Viewing profile — ryanholiday

That's exactly the point no?

It depends. They're calculated hourly. Right place right time...could be just a couple dozen. Books sell less copies than people think.

I had a tour guide in German who told me he was one of the few people he knew who had read any of it because he'd spent time in the US as a exchange student.

"Rivers are easiest to cross at their source." Syrus Do it now before it gets harder.

I was fortunate enough to publish Seth's final column this morning. http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter...

Yes they are very readable and his thoughts often feel like they were written last week. It's surprisingly timeless. Schopenhauer was not a big proponent of empty, pointless philos…

I would disagree. The general principles for growth hacking always apply--far better than traditional marketing techniques do anyway. Growth hacking is, at its core, the art of bui…

Hi everyone, I wish I was clever enough to have orchestrated all this, but in fact am not. Very nice of Chris to include me in his list. Though I will say that this list is missing…

Who is insanely worked up? It's not that it's luck behind viral videas, it's that they tend to spread or become popular in their own unique ways and attempts to deduce general rule…

This is known as "thumbnail cheating"

Nothing is worse than advice about making things "go viral" from people who have never actually done it.

Real name as user name on pretty much every account I have period. Never saw the point of doing otherwise.

HN is a testament to what happens when you make a thing for a very specific group of people and only them. It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a whil…

Only when it doesn't make sense :)

Please, I have written pretty extensively about the problems with the ad impressions model--I think it's the root of the YT issue and most the low quality blogging we see. I don't …

He wrote the intro to the republished edition of The Brass Check believe it or not. (But to address your other point, it may be. Chomsky's media criticism focusing heavily on this)…

It goes the other way around too. Most reporters and bloggers get their basic facts from Wikipedia. So it's a feedback loop. Wikipedia frames reporting which can then be used to "s…

The incentive problem goes lower and more granular than that. How are most bloggers paid (or at least judged on performance)? Pageviews. What metric has about the lowest correlatio…

Actually, in the book I go much earlier. Upton Sinclair wrote a book of media criticism in 1912 that was the genesis for my theories. Yellow journalism predates Bernays by more tha…

Ding ding! Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't unfortunate, bad for us and bad for the web in the long term.

Right, this thread should just be deleted until someone writes a story about it. The page is unreadable--like most of Wikipedia's talk pages...and then they wonder why normal peopl…

Aren't a good portion of Wikipedia edits plagiarism regardless?

I do think services like RSS are strategically opposed to the vision of a lot of technology companies. The more ad-driven (or growth/hype driven they are), the more they embrace th…

There is, nonetheless, a HUGE difference between you pulling content (subscribing) and other people recommending or aggregating content for you. One is subject to the One Off Probl…

That's why I liked Siegler's analogy to bees.