These tweets are proof that startup people are crazy | Hacker News Reader

These tweets are proof that startup people are crazy

liamgooding.com

88 pointsliamgooding26 comments

A little disingenuous I feel. Sometimes people click 'click-bait' links precisely because of how ludicrous they are, not because they are looking for a hack. I can imagine people clicking some of these thinking 'Ha, who would possibly fall for this?' rather than 'Gosh, I hope this works!'.

My 2 cents - still a fun experiment

Yeah 100% agree, particularly with the "Instagram selfie tips to raise a seed round" link, I think people were more likely to be clicking to laugh at the article/author!

Worth noting, I churned a few twitter followers during his period too who I suspect were pissed off at being link-baited :-(

I think it's a lot about curiosity and not necessarily to laugh at the author.

I doubt you'd do this experiment again, but an idea might be to ask those who clicked why they did it and what they were expecting to find.

If you agree that people are clicking to laugh at the ludicrous claim of the author, why then do you say;

The conclusion I’ve drawn from the data you’re about to see, is that we’re all looking for the ‘hacks’. The shortcuts. The non-obvious variables we can change to have a directly causal effect on helping us to get the things we really, really want: raising investment, getting MRR (and as you’re about to see) getting a date!

Surely, as you apparently agree, the conclusion is that people aren't looking for hacks, but rather they're looking for idiots to laugh at. The only causal effect going on here is that people who tweet stupid links cause people to laugh at them.

Isn't there another possibility, that people are looking for hacks, but they're also very good at detecting link-bait, and even then they still click it for the lulz?

If I am honest with myself I will click them and then decide why I clicked them if I feel duped! It's like I suspend judgement just in case.

Since I get called out I'll elaborate on my thoughts on this...

I can understand and appreciate the intention and the potential to learn and share something useful from such an 'experiment'. It's a topic I'm actually quite interested in.

I just disagree with using a bait-and-switch which doesn't deliver anything of value to an unknowing participant. It'd be cooler if the links led to genuine articles along with a footnote explaining that there's an experiment running on the side. That just seems more fair and wouldn't impact the result.

I'll laugh off a rick-rolling from a mate but I don't need the distraction from a company I don't have much of a relationship with. No hard feelings but hence the unfollow.

Hi Dwight,

As I said on the tweet, I should have pinged you on the headsup that I was using your tweet for the "against" argument. Sorry again about that, poor judgement call on my part, but thanks for the positive words about the whole idea at the time and again now that I've blogged it all up.

You make a great point, and something I really wish I'd done at the time, in terms of the "trick" article actually having something else of value. Perhaps a list of some of the best (genuine) article headline crafting guides, some posts about real pitch decks, some actual sleep/life hacking posts.. etc.

Looking back I think that would have made the 'testing' phase much better experience for our followers, and just better all around and had a +ve brand impact instead of the minor hit our accounts took.

It's all good. We all learn here.

I like this article, because it calls out some concerning trends. I'm having more and more trouble tolerating contact with startup culture at the moment and SF in general; I've been avoiding interacting too much with my Bay area acquaintances recently (but not my friends up there, obv). The amount of hyperbole, even amongst seemingly sincere people, is increasing at an alarming rate, and the old feedback-loop insular bubble problem seems to be worsening in my view. In 1997, at 18, I was at a crazy net startup, and I'm seeing the rapid growth of the kind of nonsense and marketing-literature driven fluff that I saw explode then. Bad sign.

A lot of recent Stanford and Berkeley grads I've met sound more like real estate agents than technologically oriented people.

Maybe a Victoria Secret model is actually very technically switched on, regularly reads HN in between outfit changes, trolls reddit when parties get boring, loves to Buffer her selfies, manages tickets to club appearances with Eventbrite and has her accountant send her weekly reports directly in Xero.

Either way, it’s not true. And not likely. But I’m proud to report I’m engaged to a stunner, and I met her when I was a poor student :-)

I know this is just gentle snark, but yes, one of my closest friends is a very successful model that does pretty much everything you listed, often on sites I haven't heard of yet. (She only reads HN with me but she chooses the links and always has insight). So maybe kill the snark a little? It makes you look less cool and maybe distances some people who could be truly awesome, unique friends. There are some extremely savvy models out there. She travels constantly and is basically my chief advisor on international communication trends. Now try to imagine what she overhears when some [redacted] dude wants to fly her to Bali on his private jet... Yeah. You think they ask her for an NDA?

Anyway congrats on your engagement! Money is NOT what it takes, right? Carry that message to the youngins ;)

People engaging in all that "startup culture" stuff can be annoying sometimes, especially when they're of the type "I've just seen The Social Network and am looking for a technical co-founder to bring my $1bil idea to life".

As for the article, I could totally imagine myself clicking on these ridiculous titles just to see what the articles say. I hope that was the motivation for most of those clicks too...

>especially when they're of the type ..

Or when they're of the type "look at me, i'm so different". No you're not. :)

25 clicks is noise. This post on HN has more points than any of his tweets had clicks, which clearly proves that startup people want to think that startup people are crazy.

There really isn't much to be concluded about startup people so much as the effects of link bait in general.

I appreciate the humour, don't get me wrong, but I'm just not sure this is 'proof' of anything [EDIT:] about startup people specifically.

That said, if I see an article titled "How our unscientific link bait experiment helped us raise $xxM" next week I'm not sure if I will laugh or cry.

Great and "fun" experiment :-)

Would be interesting to see how these "types of titles" (How, Tips, Shortcuts)convert in terms of "time spent", "bounce rate" etc...

I guess that this is also really "Twitter" oriented. On other distribution channels like HN it might be different.

Last thing, I'm wondering if it's sustainable. So many "tips" and "shortcuts" articles are shared on Twitter nowadays. Maybe it's rooted too deep in the human brain :-)

Can anyone ELI5 this to me? Even this Hacker News thread about crazy startup people seems crazy to me.

Countering upworthy headlines: https://github.com/snipe/downworthy

(Not guaranteed to work on all headlines; feel free to contribute filters)

I wonder if there has been work on Bayesian spam filtering but for upworthy-style clickbait headlines. Phrase substitution is fun, but I'd love to see some sort of machine learning that could pick up on the clickbaityness of headlines.

For example, I can't remember the last time a headline with "This/These" or "You" wasn't clickbait.

Instead of 'fixing' the hyperbolic headlines, stop following the sources that have shared them, and ignore these sites. Upworthy et. al. do this because it works.

The author's idea was to block upworthy headlines, but I use it myself to block any article links to these upworthy websites, on sites like HN and Reddit.

Honestly, this title is just another link-bait (how meta). Those few dozen clicks are most likely simply people who are bored and looking for something moderately entertaining to read.

I'd say "crazy" is less accurate than "mainstream."

When something goes mainstream, it gets a little whack anyway.

Well, if they are not crazy they won't be startup's.

I like “quadrupole” best. It's prove that startup people are dyslexic.

> prove

something something pot kettle something

awesome

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