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Reasons not to become famous

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Re: Reasons not to become famous

#131

Post by nlh »

The stalker thing is real - and I didn’t realize how real until a buddy who’s a moderately-successful YouTuber (750k subs) got his very own.

Thankfully it’s a relatively benign case, but man, it’s real. There’s a kid who, for the past ~10 years, calls him Every. Single. Day. Without fail. For 10 years (that’s 3600+ phone calls). He leaves a voicemail and just talks about his day - what video games he’s playing, etc. I think his mom once called and apologized (although she doesn’t seem to try and stop the behavior, which is also odd, but who knows).

Now imagine the same kind of obsessive behavior, but...less benign. Scary.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#132

Post by grawprog »

sneak wrote: post #128
woofie11 wrote: post #36

Law suits. The big one missing is law suits. That's a higher level of fame than this blogger has hit. That includes: 1) Nuts and idiots. For example, people who genuinely believe what you're doing is out to get them. 2) Jackals and vultures. People want what you've built, and see the legal system as a good way of extorting you to get it. I hit this level of fame, and quickly backed down from anything which might give…

One of the mitigating strategies here is to have a liability waiver that people sign to enter your office or home. Mine also has an NDA with a nondisparagement provision. It has been useful for dating, too.

Personally, the only time i've had to sign a waiver is right before i've been doing something dangerous or life threatening. If a date made me sign a waiver before entering their home I'd be wondering what kind of fucked up things they've got planned and probably turn around and leave right there.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#133

Post by JohnStrangeII »

coffeefirst wrote: post #120
sillysaurusx wrote: post #14

Hypothesis: On twitter, when your follower count exceeds the number you're following, you become a little nutty. I've noticed this odd trend where if people gain a lot of twitter followers, then often their views become reinforced to the point that outsiders look at their tweets and wonder what happened to make them express such ideas. But there's bias here: for tweets like these to be noticed, they need to be seen.…

Alternately, everyone has dumb thoughts from time to time, and the bigger and more tempting your megaphone, the more you risk shouting it out before having the chance to wake up 3 days later thinking "wow, that's completely insane." This is also one of the reasons I abhor twitter. Everything is RIGHT NOW. Really, nobody should send a message to 1000+ people without sleeping on it or getting a second opinion.

Most people are also easily flattered and everybody is naturally opinionated. It's hard to keep your ego in check.

For example, you see respectable scientists and artists write a popular book, then the next one (because their publisher nags them), then a third one that is borderline unprofessional (no time, publisher send ghostwriter), and so on. Maybe some of them realize that a best seller can yield a lot of money and in no time time they appear in talk shows talking about topics they couldn't possibly know anything about (alien invasions, politics, the future of mankind). Finally, they appear to be nuts and everybody is angry about how "fake" they are and speculates about their mental problems.

If I would get book proposals and interview requests every day, I'd probably end up the same way.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#134

Post by ip26 »

keiferski wrote: post #83
christiansakai wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Kevin Hart’s autobiography and one takeaway from the book was that famous comedians or famous people don’t use pseudo/nicknames but just use his/her own name. Kevin Hart was known as Lil’ Kev the Bastard until one of his early mentor told him to drop that nickname.

> Kevin Hart was known as Lil’ Kev the Bastard until one of his early mentor told him to drop that nickname. This is also just a monumentally bad name. In comedy alone, there are plenty of people with nicknames or not-their-actual name: - Louis C.K. (Louis Székely) - Jon Stewart (Jon Leibowitz) - Larry the Cable Guy (Daniel Lawrence Whitney) - Mel Brooks (Melvyn Kaminsky) - Gene Wilder (Jerome Silberman) - Tim Allen…

Many of those seem like pen names covering for ethnicity rather than preserving anonymity. I see Hungarian, Jewish, German, Polish...

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#135

Post by ikeboy »

sneak wrote: post #128
woofie11 wrote: post #36

Law suits. The big one missing is law suits. That's a higher level of fame than this blogger has hit. That includes: 1) Nuts and idiots. For example, people who genuinely believe what you're doing is out to get them. 2) Jackals and vultures. People want what you've built, and see the legal system as a good way of extorting you to get it. I hit this level of fame, and quickly backed down from anything which might give…

One of the mitigating strategies here is to have a liability waiver that people sign to enter your office or home. Mine also has an NDA with a nondisparagement provision. It has been useful for dating, too.

This sounds overkill, but mandatory arbitration clauses in business agreements is a good idea. In particular with partners, you don't want to have a nasty public fight over your company.

Can also include winner gets fees clause to discourage baseless claims.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#136

Post by reidjs »

My advice (not famous person):

If you want to “try before you buy” the famous lifestyle perhaps try to get comfortable at night clubs and festivals. Once you kind of learn how that dynamic works and you can get the most attractive people there to pay attention/dance/party with you, you will see a lot of the positives and negatives that come with the territory.

Beautiful, heartless women. Jealousy. Needless power positioning. Regretful spending. But also fun and memorable experiences. YMMV

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#137

Post by sneak »

grawprog wrote: post #132
sneak wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the mitigating strategies here is to have a liability waiver that people sign to enter your office or home. Mine also has an NDA with a nondisparagement provision. It has been useful for dating, too.

Personally, the only time i've had to sign a waiver is right before i've been doing something dangerous or life threatening. If a date made me sign a waiver before entering their home I'd be wondering what kind of fucked up things they've got planned and probably turn around and leave right there.

I have yet to encounter anyone who had any issue with it. Personally, I work at home and wouldn’t want anyone in the building who potentially had access to my office (it’s locked, but still) to not be under NDA at the very least. Opportunistic lawsuits make the liability waiver part important.

Hurt feelings when dating necessitates the non-disparagement clause. Several times I’ve had people I’ve politely rejected say all manner of false things about me, sometimes years after the fact.

I make it clear to anyone who participates in my life in any meaningful social capacity that they do so only on the condition of privacy and discretion. Those are the terms made plain up front. No one is required to participate.

Really though it comes down to physical safety. If someone doxes me, I incur approximately $40k in instantaneous expenses because I suddenly have to move, injunctions on posting or no, thanks to the internet. Having a document in place to be able to (somewhat) protect against or recover from that is a little bit of peace of mind.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#138

Post by throw18374 »

This is tangential to the article, but James being “a frequent commenter on his blog and a huge help to other readers” was my first sign that he was not mentally well. Immediately knew things would not go well for him in this story.

People often say this as a joke, but I think it’s 100% accurate: Internet comment sections have a strong self-selection bias for the mentally unwell.

I’ll include Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, HN to some extent, etc.

Not exact numbers, but the math goes something like 100% of comments are written by 10% of readers. Of those that do bother to comment, the less utilized and less psychology stable and healthy they are, the greater their commenting volume is.

Healthy happy people simply do not spend much of their time that way.

(I’m including myself in that btw.)

The world treats these comment sections as if they represent a perfect cross-section of the general population, and the result is all the insane cultural rambling and nonsense you hear and read about in media and blogs, all the way up to Fox News and NYT. They think these insane ramblings are what represent the people and what the people want.

Then the population adjusts to some extent to match those insane ramblings, because they think that’s how other people must feel.

It’s a global feedback loop of political and cultural madness and hysteria.

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#139

Post by [deleted] »

gherkinnn wrote: post #62

I never wanted to be famous. Now I feel confirmed. Jesus. There’s liberty in being a nobody. > Suffice to say, I didn’t realize that this type of thing was part of the Faustian fame-seeking bargain. Again, reading classics holds more weight than 90% of current self help and motivational books. Goethe was on point. After having mastered all the sciences and still unfulfilled, Faust seeks Mephisto to know “was die Welt…

[deleted]

Re: Reasons not to become famous

#140

Post by AJ007 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #14

Hypothesis: On twitter, when your follower count exceeds the number you're following, you become a little nutty. I've noticed this odd trend where if people gain a lot of twitter followers, then often their views become reinforced to the point that outsiders look at their tweets and wonder what happened to make them express such ideas. But there's bias here: for tweets like these to be noticed, they need to be seen.…

There is a threshold where your Twitter account flips from being a medium you communicate among a group to it’s just a microblogging platform. It’s amazing how much noise anyone with even a moderate number of followers will get as responses. It’s even more amazing how people can still continue to post good stuff after that.
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