Everything we like is a psyop?

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.

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 :)

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

The best marketing has always been a psychological operation.

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