Some notes on influenceering
lcamtuf.substack.com
lcamtuf.substack.com
> In contrast, some of the work I put weeks or months into essentially lost the SEO game and gets nearly zero traffic ... Even though I don’t write for money, there is an immense pressure to produce clickbait — even if simply to add “hey, since you’re here, check out this serious thing”.
This will be different for different people, but I've noticed a moderately strong negative correlation between how much effort I put into something and how much engagement it gets (this seems likely to be different for people who apply their effort to generating engagement). The highest engagement content content of mine tends to be thoughtless social media comments I make without thinking. Something like https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/, which summarizes 300+ pages of FTC memos and is lucky to get 10% of the traffic of a throwaway comment and is more likely to get < 0.1% of the traffic of a high-engagement throwaway comment. Of course there's a direct effect, in that a thoughtless joke has appeal to a larger number of people than a deep dive into anything, but algorithmic feeds really magnify this effect because they'll cause the thoughtless joke to be shown to orders of magnitude more people so something with a 10x difference in appeal will end up with, say, a 1000x difference in traffic on average and even more in the tail.
I don't think this is unique to tech content either. For example, I see this with YouTube channels as well — in every genre or niche that I follow, the most informative content doesn't has fairly low reach and the highest engagement content leans heavily on entertainment value and isn't very informative.
Same observation here. I think it's because these channels are optimized for people looking to be entertained, not looking to be informed. There's an impedance mismatch between high value content and what people want while doomscrolling on the couch at 8pm or while on a coffee break at work.
Not particularly surprising though, entertainment is the lowest common denominator so it's much easier for that kind of stuff to spread. High-signal information is the complete opposite: very few people can actually tell if it's valuable, and it's not particularly shareable.
To be fair, most people aren't really looking for super high-signal info anyway. Closer to the minimal amount of information I need, presented in an easily digestible way, or looking for infotainment around something they're interested in!
Hacker News, compared to Reddit.
- https://scattered-thoughts.net
- https://equalventures.substack.com
Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!
It makes me wonder what this 'need' is that can be filled by memetic drivel.
Demonstrating that the speaker is at ease, receives broad support from listeners, and can say things without fear of reprisal.
It is easy to remember and it produces a positive reaction on the spectator. Quality of information, even veracity, are a second thought.
This is the charitable interpretation. It's not that people are necessarily dumb or that "the algorithm" is trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's that the vast majority of the time, people are "engaging" with the Internet in order to seek out entertainment in the first place.
The world wide web began its life as the promise of unlimited information at our fingertips. But most people who need to engage in "serious" academic research on a topic are going directly to specialized sources for that information that they are already familiar with and trust. Even on the Internet, websites like StackOverflow come to mind when it comes to software development. But more often than not I'm going back to text books, be it for algorithms or design patterns or what have you.
When I'm taking time to engage with the web, even here right now on Hacker News, it's because I'm taking a break. I'm not engaged in any specific productive endeavour at the moment. I'm looking to fill my time and unwind until I'm back to work and chores.
I used to think about this when I considered why there is so much hate and outrage on social media. My theory is that people are on social media because they're on a break, or they just got home, or they just got their kids to sleep and all they want to do is look at cute cat gifs or watch TikTok videos or whatever. Then the news feed shoves a bunch of stuff in their face that they disagree with or find contrarian, because they're most likely to engage with it, and the fact that they're tired and not in the mood to have a well reasoned conversation goes a long way towards triggering that outburst.
It's a cliche truism to say that the algorithms are giving people want they want. I think what people want most of the time is entertainment and "easy reading/watching." And so there is far more of that than anything else.
Very often someone will post some thoughtful, high value post in a thread that gets at least a handful of positive reactions. But if someone quotes it with some silly quip that's 5 words or less, it invariably gets 3-4x the response.
Yeah, sometimes it's a tdlr; situation, but it seems common enough even with just a few sentences.
But what kind of engagement are you looking for? One of his coaching clients is a two-time world champion. Think about some of history's great teachers. Jaime Escalante directly ever engaged with what? A few hundred, maybe a thousand math students in his entire 40 year career? Sure, but he deeply impacted these people, and in some cases totally changed their lives for the better. Do you want to briefly amuse a billion people for a few seconds each or produce world champions and paths from the ghetto to the middle class?
One other axis of engagement is "topical relevance" -- and I think that does have some overlap with the axis of "effort put in". Meaning: putting a TON of effort into a long-form piece tends to relate to some original thought or framing you have. But a lot of people are explicitly looking for something, even if that something is an entertaining throwaway meme comment.
If you go too heavily down the "flesh out topic of deep personal interest", you can end up too far away from the "topic everyone wants to talk about on the internet today" stuff.
Sadly (or not!), I take great enjoyment fleshing out topics of deep personal interest, even when they have limited relevance to the topic du jour. If it were different, perhaps we'd be journalists or more mainstream authors.
I still do those projects because personally I don't feel like I'm doing as much good when I whip up a video in less than a day from concept to posting. I try to at least have something interesting/educational in each video, even if it's just a Gist or a new GitHub project someone can fork.
That extra work doesn't result in any extra reward/revenue, but at least it keeps me motivated.
E.g. people might pay attention to you because of your reputation. Your reputation might be based on high effort posts (over the long term) even if they get less attention. The lower effort posts might get more direct attention but only because of your reputation which is indirectly caused by the high effort posts which much fewer people read.
Just a theory, i wonder if people who are actually internet famous would agree or not (since i am not).
At the same time, some might say it's about the area under the curve. If 10 folks get their mind blown by in-depth treatment of some curious topic, it's roughly same amount of utils as 1e5 impressions on some silly quip if you ask me.
I, for one, am perpetually grateful to lcamtuf. I have been looking up to him for like 15 years, and he has shaped me profoundly by showing what level of focus, productivity and insight is possible. You wouldn't think that someone's life trajectory can get changed by super detailed CNC lore write up, but here we are, years later (: Thanks!!
Also, if you're reading this lcamtuf, I would like to put one vote in favour of re-instating the American essays. Pls don't pull a Kafka on us! I did read your "choosing how to be remembered" post, but still, the fact that you took the American essays down feeds right into the topic of this current post. I found them positively entertaining and insightful.
The Attention Economy has been inflated exploiting the above inequality.
Bottom line is the social media is not designed to optimize allocation of limited Global Human Attention. It does a fine job squandering it. And people are begining to notice.
There is no real logical explanation to it's utility any more, as it serves as a casino for scams and ads, it's really no longer a forum for delivering important information and developing reputation in my opinion, because the popularity garnered on these platforms can easily be bought, forged, plagiarized, and sold on the black market, and often if you're highly controversial.
Even the people getting attention these days know their popularity only lasts for seconds at a time, there is nothing durable, and most social media clout is also not very memorable in the long term. Eventually {hopefully} real life interactions will become more important again after the sheen of tech manipulation on art and news wears off.
I think this goes deeper than just comments. I've noticed a similar phenomenon with artists posting their work. Some of their most engaging posts tend to be pencil sketches, rather than their most polished pieces.
I think we tend to be more impressed with things that seem like they were achieved effortlessly, in general. If I was to guess, I'd say it might have something to do with our brains craving energy efficiency, and rewarding us for discovering someone who's more efficient than we are at some task.
The mistake many of the “I spent hours researching this piece” creators is that they don’t package that content in an accessible way. Instead it’s a huge block of text without any coherent organization or entry point. Ergo it’s not surprising that it does worse.
It's like a lot of open source software. Tons of high quality effort put together to make great things, but very little time put toward packaging it to be appealing to the masses. Which is fine if you're okay with that, just don't be surprised when the average person isn't setting up a toolchain to compile your project from source or not editing config files to changes settings that aren't accessible in-program.
It's possible hour+ blog posts don't have much of a market, but I know super in-depth, informative, hour+ videos have some form of a market. At the very least Summoning Salt does something right in their videos to get millions of people to watch hour long historical video game videos.
I honestly think this is what draws me to the documentary/podcast/video essay genre so much. I have a hard time concentrating on reading non-fiction but take the exact same material and deliver it via someone with decent charisma and the willingness to construct into a narrative story, and I'll watch a 4-hour deconstruction of a TV show I don't even care about.
For example, I read the Money Stuff newsletter and follow its author Matt Leavine on Twitter as a result; I'd be much more likely to 'engage' on Twitter if he posted some joke (for other readers: a cartoon of him leaning forward into an email client after a holiday, say) than I would to reply by email with a well thought-out and in-depth response with additional information/correction on some technical detail say, even if I worked in the industry to have that information. But I'm only following him on Twitter because of the newsletter.
Some of my highest upvoted HN comments are 1-2 sentences but when I’ve responded or posted something well thought out or detailed it sometimes gets no votes/replies.
I try to “forget” this phenomenon because I don’t want to trend towards one-liners optimizing for engagement but every time a throwaway comment blows up I get somewhat frustrated that the well-reasoned reply/comment I wrote the previous day/hour/minute was ignored.
Thankfully I’ve had longer comments/posts gain traction so I know it does happen. I wrote a detailed blog post [0] on the Kroger (grocery store) app and posted it to HN but it got no upvotes (maybe 1-2) and didn’t get any comments. Thankfully, and this was news to me, the HN mods will occasionally take a post they liked that didn’t get attention and throw it on the front page to give it some more visibility (and then it can sink or swim on its own). They did that for this post and I got to participate in some enjoyable discussions on the topic.
That’s really what drives me to write (which I do rarely), the resulting discussion/feedback, well at least it’s a close second to just getting my ideas down on “paper” which forces me to think about them in new/interesting ways. More than once I’ve gone into writing a blog post thinking a certain way then I’ve changed or altered my thinking after putting my initial thoughts on the page.
[0] https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/11/krogers-digital-struggle/
Probably half of my posts that hit the front page got there via the second chance pool. It feels like dang is single-handedly turning back the tides of the internet by hand-picking links.
Perhaps it instead is the simplicity of the idea that resonates with the most people rather than the complexity of the content. Perhaps this isn't a bad thing, either. After all, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
We're currently live in an SEO-optimised hell where everything is monetized. Years of wading through this swill has subconciously made us seek out spontaeneous, unplanned interactions and content, which seem more humane.
Thoughtless social media comments, quips, and many of the funny tweets are prime examples of stuff that is done for the fun of it, without any "ulterior motive" in mind, and refreshing to come across.
I got married to a wonderful woman I met on Twitter about 4 years ago. We now live together, slowly conquering Europe from the northeast down and to the left. I got multiple interviews and job offers from it, too, none of which I could take sadly because I planned to move to Finland to be with the aforementioned lass. But I knew plenty of others who did.
Shitposting is a game where the rewards to being (smart ∩ charming ∩ really fucking funny sometimes) are disproportionately high. I don't use Twitter anymore, but I see my involvement with it around 2020-2021 as one of the best longshot investments I ever made. By treating it as a gateway drug to the experience that is knowing me as a person, and discovering to my surprise and delight that many people found it extremely worthwhile, I think I permanently deleted any sense that I somehow was too dumb, too awkward, too boring to justify my being.
It was great!
There was a pretty in-depth article about that recently:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/26/nyregion/twitter-lawyers-...
On online weirdos - this is very much a thing. You can pick up weirdly persistent stalkers and haters and it can be exhausting and sometimes scary.
For me, I do it for fun. I find it very frustrating to have conversations with followers/viewers that are wanting me to do $thing and why don't I open subs to $monetize blah blah and I explain that while I do enjoy putting out content, at the end of the day this is for my enjoyment and there is zero chance I can make as much as I do from it as my day job, so I don't. It's very frustrating and a sad state of affairs that people can't seem to grasp the idea of making content for the sake of making content. That's how the early internet was, no one was getting paid, and it put out arguably some of the best there has been.
Regarding hosting/seo stuff, I always let platforms like twitch, meta, YT, etc. manage that for me rather than wrangling SEO hell, but I acknowledge the video space is a bit different than the blog space. For the writing I do, I wouldn't dream of self hosting for the reasons he describes.
> What stings far more is when you get no reaction whatsoever
Wow, even someone like lcamtuf can feel like this sometimes. This guy is the author of super-awesome stuff like "The Tangled Web" book, the "Guerrilla guide to CNC" and the "american fuzzy lop" software. Definitely, his work is the kind of content that makes the internet 1000 times better!
Edit: ah here it is. It was initial tcp sequence number generators: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/oldtcp/tcpseq.html
just use a static site if you can. I think I’m also stuck with an old stack and don’t have the time to move to a static site and I’ve been paying the price for years. All my new stuff is static, pushed on github, deployed by cloudflare pages. Worst was when a linux upgrade deleted a bunch of user content, fortunately I had set up backups! But spent the entire night fixing things. Now I do static site or managed databases.
> #2: There are weirdos on the internet
I agree. The worst is when it’s people you know (or even admire) who take a direct (or indirect) stab at you and your content. But I think you can’t let that stop you, because it stops most people from publishing what they have in their brain. The more successful you are the more haters you’ll attract, that’s just the way it is.
A fantastic following is 1000 people who really care. A million random YouTube subscribers might have that.
You may think I'm joking, but my pure self-hosted website can get more attention through HN if I put effort into blog posts.
I have two blog posts that say the same thing, one with a ragebait tone, and one that is moderate. HN loved the moderate one.
I love this site.
Anyway, I think he hit on the reason: other platforms give you bad signals for their own benefit. HN still gives a good signal, and self-hosting avoids bad signals from bad platforms.
Years ago I was pumping content out all the time and I was just creating the content for the sake of creating it. Consequently, the content was mostly pointless and garbage.
If you want to treat your social media as a public journal that is cool, but not likely to make you an influencer. If your goal is to grow a following, you've gotta be empathetic towards your audience and create what they want to see.
If you're trying to entertain, make sure you're actually entertaining. Or if like me you're educating, make sure you're actually educating.
It seems completely obvious, yet when you're doing it, its easy to lose sight of the mission.
Once I "removed myself" from the equation and just focused on what is actually useful to my intended audience things improved tremendously.
I also wouldn't mind eventually making some money off delivering reliable value to others.
I think the key trick is you need to be interesting. A public journal can be for some people but probably not most.
I'm interested in a public journal of someone in the top of their field, thinking deep thoughts and explaining how they see the world.
I'm not interested in a public journal that amounts to: today i bought groceries and binged netflix.
One thing that might help with this is actual face-to-face connections. Join a hackerspace or something. A smaller number of people may interact with you than on your blog, but they're a substantially more complex interactions, not just a view counter going up.
This has me spinning, even after skimming the referenced piece. What is the performer's name, and to what does s/he have a similar name?
That is mine experience as well. Projects I've spent half year working on is barely noticed, while almost meme content is spreading quite fast. Thats why internet trends are driven by entertainment, not sharing a knowledge or making art in first place.
Linus Torvalds: about $10 million per year [1].
Taylor Swift: about $185 million in 2019 [2].
Bruce Springsteen: about $435 million in 2021 [2].
Cristiano Ronaldo: about $260 in 2023 [3].
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Did-Linus-Torvalds-make-money-from-Lin...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_the_world%27s_h...
[3]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/2023/10/14/highe...
Unless I wanted to do current news and entertainment, traction is just near impossible. At some point, there's no point dreaming of how things should be, or what could be, but look at the cold hard reality that is today.
But this is still one of my favorite parts of the internet - https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ amazing, information dense guide to actually making stuff. I reached out once to the author, who was patient and kind.
I get through my days, I make stuff I do stuff, and I'm generally content with that. The author, lcamtuf, from my very limited interaction seems "extra". Maybe it really just is writing stuff down. Maybe I should do more of that.
The algorithm is by definition random, and yet for countless years now it is how most social media sites, including popular developer communities, operate.
In the era of the feed and timeline, nobody bothers to check “Following” when you have “Recommended” enabled by default. The former requires effort, while the latter gives a false sense of reality.
Every refresh it is something new and exciting, every time. A never ending loop of joy and happiness. Who knows… one day the algorithm could even show you in front of the entire world!
That's something I really hate and I feel pretty dumb that I found just some weeks ago that I can change X's feed to show me the posts people who I follow. I wonder if that's true for instagram as well because I can't stand to see random posts anymore. To be honest, I'm getting tired of it.
i.e: I'm really enjoying going to a record shop to listen to music instead of spotify crap. the serendipity is real
I love going into a record shop as much as the next guy, but I do find that I discover more new things which actually stick via the internet. I also find that I am able to rely more on network-based algorithms for discoverability if the community is well-aligned. Even better if I can navigate myself when the underlying data is exposed via similarity maps, tags and other hypertext.
Recommendation algorithms we see on corporate social platforms (Spotify included) generally suck because the underlying data is not exposed to the user. That would be bad for ad revenue. These platforms enjoy the profound level of mind control which they employ towards their users, and are loathe to surrender it.
Although, if you follow lots of people, a chronological feed is still just "random posts", because they are the ones that happened to get posted just before you looked at the feed. A customized feed would be better - some way to up-weight insightful posts and down-weight memes.
Then for fun, I randomly made a 60 line bookmarklet, converted it to a chrome extension, posted a shitty video, and it grew to 100,000+ users in like a week.
The masses absorb drivel, not true effort
But these stats throw some cold water on that. People don’t magically convert from follower to customer or viewer.
I think these narratives are pushed implicitly by the platforms to justify their stranglehold, and the creators themselves who have won big. At a certain scale, the model works, but due to very uneven distribution of attention, it’s tough to be that person.
Also, most social media platforms are so infuriatingly mind-numbing now with everyone running around speaking in that faux-authoritative voice when they’re just offering their opinion.
I want a great reset of the internet where the subject matter experts are the ones getting attention, not the people who post stupid engagement bait all day. But that won’t happen.
> It’s still a chore!
Yup. People often underestimate the amount of work it takes to run a blog or YouTube channel in general, and how much of that work doesn't involve the content itself. It's no surprise everyone wants to monetise these things; doing them for free can feel like a second unpaid full-time job in of itself.
> There are weirdos on the internet
Unfortunately. Which makes for a deadly combination alongside sudden fame and psychological instability. So much drama can basically be summed up as "assholes discover mentally unstable content creator" or "mentally unstable content creator hits the big time and becomes a worldwide celebrity".
The end result can be an internet car crash that basically destroys any hope of a normal life.
And the more popular you become online, the more likely it is you'll encounter the rare person wanting to make your life a living hell.
> Indifference is the real killer
100%. Being hated sucks, but seeing something you worked so hard on go completely ignored... well, that's arguably even worse. Nothing kills motivation faster than the feeling you're not getting anywhere, and platforms like YouTube and Twitch only rub that aspect in your face even more.
> Follower counts are a lie
Definitely. YouTube is probably the best example, since it seems the majority of users find content via the recommended videos list and home page feed rather than subscriptions now. But just about everywhere is the same, and it only makes it feel worse when only about 1% of your 10,000 followers seem to actually give a toss about your work.
> Money is the root of only some evil
This is an interesting point, though I'm not sure I agree with the example given. Generally I gain followers when I post videos, with the only difference between posting more and less stuff being whether the number grows gradually or slightly more quickly.
Nah, in my opinion, the real root of all evil is that these platforms expect their users to be machines. They expect non stop, consistently posted content on a daily/weekly/hourly basis without fail.
And they also usually don't want you to leave your lane either. If you get popular posting about any one topic (whether a game or series, framework or programming language, sport, band, etc) then they only want you to post about that topic until the day you die.
That's the big problem with content creation and social media right there. And it's the cause of every issue these platforms face.
Why do we get people making meaningless polls about every random topic under the sun? Why has AI generated garbage run rampant? Why is there so much plagiarism from large creators? How have content mills taken over everything?
Because that's how you get things done on the ludicrous schedules expected by these platforms. By giving up your humanity and becoming nothing more than a faceless machine attempting to please the algorithm.
yeah, but what if no one else cares what you write about or it does not gain traction