Yesterday Real Engineering published a video about the importance of geothermal energy and talked about them and today it's the New Yorker.
And unless I'm missing something, neither outlets mentioned this being part of a campaign or anything of that sort.
It doesn't necessarily have to be anything nefarious about it, papers and YouTubers need stuff to write and talk about after all. But at the same time that can be very beneficial for e.g Quaise in this case. How does it work, I'm guessing a "publicist" is involved somehow? How much does it cost? Has anyone here done something similar?
- tech-oriented publicists / marketers definitely do know that HN exists and matters
- there are “benign” ways to game HN, like releasing at an optimal time for readership / upvotes
- there are less nice ways, like sock puppet accounts / botting
- all of these things are certainly done regularly
- it doesn’t mean that everything you read was an astroturfed psy-op or whatever.
I recently saw a xeet, from a columnist, complaining about irrelevant PR pitches; it gives some insight into how they work. See: https://x.com/dhume/status/1892994787734602001
- an institution can publish a report as part of a regular schedule (e.g. unemployment by the BLS) or as one shot thing (e.g. a study on clowns distribution in arid areas). This leads many reporters to publish articles about basically the same subject, but in an uncoordinated manner;
- PR agencies often coordinate with media outlets from various backgrounds and markets to publish about some particular topic (company, product, campaign, ...) either at the same time, or in coordinated waves;
- trends and public discourse can make it so that many sources cover almost the same thing at the same time (e.g.: bitch resting face, rat boy summer, ...);
- luck is, always, a factor.>Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0
Pretty common PR for a company/organisation to reach out to various media to get coverage. There was probably a embargo of 1st March so everybody publishing right after that.
It just feels like I can't trust anything the videos say because they're completely unskeptical of everything they cover, which makes them feel way less informative.
And if he gets some money out of it which he can use to help fund production of some high quality videos on historical engineering topics now and then, that’s just a win-win IMO.
Was that necessary? Did it contribute anything to your comment? (It did for me, but not in a good way.)
... But it definitely smells like a guerrilla marketing campaign.