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I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

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Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#101

Post by rdrd »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #100
rdrd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs…

Yes, by all means, build and promote your product. Planning out interactions according to 3 fake personas is still fake though. Not that I have any better ideas, we all have to engage with this nonsense and waste our lives producing it. It would be nice to somehow not have to.

To be clear, the "personas" are customer/user personas. Not sure what the "fake" aspect relates to.

https://www.mural.co/blog/creating-user-personas

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#103

Post by riehwvfbk »

rdrd wrote: post #101
riehwvfbk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, by all means, build and promote your product. Planning out interactions according to 3 fake personas is still fake though. Not that I have any better ideas, we all have to engage with this nonsense and waste our lives producing it. It would be nice to somehow not have to.

To be clear, the "personas" are customer/user personas. Not sure what the "fake" aspect relates to. https://www.mural.co/blog/creating-user-personas

The whole parasocial aspect of it is what feels fake, distasteful, and icky.

The very idea of gaining power in the modern world is through parasocial relationships. Think Taylor Swift: her fans follow every single one of her updates even though they are highly scripted to engage exactly their "user persona", and present a Taylor who has nothing to do with the real one, another persona. Whoever can be at the top of this pyramid (i.e. make enough people believe that an Instagram-mediated relationship with a fake media persona is real) - wins the game.

I don't claim to have an answer, however, consider this. A few years ago it was considered impossible to win the battle against Big Food. They would continue to shove increasingly fake food simulacra down our throats and we'd be doomed. There was a backlash. With parasocial relationships, I feel that AI has tipped the scales into "enough is enough" category and people will demand real connection over personas.

And maybe we are just talking past each other. Maybe.

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#104

Post by qingcharles »

fourthark wrote: post #71
qingcharles wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never knew that. Reminds me of the inventor of the backflip, John Backflip: https://theyardstickagency.co.uk/blog/the-strange-but-true-s...

Don’t worry, this is false and the article says so.

Yes, that's the joke.

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#105

Post by neilv »

neilv wrote: post #78
rdrd wrote: post #24

As a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it. Here's what I've done: - At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas - My content has to be useful to one of those - If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link an…

> If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it Not quite the same thing, but a perspective to be aware of... For example, I used to be on a semi-private forum, where some people would lurk without participating, and then seemed to "arbitrage" ideas from there, to blog and social media posts, to promote their brand. Ideas generally…

Incidentally, from what I saw of undergrads at Brown University, I think Lisa Simpson would've fit right in. I mean that as a compliment to both.

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#106

Post by euroderf »

RobRivera wrote: post #33
rdrd wrote: post #24

As a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it. Here's what I've done: - At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas - My content has to be useful to one of those - If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link an…

I have a paper notebook next to my keyboard entitled 'sleep deprivation induced fever-dreams'. It is an excellent collection and useful tool so I dont let my ideas runaway with my attention. Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.

> Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.

Related: "Write drunk, edit sober."

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#107

Post by wahnfrieden »

girdi wrote: post #92
wahnfrieden wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing. People who do UGC work get paid enough to not have to work full-time if they don't want to, giving them more time for other things in life than most jobs. Typical jobs care more about exclusivity over your entire working day than the…

>It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing. Others are raging about your use of the (very basic) term because it's the inverse of industry jargon. Putting it bluntly: that word you're using - organic - it doesn't mean what you think it means. There's no elitism here, just mor…

You are simply out of touch. And that is not what the other repliers are raging about.

I can expand on this but you are rudely patronizing, so goodbye to that.

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#108

Post by AuthAuth »

rdrd wrote: post #83
AuthAuth wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval Except none of this is authentic. Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product. Or the accounts should be marked as sponsored or promotion accounts so they can be filtered out accordingly.

> Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs…

I'd consider cold DMs to be spam. What if every business did this? This b2b call center stuff happening on peoples social media accounts. Its gross and I dont like it. Please keep advertising within advertising channels. You arent authentic by spamming people's DMs.

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#109

Post by an0malous »

gyomu wrote: post #72
nucleogenesis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s just that I just don’t want to lie to make money. Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…

I don't see any lies in the screenshots from the original article being discussed here. They are a staged conversation with a contact named "Speedometer FAQ" - not pretending like it's with a real person, or real customer testimonials. If it makes you feel better, you could put "simulated text messages" at the bottom of such images.

“Technically you could figure out I was lying” is a great haven for liars. The whole reason this strategy works is because there are many people who won’t notice that contact name and assume it’s a real conversation, otherwise they wouldn’t have used the chat format.

It’s like saying “it’s ok to call the car ‘full self driving’ because one could figure out it’s not really full self driving.” But obviously, not everyone will realize that and you’re benefitting from the deception otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.

Re: I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

#110

Post by wahnfrieden »

klabb3 wrote: post #28
jondwillis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not raging at you, the term is newspeak, obfuscatory, slapped on top of antisocial behavior. It’s better that profits are shared than fixed. But that doesn’t change the underlying system and incentives towards dishonesty.

100% agree. Plus ”organic” is an important term that has real meaning when you try to grow a product. Diluting it with paid advertisement just makes it harder to communicate clearly. Plus we already have a word for it, paid sponsorship.

The term is used to differentiate content that end users see because it was boosted or a paid ad that the platform shows them due to payment instead of via engagement algorithms

Paid sponsorship is fine logically but isn’t usually used to describe UGC marketing. These are accounts that are set up to promote one brand, without any existing following, and without boosting the content - leaving it to be discovered organically.

(Paid sponsorship is usually used to describe promotion through someone’s existing following and is also usually communicated within the content as being a paid ad, though not necessarily. But even with paid sponsorship, it is a form of organic marketing per the use of this term when the content is not boosted and not being used for paid ads, it simply describes how the viewer is coming across it.)

I wouldn’t use the term paid sponsorship to describe how someone creates brand-focused new accounts and posts only about the brand in order to achieve organic virality, I don’t think that clearly communicates the strategy

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