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Everything we like is a psyop?

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Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#141

Post by hnfong »

adrianN wrote: post #128
majormajor wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#142

Post by TeMPOraL »

jaredklewis wrote: post #115
jottinger wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#143

Post by phendrenad2 »

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!

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#144

Post by kilroy123 »

madrox wrote: post #134

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…

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.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#145

Post by TeMPOraL »

rendaw wrote: post #112
jrecyclebin wrote: post #36

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…

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…

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.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#146

Post by TeMPOraL »

plastic041 wrote: post #70

> “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 t…

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.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#147

Post by tbossanova »

verisimi wrote: post #121
JimsonYang wrote: post #117

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…

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

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#148

Post by sersi »

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

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#149

Post by vjk800 »

jrmg wrote: post #64

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).

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#150

Post by utopiah »

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

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