Some notes on influenceering

> early on, it plays tricks with your mind — what if I’m really as clueless as they say?

> What stings far more is when you get no reaction whatsoever

Wow, even someone like lcamtuf can feel like this sometimes. This guy is the author of super-awesome stuff like "The Tangled Web" book, the "Guerrilla guide to CNC" and the "american fuzzy lop" software. Definitely, his work is the kind of content that makes the internet 1000 times better!

Having done some blogging that I need to get back to, I have to agree with you that follower counts are mostly worthless. Platforms like Twitter and YouTube end up with hugely inflated numbers compared to your actual audience.

A fantastic following is 1000 people who really care. A million random YouTube subscribers might have that.

The best thing I've learned about "influenceering" is to stop thinking you're hot shit and focus on being useful (or entertaining if that is what you're about).

Years ago I was pumping content out all the time and I was just creating the content for the sake of creating it. Consequently, the content was mostly pointless and garbage.

If you want to treat your social media as a public journal that is cool, but not likely to make you an influencer. If your goal is to grow a following, you've gotta be empathetic towards your audience and create what they want to see.

If you're trying to entertain, make sure you're actually entertaining. Or if like me you're educating, make sure you're actually educating.

It seems completely obvious, yet when you're doing it, its easy to lose sight of the mission.

Once I "removed myself" from the equation and just focused on what is actually useful to my intended audience things improved tremendously.

> Some of my most popular posts are throwaway quips and memes that went viral on social media. One of my life’s crowning achievements is this: [witty, throwaway, quip tweet].

> In contrast, some of the work I put weeks or months into essentially lost the SEO game and gets nearly zero traffic ... Even though I don’t write for money, there is an immense pressure to produce clickbait — even if simply to add “hey, since you’re here, check out this serious thing”.

This will be different for different people, but I've noticed a moderately strong negative correlation between how much effort I put into something and how much engagement it gets (this seems likely to be different for people who apply their effort to generating engagement). The highest engagement content content of mine tends to be thoughtless social media comments I make without thinking. Something like https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/, which summarizes 300+ pages of FTC memos and is lucky to get 10% of the traffic of a throwaway comment and is more likely to get I don't think this is unique to tech content either. For example, I see this with YouTube channels as well — in every genre or niche that I follow, the most informative content doesn't has fairly low reach and the highest engagement content leans heavily on entertainment value and isn't very informative.

Can relate to a lot of this as a very small content creator that has been doing it for fun for over 10 years.

On online weirdos - this is very much a thing. You can pick up weirdly persistent stalkers and haters and it can be exhausting and sometimes scary.

For me, I do it for fun. I find it very frustrating to have conversations with followers/viewers that are wanting me to do $thing and why don't I open subs to $monetize blah blah and I explain that while I do enjoy putting out content, at the end of the day this is for my enjoyment and there is zero chance I can make as much as I do from it as my day job, so I don't. It's very frustrating and a sad state of affairs that people can't seem to grasp the idea of making content for the sake of making content. That's how the early internet was, no one was getting paid, and it put out arguably some of the best there has been.

Regarding hosting/seo stuff, I always let platforms like twitch, meta, YT, etc. manage that for me rather than wrangling SEO hell, but I acknowledge the video space is a bit different than the blog space. For the writing I do, I wouldn't dream of self hosting for the reasons he describes.