Reputation: kind of a big deal | Hacker News Reader

Reputation: kind of a big deal

zachholman.com

47 pointsholman8 comments

>If you take an action — write a blog post, publish a photo, launch a website — you want your action to spread to as many people as possible.

Overgeneralization, is what I see there.

Actually, "avoiding success at all costs" motto is great.

I think that quote from Adam Chlipala (author or Ur and Ur/Web) is quite appropriate:

"I also want to emphasize that I'm not trying to maximize adoption of Ur/Web. Rather, I'm trying to maximize the effectiveness of people who do choose to use it. This means that I'm completely happy if basic features of Ur/Web mean that 90% of programmers will never be able to use it."

http://www.impredicative.com/pipermail/ur/2010-December/0003...

I think that author is wrong.

You don't have to have superfans.

I'm not saying you have to have superfans; you're welcome to do whatever you'd like (and there are plenty of paths to success!) I just think there's so many examples of a small, passionate userbase forming the bedrock of success. Why not try to foster that?

My totally uninformed assessment of human nature is that you probably _do_ want your action to spread to as many people as possible, regardless of their response to it. The success of public networks like Twitter demonstrate that.

A wise man once said "Don't try to be a great man; just be a man, and let history make its own judgments."

The reason _why (used as an example in the article) has the cult-like following he does is that he made fun, interesting things, not because he marketed himself or gamed the social system around him. Sure, a bit of self-promotion is often a good thing, but if you're expending lots of energy on making yourself into an icon, you've got less use actually earning such a status.

See also: Seth Godin on Tribes (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_w...).

While I love Seth's thoughts on tribes, the downside of the success of that book is that now there's so much talk about "my tribe" or "our tribe" that people fail to realize that none of us really have a tribe, per se. We have fans that happen to like us at the time. That's always subject to change.

This sounds like it would be an additional chapter on Rework titled "Don't Be Big On Numbers Through Social Media," well thought-out.

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