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Some notes on influenceering

lcamtuf.substack.com

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Re: Some notes on influenceering

#81

Post by trust_bt_verify »

gavinhoward wrote: post #48

This is why you must self-host. And use HN for comments. You may think I'm joking, but my pure self-hosted website can get more attention through HN if I put effort into blog posts. I have two blog posts that say the same thing, one with a ragebait tone, and one that is moderate. HN loved the moderate one. I love this site. Anyway, I think he hit on the reason: other platforms give you bad signals for their own benef…

Hacker news seems to love rage bait and may just align with your biases better than other tech sites. This has certainly been my experience, I often find people I agree with more reasonable before any personal reflection.

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#82

Post by ghaff »

paulpauper wrote: post #20
luu wrote: post #8

> 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…

This is why the stock market (specifically the Nasdaq) and real estate, tech jobs are so great for building wealth . none of this unpredictability of having to rely on user/reader engagement or guessing the whims of reader or publisher tastes. For investing, being successful is as easy as parking your money and watching it grow. The creator/engagement economy has vastly more losers relative to winners, which makes it…

It's not just unpredictability. It's that outside of doing explicitly commercial work (and often even then), the average and certainly the median income for a great deal of creative work is really low.

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#83

Post by joshstrange »

luu wrote: post #8

> 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…

I agree and it can be very frustrating. You put a lot of effort into something and get almost no feedback/traffic (I also don’t write for money or make money from my blog, but it’s nice to see people read it) and then you can write a pithy comment or post that doesn’t dig into the nuance and it will blow up.

Some of my highest upvoted HN comments are 1-2 sentences but when I’ve responded or posted something well thought out or detailed it sometimes gets no votes/replies.

I try to “forget” this phenomenon because I don’t want to trend towards one-liners optimizing for engagement but every time a throwaway comment blows up I get somewhat frustrated that the well-reasoned reply/comment I wrote the previous day/hour/minute was ignored.

Thankfully I’ve had longer comments/posts gain traction so I know it does happen. I wrote a detailed blog post [0] on the Kroger (grocery store) app and posted it to HN but it got no upvotes (maybe 1-2) and didn’t get any comments. Thankfully, and this was news to me, the HN mods will occasionally take a post they liked that didn’t get attention and throw it on the front page to give it some more visibility (and then it can sink or swim on its own). They did that for this post and I got to participate in some enjoyable discussions on the topic.

That’s really what drives me to write (which I do rarely), the resulting discussion/feedback, well at least it’s a close second to just getting my ideas down on “paper” which forces me to think about them in new/interesting ways. More than once I’ve gone into writing a blog post thinking a certain way then I’ve changed or altered my thinking after putting my initial thoughts on the page.

[0] https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/11/krogers-digital-struggle/

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#84

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

Shitposting is the top of my personal sales funnel. Always has been.

I got married to a wonderful woman I met on Twitter about 4 years ago. We now live together, slowly conquering Europe from the northeast down and to the left. I got multiple interviews and job offers from it, too, none of which I could take sadly because I planned to move to Finland to be with the aforementioned lass. But I knew plenty of others who did.

Shitposting is a game where the rewards to being (smart ∩ charming ∩ really fucking funny sometimes) are disproportionately high. I don't use Twitter anymore, but I see my involvement with it around 2020-2021 as one of the best longshot investments I ever made. By treating it as a gateway drug to the experience that is knowing me as a person, and discovering to my surprise and delight that many people found it extremely worthwhile, I think I permanently deleted any sense that I somehow was too dumb, too awkward, too boring to justify my being.

It was great!

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#85

Post by hanniabu »

_xiaz wrote: post #67
baby wrote: post #32

> #1: It’s still a chore just use a static site if you can. I think I’m also stuck with an old stack and don’t have the time to move to a static site and I’ve been paying the price for years. All my new stuff is static, pushed on github, deployed by cloudflare pages. Worst was when a linux upgrade deleted a bunch of user content, fortunately I had set up backups! But spent the entire night fixing things. Now I do sta…

Any reason in particular for going with cloudflare pages instead of github pages? The latter has served me well for years, but I'm wondering if I'm missing out

Netlify and vercel are also great options

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#86

Post by ToucanLoucan »

keiferski wrote: post #59
luu wrote: post #8

> 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…

I think the dichotomy here is a false one. There is plenty of well-researched, in-depth content that does well on social media. The trick is that it’s also presented in an accessible way that provides value at every step, even the “superficial glance” one. The mistake many of the “I spent hours researching this piece” creators is that they don’t package that content in an accessible way. Instead it’s a huge block of…

> The mistake many of the “I spent hours researching this piece” creators is that they don’t package that content in an accessible way. Instead it’s a huge block of text without any coherent organization or entry point. Ergo it’s not surprising that it does worse.

I honestly think this is what draws me to the documentary/podcast/video essay genre so much. I have a hard time concentrating on reading non-fiction but take the exact same material and deliver it via someone with decent charisma and the willingness to construct into a narrative story, and I'll watch a 4-hour deconstruction of a TV show I don't even care about.

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#87

Post by et1337 »

joshstrange wrote: post #83
luu wrote: post #8

> 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…

I agree and it can be very frustrating. You put a lot of effort into something and get almost no feedback/traffic (I also don’t write for money or make money from my blog, but it’s nice to see people read it) and then you can write a pithy comment or post that doesn’t dig into the nuance and it will blow up. Some of my highest upvoted HN comments are 1-2 sentences but when I’ve responded or posted something well thou…

I remember that post, thanks for sharing!

Probably half of my posts that hit the front page got there via the second chance pool. It feels like dang is single-handedly turning back the tides of the internet by hand-picking links.

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#88

Post by 0xmutt »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #66
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any high-signal sources in particular?

This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in: - https://erikbern.com - https://lethain.com - https://commoncog.com - https://scattered-thoughts.net - https://danluu.com - https://ideolalia.com - https://staysaasy.com - https://collabfund.com - https://blog.nelhage.com - https://jacobian.org - https://equalventures.substack.com - https://defmacro.org - https://sp…

Thanks for the list!

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#89

Post by boneitis »

> A while ago, I put together an impassioned, contrarian guide to photography, illustrated with a number of interactive shots. The only traffic it’s getting today are confused searches for a porn performer with a vaguely similar name.

This has me spinning, even after skimming the referenced piece. What is the performer's name, and to what does s/he have a similar name?

Re: Some notes on influenceering

#90

Post by tivert »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #84

Shitposting is the top of my personal sales funnel. Always has been. I got married to a wonderful woman I met on Twitter about 4 years ago. We now live together, slowly conquering Europe from the northeast down and to the left. I got multiple interviews and job offers from it, too, none of which I could take sadly because I planned to move to Finland to be with the aforementioned lass. But I knew plenty of others who…

> Shitposting is the top of my personal sales funnel. Always has been.... I got multiple interviews and job offers from it, too, none of which I could take sadly because I planned to move to Finland to be with the aforementioned lass. But I knew plenty of others who did.

There was a pretty in-depth article about that recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/26/nyregion/twitter-lawyers-...

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