting off of desperate and gullible people.
The implicit rationalization here is "this is a problem that pre-dates our involvement, everyone is already doing this". Classic dodge for bad actors.
Dang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news, and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric and unsustainable and undeserved success, even if "organic and slow growth" means failure in the end.
Your comment reminds me of a quote by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, that has helped in my lows
> How slowly one advances in a boat that does not float along with the stream in a specific direction! How much easier it is when one can connect with the work of great predecessors whose value is not doubted by anyone. A personal experiment, a construction whose foundations one must dig himself and whose walls one must erect himself, runs a real risk of becoming a humble hovel. But perhaps one prefers to live there rather than in a palace that has been built by others. (Escher on Escher – Exploring the Infinite)
That's an excellent quote and I love it. I think of it more as Thoreau, or in my own terms, but I LOVE that quote, which I'd never seen before.
Top comment of a frontpage post, you're not doing that bad at marketing.
That can be automated quite easily these days. Just make your bot/scraper scan for anything that blames something or otherwise fits narratives that can be used as a vehicle of your own promotion, and hit that.
P.S. Not necessarily implying that the grandparent resorted to that.
Ooof! If I'd thought of that, I'd have kept my trap shut. :(
Art as expression, not as market campaigns, will still capture our imaginations - that's more my driving force than trying to sell more hotdogs.
I absolutely adore it when stumbling occasionally upon great musicians who have laughable numbers of listens on various platforms, dunno if that's mere chance or the algorithm trying to balance things out, but that surely brings some hope for the pure art.
Please keep in mind that such a use is against the Guidelines[0] and will be downvoted and flagged rather quickly.
Since 2023 I always check the creation date of a user before I click on any link in their comment.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>will be downvoted and flagged rather quickly.
You wish. It is becoming harder every day to find genuine comments or technical insights at the top of HN sections instead of blind love/hate for trendy topics.
It's turtles all the way down.
Even among the "genuine" comments most of them are just people spewing things because the monkey brain has determined that it likes it when the number in the top right goes up and has figured out what kind of things to spew to make it go up (dare I say encouraging this state of affairs is the reason some platforms choose to keep score in such a manner).
Does it really matter whether you're reading something written by an AI shill, a human shill or a human (or AI) who's repeating the shillery? You're being shilled at all the same.
Trusted news orgs around the world tend to have centuries of history behind them. If you actually did it right, it should long outlive you, with the speed of growth being largely irrelevant.
Looking at your site, you have a mission statement in your About page that roughly says "scrape other sources for anything relevant and interesting." Nothing about staffing, who you are, who your editors are, whether you even have editors. Every story seems to have the byline "DREAMREAL," which doesn't sound like a person.
It doesn't seem to me like you're interested in running a news org. It seems like you're dissatisfied with your ability to find things interesting to you in a single place and are trying to scratch that itch, probably in a mostly-automated way. I can sympathize with that, but a personal knowledge base with outgoing links to the original sources isn't a news org. By all means, share it. Maybe six other people in the world have exactly the same interests you do, but this is a far cry from journalism and you probably shouldn't frame it that way.
All fair, but: it's not a "news org." News is a business model, and, man, my business is feeding my family; this site's a passion project, fulfilling a need based on what I did back in the mid-2000s: curating stuff that developers roughly adjacent to my skills (i.e., JVM-adjacent) would find interesting. What happened, where, who, why, maybe how.
The site's actually not the main focus - the site's still being developed. The hardest thing about TheServerSide back in the day wasn't the writing or curating - although curation is hard if you're not just echoing press releases or READMEs - it was discovery.
Slashdot, freshmeat, RSS, IRC back then... all just being watched and participated in (I'm an actual developer first, after all) - talking to and with and watching ALL THE SOURCES. I had an OPML to die for, man! ... and I had to read it all, and filter it all, and ignore it when people talked about stuff that readers wouldn't care about.
So BCN's actually an infobot that happens to feed that discovery, in part - it's actually an information stream that yields factoids (infobot, woo!) and other services around that, and part of that yield is information about what's happening, so it HAS an RSS reader, it has github webhooks, it has everything I can think of as input streams, not as a comb filter but just as an information hub that can contain comb filters.
Yeah, there's no marketing; I'm no marketer. Don't want to be. And the presentation of the model is confusing, because I'm no marketer and because the readers don't and really shouldn't care, if it works. And the site's "in process" anyway - I mean, yeesh, it only has 50 posts so far! I'm working on getting there.
And "dreamreal" is a person - it's me. That's the IRC handle I've used for years, and that's actually one of the admin identities for me the bot had first, and it stuck. Easy to change, but honestly, it's not about me and shouldn't be.
But you're not wrong in the slightest.
ETA: it hit me after I wrote this comment that I was posting it under a name derived from my real name, to defend the use of "dreamreal" on the site to someone who posted THEIR OWN comment under "nonameiguess" - which would be an odd name to have in real life. :D
This is great and I wish you all the best. A byproduct of the content abundance age (because that's really what is is) is the expectation that not just growth but fast growth is everything is such a race to lower quality on the whole. It's pretty depressing but ultimately I suspect we will get sick of the lower level far quicker than we probably think.
Thanks. I decided long ago that I wasn't the kind of magnetic personality who'd be able to market a mass site - as a "face" I'm a very poor candidate, and I despise cults of personality, which seems to be the "go-to" for a lot of such things. It's the modern version of "smile more!"
I hope you're right. Not for my own sake, but for everyone's. I'm trying to do what I can to put stuff worth reading out there - and whether it's worth reading or not isn't actually mine to judge; if I make it "worth reading" by SEO terms, it's not actually worth reading all that much, being neutered and hedged to the point of milquetoast oblivion.
IMO.
I like your work but I'll echo others : the title font is too narrow and hurts readability. I've advise for a regular Garamond.
The entire site looks like typical AI design
This is also fair: it's definitely AI-assisted. I'm not a UI person; I have wonky color perception and synaesthesia, and a lot of experience has taught me that what works for ME in UI is what... uh... doesn't work AT ALL for other people.
So it's a problem: I can "hand write it" and have you say "mein Gott, who came up with THIS rubbish? Are they blind? Are they trying to blind US?" or I can have an AI spin something up that looks fairly bland and normalish, but fulfills the specifications I require, and have users go "this looks like a blog that pretty much anyone would write," except the content was always meant to be the differentiator.
And the UI is actually designed to be pluggable, anyway; what I work on is the backend REST services, and the UI goes through those services for all data - it has no access to the underlying datastreams, at all. Everything goes through https://api.bytecode.news, and the intent was that if someone was an awesome UI coder and wanted to show their stuff, they'd write their UI using CoolThing and I'd put it into the system at coolthing.bytecode.news, and if it totally dominated the "normal UI" I'd promote that to the default UI and just leave the other one out there as a reference (the UI you see is also hosted at https://nextjs.bytecode.news, as the "canonical url" for that implementation.)
That way, if someone's going "ooo I could make Struts sing with this" for some reason, well, the API endpoints are published with OpenAPI; go for it. Show the world.
The UI was always secondary to the concepts that drive the information system, and the content was meant to be more important than how the content looked. I'd rather deliver information than flash.
I didn't mean any disrespect. I just think AI design is the opposite of what you're saying it is. It's flashy and distracting and filled with unnecessary animations that often hinder readability. I think a much simpler design would be beneficial to the readability.
Whether that's accomplished with LLM tools or not
Also fair. I kinda thought the design for the UI was fairly normal - it looks like a lot of standard Wordpress themes would look, with an admin panel, a primary focused "recent post" and a list of other recent posts in descending order of attention. From a UX perspective, I thought it was okay; the animated circuit thing was my idea, but I tried to keep it VERY in the background, I wanted it to be fun and not a focus.
If you have ideas about what a proper UX would look like, I'm all ... eyes? ears? UX is not my thing and I am willing to consider breaking the molds to make something more awesomer if I can.
SEO, Reddit and Paid ads probably
I'm not going to optimize content for SEO - been on the other side of that, and I think it creates content that's bland and ineffective. Humans gonna human, machines gonna machine, and I'm not paying for ads. If humans want the site to succeed, it'll succeed. Otherwise, it won't. Such is life.
I kind of see what you are saying, but it reminds me of “if you build it, they will come.”
They won’t come, because they won’t even know about it. A more accurate aphorism would have been “if you build it and tell everyone about it, some of them might come.”
Humans probably don’t want the site to succeed, because they mostly don’t know it exists.
Perhaps.
How much SEO happens here on HN? How much do they spend to tell everyone about it? I'm guessing: Not much; maybe zero.
But people come here, anyway.
(That doesn't mean that it's capable of independently sustaining itself, but people do show up.)
> How much do they spend to tell everyone about it?
You could see every YCombinator investment as a kind of sidelong marketing for HN.
If you build it, and it's genuinely, uniquely useful, you won't be able to stop people from coming and inviting others to join.
Telling everyone about it is only necessary if you're indistinguishable from 100 different takes on the same thing, and trying to win a shouting match (this includes hurrying to shout the world down before competitors get a chance).
But as the saying goes, you are not in traffic - you are the traffic. The reason you need to shout is because of people like you shouting.
It is different. If you SEO, you are actively changing content toward worst and less interesting. That is not the same as making the decision between market and not-market.
This man will build a product no one uses and then complain about the world not being ready for his genius instead of using the tools that everyone else uses to give himself a chance at success.
In all honesty and writing it straight: this kind of success you're writing of would best be not achieved at all, as it's poisoning society and civilization.
I'm not talking the success of a Facebook or an Amazon. I think to successfully make an impact in terms of helping fellow humans, reach is a multiplier just as important as the quality of the product.
Hrm. If you're talking about me: I doubt it. I've been a programmer for 30+ years: I've built a LOT of products, some of which got used, some of which ... didn't. If I was going to complain, that'd be new.
And I know how to do SEO and why. And I'm just not interested. "Success" for me... well, I mean, I'd love to retire today based on the brazilians of dollars some mogul hands me for the IP behind the site, but, uh, that's not what it's for. SEO at the service layer? Sure, it has a mode for the bots, it tries to make scanning easy for the machines. But at the content level... nah, I have been watching the world tune information - one aspect of the psyop the OP talked about - for decades, and I can't bring myself to do it.
[dead]
But also don't squander the traffic with default dark mode with low contrast ;) Use the device mode hint at least
The font for the headlines also looks 'off' to me. Letters too close together maybe
Also: one of the features of the underlying tech stack is that the UI is actually a completely separate module than the backend API. Different github repo, everything: the site is akshually https://api.bytecode.news and the UI at the "base url" is just one layer for that API. The goal was always to have multiple interfaces, all tuned for whatever the technology supported best: see https://enigmastation.com/2014/07/09/repost-some-of-what-id-... (from my personal blog).
BCN actually has multiple UIs for it, although I've been concentrating on the content rather than the front-ends - I'm not a front-end guy, so my UIs tend to be impenetrable. The model works. If it's my implementation the other front ends will suck from a UX perspective, because I don't see the UI the same way most people do (there are reasons, they're not important, bottom line is that I avoid UI.)
What would YOU suggest for a UI? I'm very much curious, because I would LOVE for the UI to sing and I would have no idea how to make that happen.
Ah that explains why it was so slow to load.
Not sure your reply was meant for me but: just make as much as static as possible
What's your load chain? I've seen some other people (who use Tor through Brave) say that it's slow to load, and I'm curious to fix that - the front end has a cached version that should be rendering pretty aggressively without datafeed updates.
Hmm, It's supposed to be using the device mode. I'll look at the UI code and see if I can fix that. I use dark mode and my eyes work well with the framing, so any information here is welcomed. Will tune.
"Dang that hurt to read, here's an advertisement!"
Why is this every 3rd comment on this site? Every single post has multiple comments that are
"I hate that, here's my solution"
This is the second comment like that. It was honestly not intended - it was actually me trying to respond in my own context to the post, and WHY I was responding; "why" is more important to me than "what," and I have a hard time saying "this" without explaining why I felt "this" - or at least trying to explore it. I'm working on a site; reading the "this kind of thing is how people do things these days" actually made the concept of working on the site (which I hope has value) harder. That's what I was saying, or trying to; the "advertisement" was context, not intent, or else I'd have tried to post my own thing to HN saying "look at how ossum my seite are!"
Market-by-contradiction is huge these days. Almost as big as We're-Evil-So-What marketing!
> "I hate that, here's my solution"
HN comments have always been like that, or rather "here's my approach to circumvent that annoyance".
What's your alternative? I prefer that style over comments that stop already at "I hate that", as curiosity should be more than an expression of a dismissive opinion.
Choosing to fail means you shouldn't begin the project in the first place.
Correspondingly, if you are beginning the project, you should not make choices that will result in failure.
I don't think i'm "choosing to fail," I'm choosing to accept the outcome given an effort to prevent it. Sometimes you try and it doesn't work out; I'm not committing the mortgage to the site or the effort, and I'd like it to pan out because I think its progenitor had a raison d'etre, and I was part of it when it was good and I think there's room for it now.
And if the moment's gone, well... that's the way it goes. That's not the same as "choosing to fail."
This is not true though. My two favorite bands from the past year were poorly-attended shows that I stumbled into. You can still seek out good underground, obscure artists - you just have to look for them.
Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
The whole psyop thing is only an issue if you use "popularity" and mass appeal (people following in instagram, etc) as a signal for finding stuff.
The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.
Some of it will suck.
Popularity is the most popular (!) signal because this isn't really about the music - it's to have something to talk about with your friends, whether to bond over shared interest or signal something about yourself to your group. The same is true about any other interest: most people care a lot (arguably, primarily) about their interest being recognized and supported by other people.
Those of us who care about an interest for the sake of that interest, are called nerds.
You dropped this: )
Ah thanks! )
Yeah. It has literally never been easier to find good niche music, and that's been true for over a decade.
Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.
It has also never been easier to find bad niche music. The problem is the work required to separate the two.
That's the core of the issue, isn't it? If you're not willing to do the filtering and judging, you depend on somebody else to do it, and those somebodies probably don't have your best interests at heart, nor would they share your specific tastes.
(On a totally unrelated note, calling your potentially-shady marketing firm "Chaotic Good" is genius and pretty funny.)
Something I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10.
Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon.
I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.
Found a favorite band through a similar technique: pile of CDs given from a friend who worked at a music store and no one wanted them.
You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.
Yeah, most of the CDs there were pretty unremarkable; a lot of them were unsurprisingly stuff that was extremely popular (since those have the most CDs available). A lot of the stuff that wasn't extremely popular was pretty bad.
Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking.
Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.
It's not elitist to be part of a very small group. But I get what you mean.
I live in a city where the bands you speak of get pushed further and further away from the downtown core. They're literally in the 'burbs now. It's counter-productive, but it seems downtown is more concerned with restaurants than other forms of entertainment these days.
OP is part of a facile, superficial milieu. You know—the common clay of the new world.
Years ago, this line formed in my head, and has stuck around - it has been long enough that I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if I came up with it myself, but I think it's relevant here:
"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."
Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.
And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".
I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.
- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.
- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).
- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.
- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.
The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.
But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.
Well, yeah, it's all subjective - and actually quite tenuous - so you won't know good and bad until you actually make the call on it. Maybe you've had the experience even of coming around on some music you previously thought was bad.
Or like: one time I listened to a bunch of new music I had dug up and wasn't sure there was anything I liked. Two days later, I had a song in my head. Turned out to be one of the ones I had listened to. But I had to listen to everything all over again to find it! ദി(ㅠ﹏ㅠ) Glad I did - there were other gems in there.
Anyway, great quote.
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This isn't new, Theodor Adorno was making the point in the 1940s that taste isn't something formed in a vacuum and then expressed in the market, it's something the market produces in you and sells back. Chaotic Good is just an extension of the same tricks from back when Eddie Bernays was staging fake suffragette marches to sell cigarettes to women in 1929.
The more disturbing implication is that it's not just "everything on the internet" is fake so much as the whole surrounding culture of consumerist societies - and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences.
Mark Fisher is a good read on whether we're even capable of comprehending what it would mean to live outside such a system at this point.
“possibly every thought you ever had” immediately brought White Noise by Don DeLillo to mind
"... and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences."
Obligatory "Cerulean Top" clip:
https://youtu.be/vL-KQij0I8I
I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning.
I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
I’ve had similar experiences. After watching it for a decade I think it’s a mostly over-active pattern recognition combined with a flood of incoming information. I believe I’m careful with the information I consume, but compared with 25 years ago it’s literally orders of magnitude more.
IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).
It seems infinitely more likely to me that this is simple coincidence than something nefarious.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree; but the odds of that coincidence are extremely long.
I'm sad my second thought about this (after dismissing it as a coincidence) was that it could be used for marketing - "I randomly thought about this book/show/movie whatever, and hey what do you know? The sequel is coming out!". Basically another variation on 'organic' advertising in comments that's been around for a while.
Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I hate advertising, I don't want it messing with real interactions with other humans. I'm not sure how to express the idea, it's like its so pervasive I'm thinking about it when its not even present.
This idea makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I shouldn't have included the name of the book in my original comment (now too late to edit).
If you check on average every three years, the odds of you checking the very same day the book comes out are about 1‰, which is improbable but not _extremely_. Add that together with all the probabilities of things that would make you think "wow, that's improbable" and we have pretty high odds of something improbable happening.
In addition, there are factors that make it more probable.
- The sequel came out a bit less than 2 years after the first book, which is fairly typical. It means it is a likely time to think "what about the sequel?"
- Doctor appointments and book releases both tend to happen on tuesdays. Especially book releases, so it is possible that you tend to think more about books on tuesdays
- It is possible to think about the book more than once without realizing it, maybe even inquery about the sequel without realizing it, and because the result is negative and unimportant, it is easy to forget. It is not uncommon for me to search something just to find it in my history, completely forgotten
I would put the likelihood of something like that happening by accident to about 1/100, the "noticeable but not memorable" kind, such as meeting the same person twice in a day in a different context, or arriving at a highly coveted parking spot just as the previous guy is leaving.
Okay, I squinted hard at that notation “1‰” and had Gemini explain it to me, and it appears that you made no typos, but I couldn’t let that go unexplained!
ButlerianJihad… had Gemini explain it to you…
Well, you know. Every med student goes through this "I Am An Earthly God" phase. Usually it passes. But the guy isn't obviously in favor of the concept for which his account is named, so there isn't the contradiction here that appears to exist on the face of it. (Speaking of usernames, hello, Grima! How on Middle-earth did you survive that fall?)
Literally the first person to understand the reference in ~14 years of using this handle, thank you.
You are most welcome! - especially at such long last.
Couldn't skip an opportunity to use an unusual character, could I‽
Is it possible this is due to a memorability bias, where perhaps you’ve done basically the same sort of thing many times before and just forgot about it because nothing noteworthy happened? Then it wouldn’t be as much of a coincidence.
I had almost the opposite experience a few years ago.
I (after a few beers) found myself idly wondering about an electric folk band I hadn't seen or heard of for a good ten years, and looked them up to see if they were doing a new album or tour.
They'd played a final farewell gig the week before :/
Thanks for letting me know book two is out!
I don't know if this fits the definition perfectly, but synchronicity is a thing that exists.
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Even if so, this seems like the good kind of priming to me. You were clearly actually interested in this and just needed the nudge to remember.
Preferences and desires have to be the end of some causal DAG with entrypoints from the world outside of your own mind one way or another. Whether or not we're marketers or have any financial interest in the popularity of specific cultural artifacts, we all generally do things like evangelize our favorite stuff to friends and instill values and a love of similar things to our kids. It's overly cynical to have comments like this responded to as if any and all external influences are nefarious and inauthentic. What we want is for people to share the things they actually love rather than bullshit they know is bullshit but have been paid to shill.
I think of the fact I've been listening to Donna Summer so much for the past couple months. I know why it is. I grew up loving disco music and watching Alysa Liu win the figure skating gold medal performing to Macarthur Park reminded me of that love, something I haven't given much attention to in nearly 30 years. It's not "better" than anything else I'd been listening to in the past few years, but it's a lot more fun to sing thanks to 70s idols like Donna largely coming from a gospel background.
Going back a link, I'm reasonably sure Alysa, a 20 year-old who very likely did not grow up listening to disco music, probably picked this as her song for the season because of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and I've read Tim Burton's explanation of how the song got into the movie. He has a jukebox in his house and was listening to the Richard Harris original version of this song, which is one of the more ridiculous pop songs to ever get recorded, but full of wild changes in tone and a very long runtime that lended itself well to an extended wedding sequence interrupted by a police raid. The Donna Summer version playing over the credits is largely for contrast. I don't think Tim Burton or anyone else was motivated by wanting to boost the royalty fees going to Richard Harris and Donna Summer, who have been dead for 24 and 14 years, respectively.
We don't remember the vast majority of advertising we see by design. That's how a) it's designed and b) why it's so dangerous.
It's quite possible you saw something somewhere about it several days if not weeks or months previously and naturally didn't consciously register it. Advertisements are designed to work this way and the memory is a wonderful thing.
It's dangerous because it's manipulative, it removes agency from ourselves and its addictive to the marketeers. It hurts our identity to admit we are manipulated so psychologically we play along with the manipulation and deny being weakened (and they know this).
If I can sell you a book and make you think it's entirely your own choice then my marketing has been incredibly successful.
Or it may not be doing what marketeers and advertising agencies actually planned to happen and it could be just random coincidence.
Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)
> “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.”
Here it is.
I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Google results. The only thing achieved here was that the marketing team gave some money to Google.
I have never been even close to anything marketing related, but I'd assume that measuring its impact is highly non-trivial in the statistical sense. Also, only the companies selling marketing even have access to the relevant metrics and they have an incentive to exaggerate the results (sometimes maybe even internally).
Idk, it seems like the marketing process on tiktok doesn't constitute trying to get people to go out of their way to interact/click with your content, tiktok users are just involuntarily fed content on some level (you don't know what the next autoplayed video will be)... how can it not be trival to manipulate that userbase with, in this case, a band whose music is just-good-enough for mass appeal?
A 'psyop' psyop!
It's such an insane amount of waste that there are rooms filled with cell phones just to churn out spam. The same job should be doable by a single server. I imagine that it's only required because platforms are fingerprinting the phones to check for spammers but obviously those systems have gone from being simply useless to becoming harmful since it's now generating massive amounts of e-waste.
This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
That's, unfortunately, the free market at play. Competition is adversarial. It has many of good sides, but resource efficiency is not one of them.
And the inevitable continued degradation of all our resources leads where, exactly...
Because once you answer that question for yourself, you'll hopefully care a lot less about the "many of good sides".
Bill Hicks had a really good point when he said people who work in advertising or marketing should kill themselves.
They turn everyone elses experiences to shit just so they can have more money.
Wouldn’t it be wiser to ignore the messages of adversaries and marketers rather than suggesting people kill themselves?
Who hasn’t fallen prey to marketing and propaganda on social media?
Advertising works despite your active efforts to avoid it.
Bill Hicks was a comedian. It's not advice.
to be fair he does say in the bit that its not a joke.
Well, i highly recommend reacting to advertising aggressively in order to store the memory along with a feeling of repulsion (e.g. swearing, middle finger) to attempt to dissaude the subconscious from retrieving it without revulsion in the future.
I think the point of the bit though is to aggressively point out that advertising corrupts our world for their benefit and if advertisers or marketers had a soul they'd realise they were actively making the world worse and move to a different industry. Meaning the only ones the message is for are sociopaths that know what they're doing and don't care.
Oh look at that, Quarrelsome's going for the 'righteous anger' dollar. That's a good; that's a good market.
Nah, I've been in it for years, and it doesn't pay shit. You need a side hustle if you want to stay in it.
I am reminded of the second episode of Black Mirror :D.
Redbar, one of the first podcasts, had been anti ads for over 20 years now. Basically changed my whole view of advertising ever since
Too bad he then became Alex Jones.
What do you mean? He pretty much died at the peak of his career in comedy. I don’t remember any Alex Jonesy material
Was supposed to be somewhat of a joke but I forgot emoji can't be submitted in comments.
If you're curious though: https://rumble.com/v5495j6-matthew-north-psyop-alex-jones-is...
The commenter is referencing a conspiracy that Bill Hicks faked his death and became Alex Jones. This imo was less stupid some years ago when Jones could conceivably be seen as an exaggerated satirical caricature, though it's very hard to imagine Bill Hicks taking the bit this far now
Well, one thing I've discovered with the advent of AI music is that there are lots of things I like that are not particularly notable. I can listen to the 100th "1996 ESCAPE FROM DATA CITY + Unreal Tournament Mix" and enjoy it. I can't say that I've "discovered" an artist who then went on to become big. Back in the day, on amie.st there were quite a lot of cheap singles that I really enjoyed too but I can't find those artists again.
So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.
Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.
If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
> The psyop is perfectly okay.
Is it?
You really don't mind if everything that gets put in front of you is controlled?
What if the people who talk about class war, the people who speak up about US and Israeli terror and torture and atrocities, the people who speak up for the voiceless are never/very rarely permitted to surface by the 'tastemaker' algorithm's controller?
Because it sure seems like that's at least partly the case today, and rapidly getting worse.
I'll be very sad if I discover that Angine de Poitrine's sudden rise is inorganic.
When reading this I immediately thought of them. Anyone I know who plays an instrument said their socials are flooded with them.
Socials being flooded across the board feels weird, but it's also how network effects are _supposed_ to work.
I just hate the fact that I feel jaded and cynical about this as my default position.
Social media is not driven by network effects though. It’s driven by algorithmic engagement and its operation is opaque.
As long as they keep making that music, wearing those costumes and mumbling those interviews, I could care less. I like it.
Yea... I'm mixed because it feels like something too creative and weird for this sort of marketing, but it's perhaps as weird how they're all over Youtube suddenly.
Their look is almost "standard" French weird = art type stuff. I find it a little annoying actually, in general and for the band.
I only found out about them via word of mouth, but who knows. At least they're good stuff!
how could that crap possibly be organic
Uninstall TikTok, listen to less shitty music, have less first world problems.
Uninstall Reddit too for that matter.
I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit"
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know.
This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.
PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.
edit to add a solution
the solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)
Yep, banning advertising would be great here. You can't accept money unless it's for buying your product, and that's it.
Then again, I'm sure some loopholes would be found.
the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?
if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.
the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.
for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.
edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.
and don't get me started on native advertising.
A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.
Also bring back blogrolls.
> A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.
As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.
Not all are swayed.
The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't.
I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it.
There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing.
But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.
It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
It's almost a bit like AI speak. The shills will all have very similar sounding content. They'll all hit on the same (ad copy) points. They might mix in a few negative tidbits, but generally speaking you'll catch them all praising the same wizbang features.
Mkbhd is my favorite baseline shill. He practically just reads the product sheet. You know if he says it, it was probably given to him by the person paying for the review and, indeed, you can find the points he brings up echoed in other people's reviews.
On the flip side, I generally trust Gamers Nexus to not shill. Primarily because their lack of playing ball has actually hurt their access.
I've enjoyed your videos as well. They don't come off as a shill particularly because there's a number of products where the negative points you've put out have been strong enough to actually discourage a purchase. They haven't been weak "The colors could pop more".
> It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.
Brandolini’s law strikes again: you really have to pay attention to catch a shill. 99% of the time when you’re not paying attention and intentionally shopping for a particular product is when they get you.
Yeah, really does not help that the internet seems to be built from the ground up to reward shilling.
Click on a shill video in youtube and you'll have 20 identical videos on the same topic.
But also, advertisers are smart and you have to assume they know you are on the lookout for a shill. I have to assume the why shilling works will continue to evolve as the way to detect shilling evolves.
I expect we'll end up with something like this in the future [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gArU-BAO7Kw
I, too, rely on your web of trust, please don't ever break my heart Jeff!
It makes sense they'd be harder to find, I imagine there are more opportunities to make money by selling your soul than by offering honest review, and people with large investments have large incentives to dilute signal in their favor.
It's sad that so many platforms let it happen, but it makes sense when the users aren't the ones paying the bills. I'm immensely grateful for those that resist though, and if I were a religious person I would nominate them for sainthood or reincarnation or at least a plaque on a nice park bench somewhere.
Unless you're RMS
I agree, but I also think the point about "Is [your opinion] based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience" is really important. Relying on other bloggers is still delegating your thinking to others. Having your own objective measures and your own direct experience is useful, and sometimes it might contradict the prevailing wisdom.
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.
The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.
Those were both narratives going around, but one was clearly winning in terms of volume, and that's what I'm speaking to here. The dismissal towards the open source models has always smelled more like marketing campaigns to me than the actual sentiments of any hackers I know. We all want the open source options to close the gap, but the labs are definitely staying ahead.
My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.
The data around media literacy is terrifying.
"Fewer than 2 in 10 teens can correctly distinguish between news, advertisement, opinion and entertainment" https://newslit.org/news-and-research/news-literacy-in-ameri...
"82 percent of middle school students couldn't tell the difference between sponsored articles and real news stories.
Out of the Stanford college students that were tested, more than 80 percent couldn't identify biased content from independent news sources supported by groups like lobbying firms as being less reliable than a mainstream news source." https://universe.byu.edu/2018/02/09/studies-show-lack-media-...
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital
And how do we know that? How do we know Cursor is "withing spitting distance of opus" (whatever it means)?
Let me guess:
> that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that
I'm pretty sure this exact concern was the impetus for slashdot's friend:foe system, HN should implement something
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I like how that article claims PR firms don't lie and then proceeds to discuss how their best PR campaign was effectively a lie.
> We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
It sounds like they did good-faith estimate that there were 5000 stores out there and really believed they had 20% of the market? I wouldn't call that a lie as such.
They made up a number, and then quoted that number to other people (presumably with the intent to benefit themselves) without disclosing that they'd made up the number in the first place. That seems to jump right past 'lie' into 'fraud' or worse.
I have this growing belief that what's wrong with America is that we've tossed a great deal of virtue (both personal and public) into the woodchipper, using a lot of euphemisms like "marketing" or "puffery". And the rot is not in any way confined to marketing - it's just that marketing is a very obvious example of it. The rot has made its way into education, relationships, entertainment, governance, infrastructure, what used to be called 'news', and on and on.
We collectively gaslight ourselves to avoid dealing with the reality that we're constantly defecating in our own minds, contaminating ourselves with patterns of thought and action that are antithetical to our own continued well-being as individuals and collectives. To borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are poisoning the noosphere.
You don't have a growing belief, you have an accurate observation.
This comes up often when bad actors promote the meme "everything is securities fraud". In reality, all cases that they're talking about are instances of _blatant lying_, but they attempt to normalize this even further than it already has been. Effectively saying "it's impossible to run a company and not lie at every possible opportunity!".
The "poisoning the noosphere" is a very good description.
There is someone called Peter Ralston; on YouTube there's a few videos of him and in one bit from an interview he starts on honesty. "Honesty", he says, "is a skill most people don't appreciate". I was really impressed by that "is a skill" qualification. Never thought about it this way. But yes, it is a skill. First you learn it and then it changes you.
To add to what the other poster said, it's a logical leap to go from 5000 stores to 20% share based on having 1000 users. What does the number of stores have to do with the number of users?
It doesn't make any sense and that's because it's a lie.
Yeah but the "good faith" math had a big margin of error, and if I estimate 5k-20k shops and pick the lower number that just happens to make my company look great, that kind of changes things.
>I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns.
"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.
this is why oldschool chat > social media
curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion
This is why influencers are making bank. Everybody still believes randos on the internet might be genuine.
related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been?
But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)
I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
FWIW, cursor (company) has a CLI tool/harness similar to Claude Code called agent.
It’s existed for a long time, is quite good, and it is under-marketed (ironic for this thread).
(Double-ironic disclosure… I work for Cursor. If you have ideas to make agent better hmu)
> I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.
This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...
You couldn't even keep your analogy straight. I didn't say the people I know said anything at all about Cursor.
If someone is clear about offering an anecdote, it's dishonest to pretend as if they were making a real and reasoned argument.
I haven't used Cursor much lately, but with Opus/Codex I can program with very few bugs without having to look at any code at all, over months of working on the same codebase. I don't think any other model can do that, no?
In Cursor I look at the code diff for my own satisfaction and understanding. I've been able to auto-accept all changes pretty reliably all last year.
So much so that i've yet to invest in CC. Finally downloaded the desktop app but use it exclusively for chat and cowork.
Cursor's purgatory UX is what'll finally get me to invest in CC and codex. Not model performance.
I do think there's a caveat that it's pretty standard nextjs with rails api.
edit: found your blog post about your experience, i'll read it! https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
edit2: maybe it's because i spend a lot of time being clear with small and surgical asks after doing purely thought exploring prompts to confirm and home in on approaches. At the point I hit build or do Agent mode, Composer is mostly always spot on.
with Opus (haven't tried) maybe people are doing large-scale multi phase and single shot prompts that trigger a swarm of sub agents?
Oh no I do realise just how much is inorganic... After the fact.
It is obvious in retrospect but difficult to see in the moment
Remember Quibi?
All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.
If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)
Quibi doesn't seem like a good example. It wasn't marketed as the next big thing. It was a trial balloon that popped.
> I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic.
Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.
I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.
A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants
not sure if ad for Attention Merchants
> What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing?
I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.
In my eyes:
* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.
* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.
* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.
I don’t think they were actually asking for your research.
But Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.
Being a good band isn't nearly enough to be a famous band.
I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence.
> Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it?
Yes, exactly this. It is extremely difficult to get attention these days, no matter how good your offering.
I know the best way to solve a problem with corruption and lack of transparency: involve the government! Nobody could ever pay off a politician. Surely that would only work in our favor.
If a regulation is written well you don't need to depend on the integrity of any one politician because they aren't responsible for enforcement. The hard part is getting the laws passed in the first place because it requires electing representatives that will serve your interests instead of the interests of the corporations who bribe them. It's our job to make sure that our government is working for us. If it's impossible to do that than our democracy has failed.
I had never heard of Geese until all the stories about how Geese bought their popularity. Now I feel I should give them a listen to know what all the fuss is about!
I'm not a huge fan of them in general, but they did a pretty ok cover of Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place" that I heard on Sirius XM.
Swans is a good band. Bird fight!
As a musician in a small band: find a venue that sells tickets at the door and just go look at some bands whose name you have never heard of.
If they sell tickets at the door, that means they may not be in one of the big ticketing monopolies. Going for bands/artists you have never heard of will give you a mixed bag, sure, but (1) it will be your mixed bag, (2) you support the ecosystem that creates new bands and (3) it is much more authentic and personal, because it is usally also smaller.
I actually don't think Getting Killed the album is well mixed, what turned me on to Geese was their From The Basement performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 the music and the mixing are incredible. I've followed From The Basement for a while, ever since their collaboration with Radiohead. So maybe this was a psyop, but the music is genuinely really good.
> But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients
The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.
Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.
This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.
The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
For folks that don't appreciate the power of marketing and advertising, I would strongly recommend the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. The point isn't to say "well ackchyually marketing is good," but is instead to say that the human mind has some built-in irrationality, and understanding the our behavioral predispositions interact with the world means that we can make better decisions in life and in business.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
it's called astroturfing and has been around since the dawn of the internet
I was really surprised that term wasn't used in this article.
I agree it's old, but I think it's reached a new high with short-form content. Now that people don't subscribe to creators they like but rather get an algorithmic feed it's much harder to detect astroturfing.
Like the articles says, these creators are easily identifiable, they typically create multiple videos a day about the same topic. But for the platform that doesn't matter.
See payolla for the radio era equivalent.
as someone who works does marketing, "first time?"
People paying UGC creators to have ads is nothing new. Posting en masse to fool the algo is, but there's alwasy been bot farms.
And before that there's still the trick of getting published by a low rated news org, then letting journalist at a more reputable organization let them know of this trending news. And so on til you end up in the NYT. FYI this works even when you actually bought placement for those low quality placements
On the upside, the product/service needs to be good if you want to gain traction AND staying power. Psyops are cheap tricks, if your product sucks, then there's no word of mouth and you can't scale regardless of how many reviews you botted.
Drake,Katseye, etc. aren't doing doing well becuase they're doing cheap marketing techniques, they're doing well b/c they have a loyal audience and make good music.
Do you personally like Drake, Katseye? And think they make good music?
Some of it is really good, yes. But of course music taste is extremely subjective
Never thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates and it's an interesting article. Also, I understand why some people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see.
We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?).
We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language.
The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form.
To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts.
Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
So TikTok is for b2c. What's the equivalent for b2b product targeting developers or opensource software? Stars on github?
Or are there a lot of adtroturfing hn accounts to influence the narrative?
It reminds me of pg's article on submarine and the pr industry
I regularly see instagram ads for chinese factories taking massive wholesale volume orders.
Social media are to be used for a very short amount of time daily.
Discipline is required.
sitting in a local pub watching a musician I've never heard of play original music and absolutely loving it rn.
I think all the comments like "I'm immune to psyops, I listen to what I like!" are interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
Psyop feels a bit dramatic. Either marketing turned you on to a band you otherwise wouldn’t have found, or your tastes are driven by trends and social/status signals from others. Either way that’s just (admittedly intense) marketing isn’t it? Maybe I’m missing something?
> Either way that’s just (admittedly intense) marketing isn’t it?
Marketing used to be obvious, now it's deceptive. You can't tell whether the content you're watching is genuine or astroturfing.
Boards of Canada releasing a new track yesterday and possibly a new album after 13 years of waiting is everything but a psyop
That's exactly what they want you to think!
Most things you think you know is a psyop too.
I once worked for a company that bought a spot in the evening news (french TF1). It worked that way: a french minister was visiting a fair and coming to stop in front of the booth and getting a product demo. And that ended up in the evening news. Since that time I kind of watch the news with different eyes.
How much of the Internet is like Moltbook where you don't know the other users are bots? Does the private sector or Government control them? ... How long has it been this way??
Yes everything is a psyop
An apologetic damage control piece of "journalism". Someone was caught cheating and manipulating, so...
> Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an industry plant, but do we actually care?
...the article tries to normalize that.
But hell yeah, Amanda Silberling, I do actually care and won't ever accept that crap as norm.
This is the kind of thing that looks simple until you're three layers deep in edge cases.
Reminds me of the documentary, “merchants of cool” https://youtu.be/0tYRoiJvhJ4
Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.
Everyone needs to revisit William Gibson's the Blue Ant books. Still holds up as the best distillation of our current times culturally.
On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook
Aren’t Christmas, Easter Bunny, and drinking milk all psyops too?
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
So the formula is basically:
(Late 90's Pop Group Framework)*(Dead Internet Theory) = Clicks and Streams
https://archive.ph/Y7lS2
Something occurred to me, I wonder if the "hipster" is a creation of these marketing firms also. What do you do when tastemakers are getting their friends to listen to underground artists you don't make money off of? Flip the script, call THEM uncool and disingenuous posers. They didn't find good underground bands by having TASTE, they only like underground bands because they're narcissistically drawn to being different than everyone else!
The meta is that Wired (Conde Nast) is peak psyop.
I'll see your payola and astroturfing, and raise wining and dining newspapermen.
The best marketing has always been a psychological operation.
Psyops can be CF created by social media themselves
OpenClaw is one of those
Since influence became monetized Goodhart's law kicked in, making popularity irrelevant as an indicator of quality.
It's really the same mechanism every time :
- capitalism is about making money, more money, "better"
- someone finds a way to package an activity to a product to be sold
- that activity gets perverted beyond recognition by cutting all corners in order to "just" earn more money by "wasting" less.
Rinse & repeat to the next activity.
PS: context: one recent a16z investment is doublespeed.ai
Lots of social sites are facing this problem. It's nearly impossible to grow on Twitch without viewbotting: https://x.com/Reedjd/status/2028533060632010759 and Nikita is calling out Perplexity on X: https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2044902122995548330
The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels.
Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.
I have thought exactly as you do for a long time. Recently a side project of my blew up and it was completely organic. I'm just a solo dev. No marketing budget at all. No PR team.
Made me realize that it's still possible for things to organically get big.
It's just way way harder now.
I think it's still possible, but to your point it is way harder. Not only that, but as a consumer I never know what is authentic.
A first-hand anecdote: I write music.
Ambient variety, you know, almost static drone, very niche style per se. Never did anything to promote it in any way. Just released it via my friend's digital label on a handful of platforms.
Never had more than ~100 listens a month, and never expected that to change and earn any substantial royalties.
One day, the friend calls and tells he's willing to pay me some pretty penny, and replies to my bewilderment that just a single track from the whole album blew up, glitched the Matrix and obtained some 10'000s of listens.
I investigated a little bit and found out that the track's title coincided with that of some other, much more popular and promoted band.
So I just happened to ride on those coattails.
Edit: removed extra zero in the number of listens :)
Got a link? I want to hear it.
Well, I don't want to make this look like a coordinated psyop in the vein of the topic, sorry)..
Fair enough. Sad times we live in.
Why can't we have a system where this is baked in?
See also how Anthropic is playing us like a fiddle while making their models less capable.
I enjoyed watching Adam Ruins Everything. But it was a bit weird. It didn’t ruin everything. It’s just about how seemingly every American thing is a marketing “psyop”. I’m not an American so learning about how spending X amounts of salary on a specifically diamond engagement ring or something is a Diamond Industry (or something) marketing campaign didn’t really “ruin” it for me since I don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings around it. But I imagine that’s the same for many Americans.
There are many this-is-just-what-is-done “values” that were discussed like this. Not quite as on-the-nose as spend this ridiculous amount of your salary on specifically X ring.
I’m not singling out America here. I don’t think this shows that it is a uniquely American thing. It is just very convenient for me: I’m not part of the culture so I can watch a little from the outside. And America is a big country (we are told) so naturally there are pop-exposes like this. I do not expect the same amount of resources to be poured into my own corner of the world and all the “organic” things that we value. But that show helped me think about all the things closer to home that might be influencing me.
And since then, or before it, I’ve believed that all of society is a marketing gimmick. The asymmetry of mass media is too great in favor of Big Bad Things (governments, corporations).
What a weird feeling. To know (or believe) that you are a spoiled brat in terms of access to information, many conveniences and such (except my mortgage), and that it just comes at the small price of a Panopticon of constant brainwashing.
And so you go about your day. A Special Occassion on this and that day, which is just a marketing campaign to sell you gifts that you are obligated to buy on this Special Occassion. You know it. But you go along with it. Because what are you going to do? Complain at the nearest plaza to drones like you that also knows the truth but go along with it because it’s just the way things are done and anyway no one cares about your particular eight-page manifesto on how society is slightly broken?
As to the article, naive to the point of being suspect, even. This has been going on for let’s say a long time. But as usual the classic outlet is the Evil Corporation with stupid-arse names like Chaotic Good who has some hateable yuppie press release person who just says, Yes, the Internet is bot-filled and there is a demand and we fill it, in fact we are so proud of it. It’s just, hey these people are doing it, look, it’s these people right here.
But the reality is so insidious and rotten that TikTok Comments on Demand Inc. and Korean Executive-created K-pop is just a farcically shallow treatment of it.
Am I saying that TFA is a psyop?
Ex CEO of Google says X about Y
Oh no!!! Tell me it ain't so! Someone--like a PR firm--is gaming the system to get attention for their client? No, surely not. Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
Almost everything that you haven't heard before on Spotify-generated playlists is payola.
> Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
Well I for one appreciate TC for giving us and the masses a heads up of new spins on old astroturf methods. You simply cannot trust the algorithm to be organic. Find trusted people or specific trusted reviewers of things. Everything else you hear could be paid for.
I'd love for this kind of scam to be regulated, at least. "Not a real fan - paid endorsement".
The fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page.
But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms pushing the same thing to people. It’s quite apparent when browsing music on Youtube and finding new discoveries. Everybody in your same niche is pushed the same new bands, rather than the algo pushing different bands to different people, as one would expect.
The reason that I completely missed Geese until the psyop reached HN is probably because it was pushed by TikTok which I don’t interact with, so I was insulated from it until the word-of-mouth phase of the viral spread.
I heard about them a few times before finally deciding to listen to an album. I can't remember if it was Reddit or Instagram. In each case they were just mentioned offhand in a comment, like I should already know about them.
Ultimately, I kind of hate the guy's voice. Sort of reminds me of... Parquet Courts? Who I don't really love, either.
Thanks for the Parquet Courts psyop, I'll give that a listen ;)
Taqueria style chile de arbol salsa roja is not a psyop. So I don't like the title. But I enjoy the examples in the article -- I am only Geese adjacent, and much closer to actual Canadian Geese on a daily basis, but my daughter has been critical of Geese hype.
I wake up There's another psyop I go to sleep I wake up
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Yep, everything is astroturfing, and it's cheap to employ. Not Reddit or HN, those only contain authentic organic opinions. /s
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They're violating ad labeling laws and the FTC should come down hard on them. While Republicans pretend to be against defunding of police that's only the police for poor people, commercial and rich people police have suffered all kinds of defunding and kneecapping at their hands. We need an aggressive war on slop or democracy is not going to make it.
It is a quite strange view of democracy to think that it can resist tyrants but not spam of advertisements.
The government is broken. I'm not sure what you are hoping for.
Broken on purpose