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First, make me care

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Re: First, make me care

#211

Post by mvc »

weitendorf wrote: post #205
mvc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> each me something but make me feel like “Finally someone who gets it” rather than challenged or threatened. Ironically, AI has been making me feel like this lately. But it taught me all of this (i.e. your exact point about the psycological levers employed by people/organizations who understand why stuff goes viral). So is that real or am I just being successfully marketed to, now by AI.

I guess my meta-point is that "marketing" shouldn't be such a dirty word, because done well enough, it's effective communication that gives people what they want/helps them AND makes them feel good. My own comment basically does the same thing I said he did, lol. The point of calling it marketing is that this blog post is explaining hooks, basic content marketing (ie be entertaining or interesting), progressive discl…

Sure, when it's fronting a great product, I have no issue with marketing. But it can be abused, which makes people suspicious (but not invulnerable as we know).

Anyway, I am currently in "lean in and find out" mode with AI :-)

Not quite at Gas Town yet but I've dropped a lot of baggage and willing to take a hike to try and find it.

Re: First, make me care

#212

Post by MarkusWandel »

So LLMs can't do that? Every LLM-written historical or pseoudo-historical (i.e. made up) thing that comes up in my Facebook feed does start with a "hook" like that. Doesn't make them great articles but obviously you can prompt them to do it.

Re: First, make me care

#213

Post by wodow »

simonw wrote: post #4

This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever...

I would be interested in a study on how long popular accounts do use their one hook -- or set of hooks, or rotate them...

Re: First, make me care

#214

Post by adolph »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #152
komali2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.

My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end: What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma? Consider the war on t…

Vervaeke makes a claim of parasitism explicit in the Meaning Crisis series.

  We call this Parasitic Processing because it's like a parasite in that it 
  takes up life within you, and it takes life away from you! It causes you to 
  lose your agency. It causes you to suffer. And here's what's important. This 
  capacity for your cognitive brain to be self organizing, heuristic using, 
  complexify, to create complex systems and functions with emergent abilities, 
  has a downside to it.

  This is a complex, self-organising, adaptive system! If you try and intervene 
  here the rest of the system reorganizes itself around your attempted 
  intervention. It can adapt and preserve itself as you tried to destroy it. 
  Why? Because it's making use of the very machinery by which You adapt, and 
  make use of the things that are trying to destroy You!
https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-13-awakening-from-the-meanin...

Re: First, make me care

#215

Post by shalmanese »

kqr wrote: post #200
shalmanese wrote: post #129

There is content you write for acquisition and content you write for retention and my #1 tip for writers who want to engineer growing an audience is be clear before you sit down to write a piece which it’s going to be. Content for acquisition, the reader’s relationship is to the topic, they have to be convinced the topic is relevant to their life goals but it’s valuable despite who the topic. Content for retention, t…

This mirrors reflections I've had recently as well. I have been, for the most part, focusing on what you would call "content for acquisition", i.e. easily relatable, somewhat shallow, extensively researched articles that show off what I can write at my best. But in trying to aim for a regular cadence in the past year, I've realised I cannot maintain that level across the board. So I've started to write things that ar…

Another common mistake I see "thoughtfluencer" bloggers make is they think they need a brand new idea per post. This not only isn't sustainable, it's bad for the audience.

Instead, I think a successful blog is really about finding your, at most, 3 - 5 big ideas and instead showing the audience how they apply in many different context. For example, Matt Levine returns to a few commmon catchphrases across years of his writing: "People are worried about bond market liquidity", “Everything Is Securities Fraud” etc. that crop up in odd and wonderful ways in totally new contexts across years of writing. Forming a relationship with his writing is deepening your appreciation of these concepts.

Re: First, make me care

#216

Post by mdnahas »

Jap2-0 wrote: post #41

Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question: - They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult - They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply - Fish - They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats (note: I read a few sources…

It is a recurring phenomenon. Venice, Netherlands, and today Singapore. Small countries without resources and, hence, needing trade. They become open trading hubs and grow.

Sadly, countries with a single easy-to-harvest resource —- like oil, gold, or gems —— are more likely to become closed dictatorships.

Re: First, make me care

#217

Post by slumberlust »

wodow wrote: post #213
simonw wrote: post #4

This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever... I would be interested in a study on how long popular accounts do use their one hook -- or set of hooks, or rotate them...

We have these answers already. At least the successful tubers like Mr. beast do. They ab test everything. That super creepy saturated image of him? Works really really well.

Re: First, make me care

#218

Post by horacemorace »

adolph wrote: post #214
TeMPOraL wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end: What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma? Consider the war on t…

Vervaeke makes a claim of parasitism explicit in the Meaning Crisis series. We call this Parasitic Processing because it's like a parasite in that it takes up life within you, and it takes life away from you! It causes you to lose your agency. It causes you to suffer. And here's what's important. This capacity for your cognitive brain to be self organizing, heuristic using, complexify, to create complex systems and f…

There are malicious ads linked from that site. Do not recommend.

Re: First, make me care

#219

Post by RGamma »

simonw wrote: post #4

This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…

This description leaves me feeling blandly horrified.

Re: First, make me care

#220

Post by andai »

Nextgrid wrote: post #206
sevenseacat wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How I hate the trend of videos like YouTube shorts to almost show the punchline of the video at the start before the full video.

It's not limited to Shorts, even normal longform videos have had this crap for years now. I hate it too - fortunately SponsorBlock can take care of this, they have optional categories you can enable beyond just sponsors, including the "hook". I was looking into making an automatic detector for this kind of thing (basically detect if anything in the first ~30 seconds repeats itself later in the video, and if so mark i…

In my experience an LLM could probably handle this. And it's not so novel. They can make an image stitcher which is basically the same problem.

It would probably need to download the whole video first though, so I'm not sure it would work as an extension. And analysing all frames would be expensive upfront. (If you're using it interactively and waiting for a video to start playing.)

You might be able to get away with just looking for repetition in the audio.

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