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First, make me care

gwern.net

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Re: First, make me care

#251
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went back to CDs because the friction of having to stand up, walk to the player and change the disc is enough to stop me from skipping songs every few seconds. For discovering new music, I go to the flea market every so often and buy some random discs. Some are unlistenable, but a lot are alright. I found New Mind[1] this way and really loved it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sharp#New_Mind

This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen. (the other part is that my vinyl collection is about 80% from my parents, and its just cool personally to have the same physical copy of the media that they did) Also, many libraries still have CD collections. In the pre-iphone days I used to max out my library account getting CDs, rip/copy the ones I liked, and repeat.

> This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen.

It is a tad harder on a player without a [working] soft-lower mechanism, but still 100% doable as track boundaries are clearly visible on the surface of the vinyl.

Re: First, make me care

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. For those who are really adverse to that kind of thing and have trouble with thinking "but it is is just making it sound like clickbait" in the comparison above: You don't have to go as far with it either. Just inserting inserting that one detail without changing the style or shortening it makes the reader's mind go…

I have rule on Youtube. If the title of the video is click baity then I pick "Don't Recommend Channel", always and without exception. "The Machine Fired Me" would not get me to block the channel but I've blocked hundreds of channels. I also block any channel that appears to be a rando repeating the latest hot topic.

Same.

Also I tend to do the "Don't recommend -> I don't like this video" for those that have the thumbnails with "that face" (you know, the YouTube Thumbnail Clickbait Face, I don't even know if there's an actual term for it).

When I actually enter a video, you have my attention by default and you'll get an instant dislike for:

- "Don't forget to like and subscribe."

- Showing those like and/or subscribe buttons on screen.

- If I get suspicious that you're padding video length, talking just for the sake of stalling.

Re: First, make me care

#253

I wrote my story and titled it, "My experience at work with an automated HR system". I sent it to a few friends, only a couple of them read it. A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew up! I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book is that yo…

"The Machine Fired Me" is one good hook. I found the original post and its good: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me

The Machine Fired Me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 - June 2018 (554 comments)

Re: First, make me care

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen. (the other part is that my vinyl collection is about 80% from my parents, and its just cool personally to have the same physical copy of the media that they did) Also, many libraries still have CD collections. In the pre-iphone days I used to max out my library account getting CDs, rip/copy the ones I liked, and repeat.

> This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen. It is a tad harder on a player without a [working] soft-lower mechanism, but still 100% doable as track boundaries are clearly visible on the surface of the vinyl.

Yes, there are workarounds, but very few people are going to queue up a specific track instead of just listening to the entire side.

Re: First, make me care

#256
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.

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.

https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm

Re: First, make me care

#257
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks that give you a pinch. We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day. I made a TikTok account to at least know…

Thirty years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, in which he made very similar points about broadcast television. I don't remember all his points, but I vividly remember how talked about how you'll be watching a news story about something awful, maybe an earthquake in which hundreds of people died, and then with practically no warning you'll be hearing a happy jingle from a toothpast…

That talking point - that rapid-form media creates attention deficit problems is honestly overdone and there's no evidence that it's true at all (that I know of). ADHD exists and is a mostly genetic condition, you can't catch it without something serious like cPTSD. Amusing Ourselves To Death emphasized way more the angle of densensitization.

I used to think doomscrolling broke my brain before I was diagnosed. Later I realized I was "doomscrolling" way before I got my first digital device, rereading the same fiction books late into the night.

I can buy the argument that rapid-form media consumption acutely creates symptoms like ADHD (for at most a few hours after exposure) because I see it even in NT people.

Re: First, make me care

#258
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 That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since…

not true because the meta changes constantly. The accounts that are popular for a long time have someone talented at the head.

Re: First, make me care

#259
post #243

What are those sun symbols after paragraph ends. Always found them interesting.

Well they are sun symbols. I guess if you are asking how are they produced, they are embedded SVG in the CSS at https://gwern.net/static/css/style.css see for instance --GW-image-sun-verginasun-black-svg

Do they have a special name? I haven’t seen them in books.

Re: First, make me care

#260
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they are sun symbols. I guess if you are asking how are they produced, they are embedded SVG in the CSS at https://gwern.net/static/css/style.css see for instance --GW-image-sun-verginasun-black-svg

Do they have a special name? I haven’t seen them in books.

they probably do, I've seen that kind of thing (a logo) placed throughout the text before now, but more of a fancy print rather than cheap paperbacks. In the old days it would have cost more, but since DTP took over then I don't see why that would be a problem. perhaps just "paragraph divider", eg https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/12217904-collection-set-...
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