Stop Ruining It
seths.blog
Stop Ruining It
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Re: Stop Ruining It
#2> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
Re: Stop Ruining It
#3[flagged]
Re: Stop Ruining It
#4[flagged]
Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating.
Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
Re: Stop Ruining It
#5> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place. also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it. so…
I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.
Re: Stop Ruining It
#6> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Re: Stop Ruining It
#7[flagged]
Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating. Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
I think it was hyperbole, and that the GP does not literally believe this was written by GPT-1, which did not produce coherent sentences.
Re: Stop Ruining It
#8> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drov…
According to Cory Doctorow, P&G (Proctor&Gamble) canceled $200m of ad spend and saw no change in sales
Re: Stop Ruining It
#9As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
Re: Stop Ruining It
#10> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drov…
I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.