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Everything we like is a psyop?

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Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#111

Post by genewitch »

stavros wrote: post #84
genewitch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know. This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to k…

Yep, banning advertising would be great here. You can't accept money unless it's for buying your product, and that's it. Then again, I'm sure some loopholes would be found.

the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?

if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.

the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.

for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.

edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.

and don't get me started on native advertising.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#112

Post by rendaw »

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 makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.

Some of it will suck.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#113

Post by rexpop »

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…

OP is part of a facile, superficial milieu. You know—the common clay of the new world.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#114

Post by stacktraceyo »

vermilingua wrote: post #27

I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning. I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a co…

Thanks for letting me know book two is out!

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#115

Post by jaredklewis »

jottinger wrote: post #90
absoluteunit1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO, Reddit and Paid ads probably

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.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#116

Post by owlboy »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #94
simplyluke wrote: post #5

I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit" I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis…

> What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics. In my eyes: * Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive s…

I don’t think they were actually asking for your research.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#117

Post by JimsonYang »

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 you actually bought placement for those low quality placements

On the upside, the product/service needs to be good if you want to gain traction AND staying power. Psyops are cheap tricks, if your product sucks, then there's no word of mouth and you can't scale regardless of how many reviews you botted.

Drake,Katseye, etc. aren't doing doing well becuase they're doing cheap marketing techniques, they're doing well b/c they have a loyal audience and make good music.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#118

Post by cal_dent »

Everyone needs to revisit William Gibson's the Blue Ant books. Still holds up as the best distillation of our current times culturally.

On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#119

Post by cal_dent »

jottinger wrote: post #54

Dang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news , and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric a…

This is great and I wish you all the best. A byproduct of the content abundance age (because that's really what is is) is the expectation that not just growth but fast growth is everything is such a race to lower quality on the whole. It's pretty depressing but ultimately I suspect we will get sick of the lower level far quicker than we probably think.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#120

Post by [deleted] »

vermilingua wrote: post #27

I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning. I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a co…

[deleted]
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