One million people saw my dumbest tweet
mccormick.cx
mccormick.cx
One of my videos was very different than all my others and it did, for me, very well. This video earned something like 700k views compared to my average of high hundreds to low thousands.
Like this author, my video was something different than I usually did. Unlike this author my thought was "I've got to start making more content like that new thing!"
However, my approach kind of killed my channel. The reason my video did well turned out to be because a minor YouTuber (significantly more major than me) linked to it and almost all of the views came from him. He never linked to my other videos so when I made similar content it didn't do very well.
When I went back to making my old content that did worse than before too. My mental model was that I had alienated my original audience with the shift to the new kind of videos and then alienated my new audience with the return to the old kind of videos.
In the end, I felt that the random spike in views, and my poor handling of it, ruined my channel and reversed the modest momentum I had built over years. I used to have small but growing numbers of views and subscribers. After this incident I had declining numbers of both.
I had to fix my dishwasher and searched on youtube for people with the same problems. I found some videos and on a whim I clicked on the profile for one of them to see what else they had videos of, and it turns out all of their other videos were video auditions and screen tests. They're an actor and had a single video of them fixing their dishwasher, and their single little dishwasher video had several orders of magnitude more views than any of their other videos.
I always wondered what they felt about that.
my understanding from a friend of mine is you're not putting that up there because you are hoping for some big engagement with the general population, you just want a convenient place to put your portfolio.
>I always wondered what they felt about that.
hopefully it made them feel good. At least I can always be a youtube star!
I posted and completely forgot about it, then randomly checked it a few years later and it had views in the over 500,000 range.
My other videos(similar things for the same reason), were on 10-15 views haha.
It was very confusing to me, and I always wondered what would happen if I'd made a decent try at making instructional videos, in the end I just deleted the account in one of my anti-youtube moments.
So hopefully that gives you insight into a similar reaction from someone in a similar position.
It may have already happened and you missed it.
My definition of success is when people share my site because they see it as something very valuable (hopefuly one day...). I can't really miss it since the same questions come back over and over in the subreddit in which I'm active (taht's probably the case for the whole of reddit as well).
The popular video - I just happened to notice on YouTube that someone completely unrelated was lying about something. They were faking a technical issue and accusing a company of something. I made a video that proved the original was a fake and explained how they did it.
When my new video exploded in popularity I thought "debunking" was the way to go. I also had the problems that I didn't really know any other similar fakes to debunk, so I probably picked things that were either too obvious or I'd pick things that turned out to be legit so far as I could tell and just share my results on that.
I've since removed my attempts at debunking and even my popular video from my channel. Didn't undo the damage though. (Also possible my channel was failing for other reasons not related. It was never clear to me how the algorithm worked).
In my opinion, there's huge demand and little supply for good, comprehensive, credible debunking videos. I also think the fact that someone linked to it wasn't necessarily a fluke: debunking is basically just investigative journalism, and good, accurate, novel investigative journalism is hard to come by and likely to be shared when it's discovered, if it's concerning some topic of interest to many people.
I'd even say - if you want to and are truly passionate about it, at least - that you should consider trying it again but take a dramatically different approach to what you choose to investigate and publish. Or perhaps hone your investigative skills and tactics, as well.
Doing it on a separate channel might be the best option, though, like you said in another comment.
I may try again in the future, although I will do it on Odysee (or whatever YouTube clone exists when I get around to retrying). I have negative feelings for Google entirely apart from my failed YouTube bid.
Apparently, from what a few different channels i watch have mentioned, in some cases they started getting half the amount of views or less compared to before the changes.
I found that all of my key metrics were down after my failed switch. Fewer people would click on my notifications, if they did they didn't watch as much, and they tended to stop watching as I explained what the video was about. I think that in turn these metrics would signal YouTube that my content was bad so it wouldn't get recommended or rank in search queries
I know YouTube is always tinkering with the algorithm, but in my case the metrics and the timing of my collapse in views, make me think my channel failed because of the content switch.
I think that's the worst part of the way YouTube's algorithms work, in your case, at least you have a fairly good idea as to possibly why your channel declined in popularity, but for a lot of people they're left wondering if it's the algorithm or their content.
It is hard to please the youtube algorithm, and keep the original viewers...
In addition it's hard to get a second hit (even in the music industry)...
In retrospect, I think the smart thing would've been to not post the new content type on my existing channel. I should've just created a new channel for it.
Humor is situational and often counterintuitive. There is no formula for a good joke, and staying up till 3am trying to draft a successful Tweet is the exact wrong way to do it. While I am glad the author recognized the problem, writing a semi-pretentious blog post about it and posting it on HN for further validation rather than just switching off his computer tells me that he isn't out of the woods just yet.
But that's how memes work, they mutate, evolve, and what he did was he introduced a slight mutation in the original joke that helped its spread. Maybe his Twitter account also has the right connections.
Ironically, I think he partly considers it "dumbest" because he didn't overthink it... like I'm doing to the author's use of "dumbest" hehe.
My wife does way more conventional social media than me (given that I never use FB or Insta, that's not hard), but as far as I can tell she's fairly impervious to the whole ratings game. For her, it really is just a communication mechanism. I'm not 100% sure about this, but fairly sure.
Maybe we're just hearing about the majority (?) of humans that get helplessly trapped in this stuff, causing us to ignore the minority who can dip and out of it with ease.
Sure once I make a post I'll check back for responses/likes but it's never on my mind when I create the post. More importantly I never find myself wanting to post anything. In fact its borderline difficult. I hate having to put my thoughts down and try to be conscious of how other's might perceive this. This is becoming increasingly frustrating as I type this right now.
I generally feel like I have nothing significant enough to say to put myself through the effort to write it down. I much prefer verbal. Maybe it's not so much a resistance to social media addiction as much as it is despising the process of writing.
I intentionally post under a semi-anonymous login ID because my job is very sensitive to public exposure. "[B]orderline difficult" -- I felt exactly the same before I started posting about serious, but difficult issues here. (One of my first posts was about a serial killer [!] in California who was caught by DNA analysis. That would be impossible for me to comment about under my real name.) Posting under a semi-anonymous login ID gave the intellectual freedom that I needed.
Kindly, please try posting a few comments under a semi-anonymous login ID. If you get a few up-votes, you may be motivated to post more.
Organizing my thoughts and second guessing everything feels like the main blocker. If you look at my response to a sibling comment, it's worth pointing out that it took over two hours to write (while in work meetings with only a few times I needed to chime in). For some reason a response like this only took about 10 minutes. Perhaps because this is more of a thank you with a fact/comment. The other is much more of an idea/concept.
A few things come to mind that might be related.
Firstly, (I think that) parts of my thinking/reasoning process route through and leverage the language center of my brain like a crutch, or a like sequence of stepping stones, that my brain somehow uses in order to stay focused and retain my train of thought. I've found that the whole talk-to-the-air/sounding out thing public speakers do has helped me to better elucidate ideas. In that context, I'll talk about something as though it already exists.
Independently of all that, I also find I reason about a few ideas or topics using a sort of indeterminate/open-ended/unconditional focus model that seems to have a bunch of cues associated with it that allow me to carefully isolate the focus process from the traditional "oh meep, solve problem... yay, done!" beginning/middle/end reward cycle, such that I just find myself pondering the ideas on occasion, then naturally drift away when they become boring without associating them with the friction of mental exhaustion in the same way that I tend to do with almost everything (including the discussion topics in the previous paragraph).
Critically, I don't tend to reason about the second group of things using language, instead using nameless compound associations I typically perceive as instantaneous point recollections of That One Time I Thought Of A Thing.
So it seems I have writing and "funnel entire thought process through language center" on one side, and complex problem solving, ideation, long-term focus retention aaaand unfortunately _memory_ on the other side, of a rift I've been puzzling over for years.
(Naturally, if I try to reason about any of those instantaneous recollections, they fragment like waking up from a dream. I've learned to leave them alone, and just try to stumble into them a lot. Not a very effective method.)
This whole issue makes writing about those particularly/exceptionlly-interesting ideas next to impossible: because this rift creates the equivalent of a block against sensible random access to all of those memories, I can only write one-dimensionally about a single element of a given idea that I know I have a much deeper understanding of... and the result is that it feels pointless.
Hm. I just realized this is way more specific than I thought it would be before I wrote it out. (Caveat emptor.) I'm now very curious if this is even remotely tangentially relevant to what you describe.
With all of this said it's incredible that people are able to post on social media often. It's a crushing amount of mental energy. You could chalk it up to others not being critical thinkers but that just feels like a subconscious way to insult them and simultaneously compliment yourself.
I had to tell my girlfriend when we first started dating that I usually see her texts within moments of getting them. However if I don't respond soon then I'm not trying to play mental games, build tension or whatever. I need time to formulate a response and type it out. When she sees me text others she is appalled at how difficult it is for me. I can coordinate plans, answer a short question or relay facts with no effort. The second it becomes a conversation or small talk I just lock up. This is with everybody not just someone I'm attracted to.
I’m hoping eventually over time there will be the equivalent to herd immunity. But it’s just wishful thinking.
...but I'm resistant to social media addiction, and yet was a heroin addict for 6 years as a teen/young adult. So perhaps there's no correlation at all. I wonder if there are any academic papers exploring this?
I have a feeling the companies might already know.
This is possible. I read the post and in no way related to any of it. I don't think Twitter has a central thesis, and if it does it's about popularity, not quality. And perhaps I've never said anything famous, but I don't have a rush of pride when a tweet gets a lot of likes.
I live in East Asia, and I notice that women use social media much more than men. (Is this true in other regions of the world?) The men that I know who are "Über" social media users are the most (conventionally) attractive or the funniest. In turn, they (try to) convert the increased social status into (a) personal branding or (b) dating opportunities.
Are there any serious (Nature?) studies of social media across genders? It would be interesting to read.
Sure, measure people on a narcissism scale, to name one huge aspect, and you'll get a direct correlation to the blackhole of needing validation in the form of likes. People that grade low on narcissism accordingly care a lot less about that validation, they simply care a lot less about what most other people think and don't require their approval.
I have almost zero need for approval from other people for example. The exceptions I can count on one hand and are close family / friends. I'm hyper resistant to needing likes on social media, needing that feedback charge. I'm certain it's hard-wired in, you're either born that way or you're not; I didn't have to do anything to be that way, I don't have to resist the urge to seek out likes/approval/upvotes, it's never a consideration in terms of my well-being or needs. The people I know that need that outside validation universally also have low self-esteem, they don't self-sustain so they need to fill that from external sources.
> Metrics are an addictive drug. Twitter is literally an incremental game.
This comes up in the Nir Eyal "Hooked" model, but Eyal spends chapters outlining it, where the author here captures it as the main thing. Watch the number go up, get little hits of dopamine. It's gambling, trading/investing, SEO, literally anything with an 1/f distribution. (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/1/f_noise)
I'd wonder if you could drive engagement on an app by spacing out the arrival of user alerts and feedback so they only reached the user with a delay/period that was hidden, but detectable in the same sense of anticipation music creates. Seems like an unethical experiment, and probably hidden in the annals of FAANG companies.
From the article you linked... That's kind of scary. To be honest, one of the things we have done with ads as the medium of exchange with some IT services is inadvertently dedicated some of the smartest minds of our generation to "Figure out the addiction function". Look what we've done in 26 years, imagine what we can do in 100 years.
I'm pretty sure twitter does this, for this reason. When you login you have no notifications. Aw. But then after you click around a bit... ding ding - you get the ones that happened while you were logged out.
You could say it has to load them in the background. I don't buy it. The sensation is too close to what you described. A pause then a hit
Totally. Social media corporations would never do that.
Is it possible that reality is somewhere in between those two extremes?
Also, you seem to be asserting the people at FB can operate the machine without being aware of what it is or what it does.
I would like to subscribe to more second-order applications of hanlon's razor please.
I don’t have any social media apps or notifications on my phone, so it’s not like I’m constantly picking it up and seeing or awaiting responses. Instead I’m just wasting my brain power imagining arguments with strangers.
With respect to infinite scrolling/ranking, I have also worked on a simplified model (unfortunately does not capture spacing of likes but captures fatigue based on relevancy) and and algorithm to work with it.[1]
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10356: Learning by Repetition: Stochastic Multi-armed Bandits under Priming Effect
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07734: Thompson Sampling for a Fatigue-aware Online Recommendation System
The most common argument I remember was “I need unread counts to know if a topic is worth reading”, which suggests the early stages of addiction to high positive integers that we’re seeing on every other site.
Have we come around yet to agreeing that all like counts are harmful — whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN? Because I’d love to see what HN is like when people participate based on the content rather than the integers.
I have no idea what my karma is now. And I don't care, or at least I didn't think I cared, but I used to spend significant time checking on it. Stupidest waste of time ever, and it told me something about myself.
Blocking my profile page also frees me from going back and nursing my recent threads, which was also mostly a waste of time.
There's some cost in engagement, but the site is less stressful for me now.
For example, I won't be coming back to check on this thread, partly in case some joker posts my karma here, but also just because I've gotten what I want from the comments (in a good way; user motohagiography's comment in particular threatens to make me spend a day reading about stochastic thingies).
Sounds like you need a simple script that grabs your current karma from the HN API, and then cleans that number (±10?) from HN pages for you, so you can browse the site without fear of being trolled
Unfortunately, you won't see this suggestion :)
I'm not a karma whore, I don't post specifically to get karma. I just like contributing and engaging, but I also like to see my score go up slowly. I bet I'm not the only one that's in the middle of the road like that. How many overly emotional, rash and knee jerk comments has it saved us all?
And conversely, I think it's trained me to give just a little bit more thought to most comments, and put in a little more effort. And that effect smeared over everyone on HN is what makes it great.
I would also like to see karma show rate of change instead of an integer, so that I can just see if there are replies, gray’d, or flagged posts/comments. Instead I optimize for only reading the last two digits of my karma. It encourages visiting too often just to assure myself that there’s no reason to visit.
Upvotes and replies to a comment do not necessarily indicate the same thing. A controversial comment can spark discussion, but an idea can do so as well; only the latter would receive many upvotes. A good and long explanation, for example, might be very valuable, but not receive many replies and only upvotes, while a boring comment will receive neither. I think HN not showing the score of comments already does a solid job of preventing trains; you yourself seeing the score just allows you to know whether people valued your contribution.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...
For the past three-four years I've had a topcolor of #222222, the same color as the vote count text.
So I've had to click the "threads" link blindly, as the link text is nigh impossible to read now.
But now clicking that threads link is truly hard, so I don't do it often, which also breaks the engagement/addiction cycle, so I see no point in filing a bug report. Comment and move on. It's nice.
They are, but it's hard to get people to accept this because it's based on a false economy: "this integer will determine whether I should read this comment or not." Instead, they should be asking themselves, "why am I putting up with so much garbage content? Why do I need distraction?"
The latter question can be quite unsettling.
In the true spirit of social media, let me miss the point and note that the Trojans are inside the fortress (the Achaeans are at the gate).
Good post though.
This is one of those few times where more information would have made me get through it the first time without having to re-read, i felt like I missed something.
Not being too critical or anything; i appreciated the views expressed. Though the twitter logo is still visible at the bottom of the page.. so will our dear writer stick to this conviction i know not.
I personally at least sort of disagree but I can understand the reaction. I.e., is peak Twitter just an kind of skinner box full of people with their brains turned off, echoing memes to each other in exchange for hits of dopamine, while ads play softly in the background?
(absolutely irrelevant to the discussion, but someone had to do this)
It looks like someone took web forum progenitors of HN, asked how they could possibly make them worse, then arrived at the epiphany of optimizing for greyed-out content.
Edit: clarification
Ezra Klein extends this thesis to describe group identification, but at its basis it just seems to be about heightening tension.
Of course if it's a black box algorithm, we may not know its parameters, but are only able to guess what they may be.
E.g., Glenn Greenwald-- who won a Pulitzer and civilly debated both Michael Hayden and a former Bush-era drug czar-- has tweets where the content is, "Fuck you." What is the point, and why does that attract users in the first place?
At least with Facebook it really did connect boomers with long lost boomers from summer camp.
I can see how it'd be useful for short announcements with links to details but HN is a lot better than Twitter for that (for me).
But more to the point, the notion of the false sense of achievement that getting "retweets" and "views" and "comments" made it feel like "junk food" to me, with an added dash of fandom, which I also can't do. I am not a "fan" and don't want or need fans.
Twitter offers the chance for anyone to be "famous". That's it's most appealing feature. I learned early on that anonymity is highly underrated in our culture.
Those attributes of the platform seem to be exactly what the author experienced so it's interesting to read about how they got there.
I think that aside from content, debate, having an opinion - there is the views/fame concept.
Conan O'Brian said "fame is more addictive and destructive than heroin, and we wouldn't give heroin to children would we?" in reference to the challenges child stars go through.
The addiction of attention I think is overwhelming - it starts with a viral bit of this or that - a new mom on TikTok with videos of her cute kid getting millions of views ... but it grows into an addiction, increasing disruption of daily activities in search of views until for many it seems to consume people.
The overlap of people's actual lives with the content creation, the fact there doesn't seem to be hard boundaries is particularly difficult.
I see most casual content creators with 10K-1M followers almost like pack-a-day smokers, wondering how they deal with all of it.
I think this is a common misconception and having it makes people put undue blame on themselves for "misusing" twitter.
Of course, one can go the way the author did here, and I would recommend it. But to make this a problem of personal responsibility of every individual is to misunderstand the problem at hand.
Social media platforms are not tools. They are active agents. An axe doesn't show you notifications of the most attractive wood blocks if you don't use it for too long. A pencil doesn't roll onto your notepad to tempt you to doodle. These are truly tools, and if you misuse them it is indeed your fault and nobody else's.
If you get hooked to social media, that is exactly the intention of a system that is actively pushing for that result. If we realize that, then we can take actions against it beyond the individual.
I am curious to see if he is able to handle being on the front page of HN, with potentially record amounts of traffic being sent to his blog, without getting hooked again.
If it was me I would probably be up late at night refreshing my analytics page instead of sleeping. And then wake up the next morning with a strong sense of self-loathing knowing that the day was going to be an unproductive one due to lack of sleep.
That kind of immense social attention, even for something as minor as a tweet, can really get to some people. And they can wonder how to replicate, where they went right -- or wrong -- etc.
For people who have a lot more followers than that, they might not feel so derailed by a tweet going viral in a big way like that.
There's nothing profound about addiction but it's no less real and momentous in the life of afflicted for that
That is to be celebrated, for sure!
But, I have to say: an even healthier relationship to something you think is fundamentally bad is to not engage with it at all. Twitter is totally optional and voluntary; you don't need to negotiate on how little you use it, you can just quit.
I don't even disagree with the author's conclusion, that he needed to stop encouraging this sort of behavior in his daily life.
However, I do disagree that it's the only conclusion to be made here. There was definitely a missed opportunity to take this further. Now that you're being watched because of the witty thing, you have some more influence and eyes on you than you might have yesterday. What better time to capitalize on the moment, and write a short piece about the problem of requirements drift itself? Some may learn something from it; others may get a feel for someone else's viewpoint.
I could write that piece myself now, but without a hook and followers, it's just a diatribe on a blog that nobody reads.
I think this is why Twitter is successful.
But you can probably shift people’s worldview over the course of years, with a small followership, if you consistently get demonstrated popularity/interaction feedback, because people can’t help but pick up on when others get consistent attention and then they start to be more open to what you have to say.
Dumb stuff doesn’t stick, it flies.
You need to go viral multiple times for it to make a significant impact, and I think people also realize that they just don't give a shit about growing an audience and wonder why they're wasting their time.
It's way harder to be a "content creator" than people think.
The Mandalorians that Din Djarin primarily concerns himself with in season 1 are all children of the watch. I'm not sure that you ever hear it uttered by Bo-Katan or her friends or Boba Fett, who are not children. However Bo-Katan was part of Death Watch before she broke away with her Nite Owls, so if it was a Death Watch thing she may have uttered in during season 2.. I don't recall.
Chasing Hacker News points is one of them.
The rest of the content of this post
Come on
This guy is just too far up his own wazoo.
I already knew that, of course. I now write under another account. Hopefully I remain anonymous. If I get famous or respected under this account, I’ll create a new one where I’m not recognised.