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Everything we like is a psyop?

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Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#201

Post by arcfour »

autoexec wrote: post #48
johnfn wrote: post #11

But Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.

I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regula…

I know the best way to solve a problem with corruption and lack of transparency: involve the government! Nobody could ever pay off a politician. Surely that would only work in our favor.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#202

Post by jottinger »

gib444 wrote: post #159
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…

But also don't squander the traffic with default dark mode with low contrast ;) Use the device mode hint at least The font for the headlines also looks 'off' to me. Letters too close together maybe

Also: one of the features of the underlying tech stack is that the UI is actually a completely separate module than the backend API. Different github repo, everything: the site is akshually https://api.bytecode.news and the UI at the "base url" is just one layer for that API. The goal was always to have multiple interfaces, all tuned for whatever the technology supported best: see https://enigmastation.com/2014/07/09/repost-some-of-what-id-... (from my personal blog).

BCN actually has multiple UIs for it, although I've been concentrating on the content rather than the front-ends - I'm not a front-end guy, so my UIs tend to be impenetrable. The model works. If it's my implementation the other front ends will suck from a UX perspective, because I don't see the UI the same way most people do (there are reasons, they're not important, bottom line is that I avoid UI.)

What would YOU suggest for a UI? I'm very much curious, because I would LOVE for the UI to sing and I would have no idea how to make that happen.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#203

Post by wartywhoa23 »

jottinger wrote: post #195
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can be automated quite easily these days. Just make your bot/scraper scan for anything that blames something or otherwise fits narratives that can be used as a vehicle of your own promotion, and hit that. P.S. Not necessarily implying that the grandparent resorted to that.

Ooof! If I'd thought of that, I'd have kept my trap shut. :( Art as expression, not as market campaigns, will still capture our imaginations - that's more my driving force than trying to sell more hotdogs.

I absolutely adore it when stumbling occasionally upon great musicians who have laughable numbers of listens on various platforms, dunno if that's mere chance or the algorithm trying to balance things out, but that surely brings some hope for the pure art.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#204

Post by vermilingua »

throwanem wrote: post #197
vermilingua wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ButlerianJihad… had Gemini explain it to you…

Well, you know. Every med student goes through this "I Am An Earthly God" phase. Usually it passes. But the guy isn't obviously in favor of the concept for which his account is named, so there isn't the contradiction here that appears to exist on the face of it. (Speaking of usernames, hello, Grima! How on Middle-earth did you survive that fall?)

Literally the first person to understand the reference in ~14 years of using this handle, thank you.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#205

Post by sph »

badc0ffee wrote: post #125
sph wrote: post #99

The fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page. But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms p…

I heard about them a few times before finally deciding to listen to an album. I can't remember if it was Reddit or Instagram. In each case they were just mentioned offhand in a comment, like I should already know about them. Ultimately, I kind of hate the guy's voice. Sort of reminds me of... Parquet Courts? Who I don't really love, either.

Thanks for the Parquet Courts psyop, I'll give that a listen ;)

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#206

Post by jottinger »

cal_dent wrote: post #119
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.

Thanks. I decided long ago that I wasn't the kind of magnetic personality who'd be able to market a mass site - as a "face" I'm a very poor candidate, and I despise cults of personality, which seems to be the "go-to" for a lot of such things. It's the modern version of "smile more!"

I hope you're right. Not for my own sake, but for everyone's. I'm trying to do what I can to put stuff worth reading out there - and whether it's worth reading or not isn't actually mine to judge; if I make it "worth reading" by SEO terms, it's not actually worth reading all that much, being neutered and hedged to the point of milquetoast oblivion.

IMO.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#208

Post by throwanem »

vermilingua wrote: post #204
throwanem wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you know. Every med student goes through this "I Am An Earthly God" phase. Usually it passes. But the guy isn't obviously in favor of the concept for which his account is named, so there isn't the contradiction here that appears to exist on the face of it. (Speaking of usernames, hello, Grima! How on Middle-earth did you survive that fall?)

Literally the first person to understand the reference in ~14 years of using this handle, thank you.

You are most welcome! - especially at such long last.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#209

Post by GuB-42 »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #129
vermilingua wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree; but the odds of that coincidence are extremely long.

If you check on average every three years, the odds of you checking the very same day the book comes out are about 1‰, which is improbable but not _extremely_. Add that together with all the probabilities of things that would make you think "wow, that's improbable" and we have pretty high odds of something improbable happening.

In addition, there are factors that make it more probable.

- The sequel came out a bit less than 2 years after the first book, which is fairly typical. It means it is a likely time to think "what about the sequel?"

- Doctor appointments and book releases both tend to happen on tuesdays. Especially book releases, so it is possible that you tend to think more about books on tuesdays

- It is possible to think about the book more than once without realizing it, maybe even inquery about the sequel without realizing it, and because the result is negative and unimportant, it is easy to forget. It is not uncommon for me to search something just to find it in my history, completely forgotten

I would put the likelihood of something like that happening by accident to about 1/100, the "noticeable but not memorable" kind, such as meeting the same person twice in a day in a different context, or arriving at a highly coveted parking spot just as the previous guy is leaving.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#210

Post by cucumber3732842 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #180
whilenot-dev wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep in mind that such a use is against the Guidelines[0] and will be downvoted and flagged rather quickly. Since 2023 I always check the creation date of a user before I click on any link in their comment. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>will be downvoted and flagged rather quickly. You wish. It is becoming harder every day to find genuine comments or technical insights at the top of HN sections instead of blind love/hate for trendy topics.

It's turtles all the way down.

Even among the "genuine" comments most of them are just people spewing things because the monkey brain has determined that it likes it when the number in the top right goes up and has figured out what kind of things to spew to make it go up (dare I say encouraging this state of affairs is the reason some platforms choose to keep score in such a manner).

Does it really matter whether you're reading something written by an AI shill, a human shill or a human (or AI) who's repeating the shillery? You're being shilled at all the same.

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