Discussion

Everything we like is a psyop

simplyluke: I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit"I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.

B1FF_PSUVM: I'll see your payola and astroturfing, and raise wining and dining newspapermen.

dylan604: Oh no!!! Tell me it ain't so! Someone--like a PR firm--is gaming the system to get attention for their client? No, surely not. Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.

ryanmerket: it's called astroturfing and has been around since the dawn of the internet

codezero: [delayed]

johnfn: But Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.

kibibu: I'll be very sad if I discover that Angine de Poitrine's sudden rise is inorganic.

roflchoppa: Reminds me of the documentary, “merchants of cool” https://youtu.be/0tYRoiJvhJ4Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.

apsurd: related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been?But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)

kylecazar: A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.Also bring back blogrolls.

the__alchemist: Yea... I'm mixed because it feels like something too creative and weird for this sort of marketing, but it's perhaps as weird how they're all over Youtube suddenly.

emmelaich: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

operatingthetan: I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.

foolserrandboy: See payolla for the radio era equivalent.

foolserrandboy: When reading this I immediately thought of them. Anyone I know who plays an instrument said their socials are flooded with them.

vermilingua: I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning.I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.

mitchbob: https://archive.ph/Y7lS2

raincole: > Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capitalAnd how do we know that? How do we know Cursor is "withing spitting distance of opus" (whatever it means)?Let me guess:> that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that

SyneRyder: I agree, but I also think the point about "Is [your opinion] based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience" is really important. Relying on other bloggers is still delegating your thinking to others. Having your own objective measures and your own direct experience is useful, and sometimes it might contradict the prevailing wisdom.

InexSquirrel: Socials being flooded across the board feels weird, but it's also how network effects are _supposed_ to work.I just hate the fact that I feel jaded and cynical about this as my default position.

genghisjahn: As long as they keep making that music, wearing those costumes and mumbling those interviews, I could care less. I like it.

jrecyclebin: This is not true though. My two favorite bands from the past year were poorly-attended shows that I stumbled into. You can still seek out good underground, obscure artists - you just have to look for them.Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.

guelo: They're violating ad labeling laws and the FTC should come down hard on them. While Republicans pretend to be against defunding of police that's only the police for poor people, commercial and rich people police have suffered all kinds of defunding and kneecapping at their hands. We need an aggressive war on slop or democracy is not going to make it.

titzer: The government is broken. I'm not sure what you are hoping for.

sonofhans: I’ve had similar experiences. After watching it for a decade I think it’s a mostly over-active pattern recognition combined with a flood of incoming information. I believe I’m careful with the information I consume, but compared with 25 years ago it’s literally orders of magnitude more.IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).

cucumber3732842: >I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns."The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.

Chaosvex: I like how that article claims PR firms don't lie and then proceeds to discuss how their best PR campaign was effectively a lie.> We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.

genewitch: don't fall into the Gell-Mann Amnesia trap. Any media that has advertisements is already not in your interest. If a media has to weigh losing an advertiser or telling the truth, very few would choose truth. Scruples don't put food on the table, believe me, i know.This means that marketing budgets run everything, from the morning news talk to the evening nightly news, and everything between, is carefully crafted to keep you watching those commercials. On the internet, everything is trying to filter you into conversions or purchases, or steal your identity and cut out the middleman.PBS and NPR like to say they're advertiser free but they aren't, they just call it "underwriting", and it entails the same wariness over bucking the advertiser's wishes. sorry, underwriters wishes.edit to add a solutionthe solution is value for value. You publish, if people like your stuff, you tell them to contribute time, talent, or treasure to your product, be it a youtube channel, a podcast, or even an e-zine (remember those...)

esperent: [delayed]

gfody: I'm pretty sure this exact concern was the impetus for slashdot's friend:foe system, HN should implement something

autoexec: > A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.

squigz: It seems infinitely more likely to me that this is simple coincidence than something nefarious.

autoexec: It's such an insane amount of waste that there are rooms filled with cell phones just to churn out spam. The same job should be doable by a single server. I imagine that it's only required because platforms are fingerprinting the phones to check for spammers but obviously those systems have gone from being simply useless to becoming harmful since it's now generating massive amounts of e-waste.This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.

xenophonf: I only found out about them via word of mouth, but who knows. At least they're good stuff!

guelo: Broken on purpose

ahartmetz: Their look is almost "standard" French weird = art type stuff. I find it a little annoying actually, in general and for the band.

unethical_ban: Well I for one appreciate TC for giving us and the masses a heads up of new spins on old astroturf methods. You simply cannot trust the algorithm to be organic. Find trusted people or specific trusted reviewers of things. Everything else you hear could be paid for.I'd love for this kind of scam to be regulated, at least. "Not a real fan - paid endorsement".

autoexec: I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence.

throw_m239339: Yeah, I heard about them because their album became some of the most sold record on DISCOGS overnight, out of nowhere. Music isn't bad though. But anything can be gamed for marketing today.

tombert: Something I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10.Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon.I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.

heddycrow: Why can't we have a system where this is baked in?

mumbisChungo: sitting in a local pub watching a musician I've never heard of play original music and absolutely loving it rn.

majormajor: Remember Quibi?All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)

jottinger: Dang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news, and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric and unsustainable and undeserved success, even if "organic and slow growth" means failure in the end.

vermilingua: Don’t get me wrong, I agree; but the odds of that coincidence are extremely long.

johnmaguire: I had never heard of Geese until all the stories about how Geese bought their popularity. Now I feel I should give them a listen to know what all the fuss is about!

tombert: I'm not a huge fan of them in general, but they did a pretty ok cover of Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place" that I heard on Sirius XM.

koolala: Ex CEO of Google says X about Y

AlexCoventry: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

majormajor: > I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...

operatingthetan: You couldn't even keep your analogy straight. I didn't say the people I know said anything at all about Cursor.If someone is clear about offering an anecdote, it's dishonest to pretend as if they were making a real and reasoned argument.

majormajor: Yeah. It has literally never been easier to find good niche music, and that's been true for over a decade.Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.

lmm: It sounds like they did good-faith estimate that there were 5000 stores out there and really believed they had 20% of the market? I wouldn't call that a lie as such.

tcdent: Yeah I can't tell if he's calling out simonw in a positive light? The guy has tuned himself into a AI influencer; not a thought leader, a news aggregator that drives impressions. (X is a monetized app now btw.)Anyone getting thousands of impressions is doing it for personal or professional gain. There are real people our there just doing stuff and not talking loudly about it. I'd recommend finding them. And then meeting the ones that resonate in person.

ericjmorey: Quibi doesn't seem like a good example. It wasn't marketed as the next big thing. It was a trial balloon that popped.

RobRivera: I wake up There's another psyop I go to sleep I wake up

phpnode: > Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it?Yes, exactly this. It is extremely difficult to get attention these days, no matter how good your offering.

ryankrage77: I'm sad my second thought about this (after dismissing it as a coincidence) was that it could be used for marketing - "I randomly thought about this book/show/movie whatever, and hey what do you know? The sequel is coming out!". Basically another variation on 'organic' advertising in comments that's been around for a while.Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I hate advertising, I don't want it messing with real interactions with other humans. I'm not sure how to express the idea, it's like its so pervasive I'm thinking about it when its not even present.

jrmg: Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)

absoluteunit1: SEO, Reddit and Paid ads probably

degamad: Years ago, this line formed in my head, and has stuck around - it has been long enough that I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if I came up with it myself, but I think it's relevant here:"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.

sneak: Almost everything that you haven't heard before on Spotify-generated playlists is payola.

sneak: Choosing to fail means you shouldn't begin the project in the first place.Correspondingly, if you are beginning the project, you should not make choices that will result in failure.

Aurornis: > Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.

testaccount28: how could that crap possibly be organic

absoluteunit1: > I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic.Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants

plastic041: > “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!It's worse if you read the context[0]:Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.[0] https://www.billboard.com/pro/digital-marketers-secret-tacti...

qq66: Being a good band isn't nearly enough to be a famous band.

geerlingguy: Not all are swayed.The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't.I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it.There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven't sold their soul to marketing. Or at least are clear when they say things that are marketing.But it is ever harder to find those voices, especially if you're new to an industry.

arjie: Well, one thing I've discovered with the advent of AI music is that there are lots of things I like that are not particularly notable. I can listen to the 100th "1996 ESCAPE FROM DATA CITY + Unreal Tournament Mix" and enjoy it. I can't say that I've "discovered" an artist who then went on to become big. Back in the day, on amie.st there were quite a lot of cheap singles that I really enjoyed too but I can't find those artists again.So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.

jrecyclebin: Well, yeah, it's all subjective - and actually quite tenuous - so you won't know good and bad until you actually make the call on it. Maybe you've had the experience even of coming around on some music you previously thought was bad.Or like: one time I listened to a bunch of new music I had dug up and wasn't sure there was anything I liked. Two days later, I had a song in my head. Turned out to be one of the ones I had listened to. But I had to listen to everything all over again to find it! ദി(ㅠ﹏ㅠ) Glad I did - there were other gems in there.Anyway, great quote.

catcowcostume: > EverythingYou may want to read this wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

tasseff: not sure if ad for Attention Merchants

stavros: Yep, banning advertising would be great here. You can't accept money unless it's for buying your product, and that's it.Then again, I'm sure some loopholes would be found.

egonschiele: I actually don't think Getting Killed the album is well mixed, what turned me on to Geese was their From The Basement performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 the music and the mixing are incredible. I've followed From The Basement for a while, ever since their collaboration with Radiohead. So maybe this was a psyop, but the music is genuinely really good.

jrecyclebin: Found a favorite band through a similar technique: pile of CDs given from a friend who worked at a music store and no one wanted them.You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.

simplyluke: Those were both narratives going around, but one was clearly winning in terms of volume, and that's what I'm speaking to here. The dismissal towards the open source models has always smelled more like marketing campaigns to me than the actual sentiments of any hackers I know. We all want the open source options to close the gap, but the labs are definitely staying ahead.My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.

jottinger: I'm not going to optimize content for SEO - been on the other side of that, and I think it creates content that's bland and ineffective. Humans gonna human, machines gonna machine, and I'm not paying for ads. If humans want the site to succeed, it'll succeed. Otherwise, it won't. Such is life.

jottinger: I don't think i'm "choosing to fail," I'm choosing to accept the outcome given an effort to prevent it. Sometimes you try and it doesn't work out; I'm not committing the mortgage to the site or the effort, and I'd like it to pan out because I think its progenitor had a raison d'etre, and I was part of it when it was good and I think there's room for it now.And if the moment's gone, well... that's the way it goes. That's not the same as "choosing to fail."

sph: The fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page.

tombert: Yeah, most of the CDs there were pretty unremarkable; a lot of them were unsurprisingly stuff that was extremely popular (since those have the most CDs available). A lot of the stuff that wasn't extremely popular was pretty bad.Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking.Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.

stavros: I haven't used Cursor much lately, but with Opus/Codex I can program with very few bugs without having to look at any code at all, over months of working on the same codebase. I don't think any other model can do that, no?

cogman10: It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.It's almost a bit like AI speak. The shills will all have very similar sounding content. They'll all hit on the same (ad copy) points. They might mix in a few negative tidbits, but generally speaking you'll catch them all praising the same wizbang features.Mkbhd is my favorite baseline shill. He practically just reads the product sheet. You know if he says it, it was probably given to him by the person paying for the review and, indeed, you can find the points he brings up echoed in other people's reviews.On the flip side, I generally trust Gamers Nexus to not shill. Primarily because their lack of playing ball has actually hurt their access.I've enjoyed your videos as well. They don't come off as a shill particularly because there's a number of products where the negative points you've put out have been strong enough to actually discourage a purchase. They haven't been weak "The colors could pop more".

SkyPuncher: > What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing?I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.In my eyes:* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.

gen220: FWIW, cursor (company) has a CLI tool/harness similar to Claude Code called agent.It’s existed for a long time, is quite good, and it is under-marketed (ironic for this thread).(Double-ironic disclosure… I work for Cursor. If you have ideas to make agent better hmu)

boxedemp: Unless you're RMS

jongjong: Never thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates. Also, I understand why people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see.We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is.We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether.

sph: Social media is not driven by network effects though. It’s driven by algorithmic engagement and its operation is opaque.

mumbisChungo: this is why oldschool chat > social mediacurating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion

sph: This is why influencers are making bank. Everybody still believes randos on the internet might be genuine.

sph: > It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.Brandolini’s law strikes again: you really have to pay attention to catch a shill. 99% of the time when you’re not paying attention and intentionally shopping for a particular product is when they get you.

vermilingua: This idea makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I shouldn't have included the name of the book in my original comment (now too late to edit).

GolfPopper: They made up a number, and then quoted that number to other people (presumably with the intent to benefit themselves) without disclosing that they'd made up the number in the first place. That seems to jump right past 'lie' into 'fraud' or worse.I have this growing belief that what's wrong with America is that we've tossed a great deal of virtue (both personal and public) into the woodchipper, using a lot of euphemisms like "marketing" or "puffery". And the rot is not in any way confined to marketing - it's just that marketing is a very obvious example of it. The rot has made its way into education, relationships, entertainment, governance, infrastructure, what used to be called 'news', and on and on.We collectively gaslight ourselves to avoid dealing with the reality that we're constantly defecating in our own minds, contaminating ourselves with patterns of thought and action that are antithetical to our own continued well-being as individuals and collectives. To borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are poisoning the noosphere.

Mikhail_Edoshin: The "poisoning the noosphere" is a very good description.There is someone called Peter Ralston; on YouTube there's a few videos of him and in one bit from an interview he starts on honesty. "Honesty", he says, "is a skill most people don't appreciate". I was really impressed by that "is a skill" qualification. Never thought about it this way. But yes, it is a skill. First you learn it and then it changes you.

cogman10: Yeah, really does not help that the internet seems to be built from the ground up to reward shilling.Click on a shill video in youtube and you'll have 20 identical videos on the same topic.But also, advertisers are smart and you have to assume they know you are on the lookout for a shill. I have to assume the why shilling works will continue to evolve as the way to detect shilling evolves.I expect we'll end up with something like this in the future [1].[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gArU-BAO7Kw

tbrockman: I, too, rely on your web of trust, please don't ever break my heart Jeff!It makes sense they'd be harder to find, I imagine there are more opportunities to make money by selling your soul than by offering honest review, and people with large investments have large incentives to dilute signal in their favor.It's sad that so many platforms let it happen, but it makes sense when the users aren't the ones paying the bills. I'm immensely grateful for those that resist though, and if I were a religious person I would nominate them for sainthood or reincarnation or at least a plaque on a nice park bench somewhere.

apsurd: In Cursor I look at the code diff for my own satisfaction and understanding. I've been able to auto-accept all changes pretty reliably all last year.So much so that i've yet to invest in CC. Finally downloaded the desktop app but use it exclusively for chat and cowork.Cursor's purgatory UX is what'll finally get me to invest in CC and codex. Not model performance.I do think there's a caveat that it's pretty standard nextjs with rails api.edit: found your blog post about your experience, i'll read it! https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/

nirui: > But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clientsThe complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.

genewitch: the commonest argument against these ideas is that, if some capitalist makes the most amazing thing ever invented, how will people ever find out?if it truly is life altering, and most people or everyone needs it, that's why we have a government. note i said needs it. No one needs to know about the latest transformers movie coming out in 6 months. there are websites dedicated to calendars for events and the like, you can just subscribe there if you care about transformers.the very idea that most people just walk around all day going "i wonder what i should eat... I'm lovin' it!" because they heard a mcdonalds commercial is... ludicrous.for myself, literally the only advertising that works on me is word of mouth. and not like, influencers or celebrities, but my friends, co-workers and associates, my neighbors, my in laws; people i trust.edit: don't get me wrong here, i am sure that there are lots of research papers, studies - longitudinal or otherwise - about "returns on marketing investment." Pepsi and Coca Cola spend $4,000,000,000 each on advertising (2024), is that netting them more than 4 billion each in new sales? Recurring sales? I don't get it, it just feels like they're taking unhealthy addicts' money and setting it on fire to wow other addicts.and don't get me started on native advertising.

rendaw: The whole psyop thing is only an issue if you use "popularity" and mass appeal (people following in instagram, etc) as a signal for finding stuff.The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.Some of it will suck.

rexpop: OP is part of a facile, superficial milieu. You know—the common clay of the new world.

stacktraceyo: Thanks for letting me know book two is out!

JimsonYang: as someone who works does marketing, "first time?"People paying UGC creators to have ads is nothing new. Posting en masse to fool the algo is, but there's alwasy been bot farms.And before that there's still the trick of getting published by a low rated news org, then letting journalist at a more reputable organization let them know of this trending news. And so on til you end up in the NYT. FYI this works even when you actually bought placement for those low quality placementsOn the upside, the product/service needs to be good if you want to gain traction AND staying power. Psyops are cheap tricks, if your product sucks, then there's no word of mouth and you can't scale regardless of how many reviews you botted.Drake,Katseye, etc. aren't doing doing well becuase they're doing cheap marketing techniques, they're doing well b/c they have a loyal audience and make good music.

owlboy: I don’t think they were actually asking for your research.

jaredklewis: I kind of see what you are saying, but it reminds me of “if you build it, they will come.”They won’t come, because they won’t even know about it. A more accurate aphorism would have been “if you build it and tell everyone about it, some of them might come.”Humans probably don’t want the site to succeed, because they mostly don’t know it exists.

cal_dent: This is great and I wish you all the best. A byproduct of the content abundance age (because that's really what is is) is the expectation that not just growth but fast growth is everything is such a race to lower quality on the whole. It's pretty depressing but ultimately I suspect we will get sick of the lower level far quicker than we probably think.

cluckindan: Swans is a good band. Bird fight!

haunter: Boards of Canada releasing a new track yesterday and possibly a new album after 13 years of waiting is everything but a psyop

arcanemachiner: That's exactly what they want you to think!

eptcyka: This man will build a product no one uses and then complain about the world not being ready for his genius instead of using the tools that everyone else uses to give himself a chance at success.

PufPufPuf: If you check on average every three years, the odds of you checking the very same day the book comes out are about 1‰, which is improbable but not _extremely_. Add that together with all the probabilities of things that would make you think "wow, that's improbable" and we have pretty high odds of something improbable happening.

adrianN: It has also never been easier to find bad niche music. The problem is the work required to separate the two.

Mikhail_Edoshin: Most things you think you know is a psyop too.

madrox: Lots of social sites are facing this problem. It's nearly impossible to grow on Twitch without viewbotting: https://x.com/Reedjd/status/2028533060632010759 and Nikita is calling out Perplexity on X: https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2044902122995548330The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels.Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.

cpa: Top comment of a frontpage post, you're not doing that bad at marketing.

Rekindle8090: "Dang that hurt to read, here's an advertisement!"Why is this every 3rd comment on this site? Every single post has multiple comments that are"I hate that, here's my solution"

ssl-3: Perhaps.How much SEO happens here on HN? How much do they spend to tell everyone about it? I'm guessing: Not much; maybe zero.But people come here, anyway.(That doesn't mean that it's capable of independently sustaining itself, but people do show up.)

Nursie: I had almost the opposite experience a few years ago.I (after a few beers) found myself idly wondering about an electric folk band I hadn't seen or heard of for a good ten years, and looked them up to see if they were doing a new album or tour.They'd played a final farewell gig the week before :/

vjk800: > “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.”Here it is.I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Google results. The only thing achieved here was that the marketing team gave some money to Google.I have never been even close to anything marketing related, but I'd assume that measuring its impact is highly non-trivial in the statistical sense. Also, only the companies selling marketing even have access to the relevant metrics and they have an incentive to exaggerate the results (sometimes maybe even internally).

sersi: So TikTok is for b2c. What's the equivalent for b2b product targeting developers or opensource software? Stars on github?

verisimi: Do you personally like Drake, Katseye? And think they make good music?

tbossanova: Some of it is really good, yes. But of course music taste is extremely subjective

TeMPOraL: Makes me think of a 20-something old running a popular YouTube channel interviewing people for business advice, and in one episode, stressing the important message of their interviewee, that was literally "don't trust advice from people who have never actually done the thing you're trying to do".That's multiple levels of "you're not the traffic, you are the traffic" right there.

TeMPOraL: Popularity is the most popular (!) signal because this isn't really about the music - it's to have something to talk about with your friends, whether to bond over shared interest or signal something about yourself to your group. The same is true about any other interest: most people care a lot (arguably, primarily) about their interest being recognized and supported by other people.Those of us who care about an interest for the sake of that interest, are called nerds.

3RTB297: So the formula is basically:(Late 90's Pop Group Framework)*(Dead Internet Theory) = Clicks and Streams

ButlerianJihad: Okay, I squinted hard at that notation “1‰” and had Gemini explain it to me, and it appears that you made no typos, but I couldn’t let that go unexplained!

vermilingua: ButlerianJihad… had Gemini explain it to you…

HerbManic: Oh no I do realise just how much is inorganic... After the fact.It is obvious in retrospect but difficult to see in the moment

fedeb95: Social media are to be used for a very short amount of time daily.Discipline is required.

r-w: You dropped this: )

Quarrelsome: Bill Hicks had a really good point when he said people who work in advertising or marketing should kill themselves.They turn everyone elses experiences to shit just so they can have more money.

wartywhoa23: That can be automated quite easily these days. Just make your bot/scraper scan for anything that blames something or otherwise fits narratives that can be used as a vehicle of your own promotion, and hit that.P.S. Not necessarily implying that the grandparent did that.

AlecSchueler: > How much do they spend to tell everyone about it?You could see every YCombinator investment as a kind of sidelong marketing for HN.

jasonvorhe: Too bad he then became Alex Jones.

coffeebeqn: What do you mean? He pretty much died at the peak of his career in comedy. I don’t remember any Alex Jonesy material

whilenot-dev: Please keep in mind that such a use is against the Guidelines[0] and will be downvoted and flagged rather quickly.Since 2023 I always check the creation date of a user before I click on any link in their comment.[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nasrudith: It is a quite strange view of democracy to think that it can resist tyrants but not spam of advertisements.

TheServitor: Uninstall TikTok, listen to less shitty music, have less first world problems.

atoav: [delayed]

baxtr: Wouldn’t it be wiser to ignore the messages of adversaries and marketers rather than suggesting people kill themselves?Who hasn’t fallen prey to marketing and propaganda on social media?

jasonvorhe: Was supposed to be somewhat of a joke but I forgot emoji can't be submitted in comments.If you're curious though: https://rumble.com/v5495j6-matthew-north-psyop-alex-jones-is...

leethomp: The commenter is referencing a conspiracy that Bill Hicks faked his death and became Alex Jones. This imo was less stupid some years ago when Jones could conceivably be seen as an exaggerated satirical caricature, though it's very hard to imagine Bill Hicks taking the bit this far now

Quarrelsome: Well, i highly recommend reacting to advertising aggressively in order to store the memory along with a feeling of repulsion (e.g. swearing, middle finger) to attempt to dissaude the subconscious from retrieving it without revulsion in the future.I think the point of the bit though is to aggressively point out that advertising corrupts our world for their benefit and if advertisers or marketers had a soul they'd realise they were actively making the world worse and move to a different industry. Meaning the only ones the message is for are sociopaths that know what they're doing and don't care.

nonameiguess: Trusted news orgs around the world tend to have centuries of history behind them. If you actually did it right, it should long outlive you, with the speed of growth being largely irrelevant.Looking at your site, you have a mission statement in your About page that roughly says "scrape other sources for anything relevant and interesting." Nothing about staffing, who you are, who your editors are, whether you even have editors. Every story seems to have the byline "DREAMREAL," which doesn't sound like a person.It doesn't seem to me like you're interested in running a news org. It seems like you're dissatisfied with your ability to find things interesting to you in a single place and are trying to scratch that itch, probably in a mostly-automated way. I can sympathize with that, but a personal knowledge base with outgoing links to the original sources isn't a news org. By all means, share it. Maybe six other people in the world have exactly the same interests you do, but this is a far cry from journalism and you probably shouldn't frame it that way.

whilenot-dev: > "I hate that, here's my solution"HN comments have always been like that, or rather "here's my approach to circumvent that annoyance".What's your alternative? I prefer that style over comments that stop already at "I hate that", as curiosity should be more than an expression of a dismissive opinion.

eracle1: Psyops can be CF created by social media themselvesOpenClaw is one of those

shermozle: The best marketing has always been a psychological operation.

TeMPOraL: That's, unfortunately, the free market at play. Competition is adversarial. It has many of good sides, but resource efficiency is not one of them.

Schmerika: And the inevitable continued degradation of all our resources leads where, exactly...Because once you answer that question for yourself, you'll hopefully care a lot less about the "many of good sides".

r-w: It's so weird to see empathy-speak be regularly co-opted by habitual mass manipulators. "I don't know if this will make you feel better... but we're concerned with manipulating the reactions to the reactions as well! See how much we care?" It makes me do a double-take every time someone shows actual empathy, because it's used so often as a manipulative tactic to shield oneself against critiques of soullessness.

thinkingemote: [delayed]

Schmerika: Oh look at that, Quarrelsome's going for the 'righteous anger' dollar. That's a good; that's a good market.

kilroy123: I have thought exactly as you do for a long time. Recently a side project of my blew up and it was completely organic. I'm just a solo dev. No marketing budget at all. No PR team.Made me realize that it's still possible for things to organically get big.It's just way way harder now.

wartywhoa23: A first-hand anecdote: I write music.Ambient variety, you know, almost static drone, very niche style per se. Never did anything to promote it in any way. Just released it via my friend's digital label on a handful of platforms.Never had more than ~100 listens a month, and never expected that to change and earn any substantial royalties.One day, the friend calls and tells he's willing to pay me some pretty penny, and replies to my bewilderment that just a single track from the whole album blew up, glitched the Matrix and obtained some 100'000s of listens.I investigated a little bit and found out that the track's title coincided with that of some other, much more popular and promoted band.So I just happened to ride on those coattails.

gib444: But also don't squander the traffic with default dark mode with low contrast ;) Use the device mode hint at leastThe font for the headlines also looks 'off' to me. Letters too close together maybe

jottinger: Hmm, It's supposed to be using the device mode. I'll look at the UI code and see if I can fix that. I use dark mode and my eyes work well with the framing, so any information here is welcomed. Will tune.

kilroy123: Got a link? I want to hear it.

jottinger: All fair, but: it's not a "news org." News is a business model, and, man, my business is feeding my family; this site's a passion project, fulfilling a need based on what I did back in the mid-2000s: curating stuff that developers roughly adjacent to my skills (i.e., JVM-adjacent) would find interesting. What happened, where, who, why, maybe how.The site's actually not the main focus - the site's still being developed. The hardest thing about TheServerSide back in the day wasn't the writing or curating - although curation is hard if you're not just echoing press releases or READMEs - it was discovery.Slashdot, freshmeat, RSS, IRC back then... all just being watched and participated in (I'm an actual developer first, after all) - talking to and with and watching ALL THE SOURCES. I had an OPML to die for, man! ... and I had to read it all, and filter it all, and ignore it when people talked about stuff that readers wouldn't care about.So BCN's actually an infobot that happens to feed that discovery, in part - it's actually an information stream that yields factoids (infobot, woo!) and other services around that, and part of that yield is information about what's happening, so it HAS an RSS reader, it has github webhooks, it has everything I can think of as input streams, not as a comb filter but just as an information hub that can contain comb filters.Yeah, there's no marketing; I'm no marketer. Don't want to be. And the presentation of the model is confusing, because I'm no marketer and because the readers don't and really shouldn't care, if it works. And the site's "in process" anyway - I mean, yeesh, it only has 50 posts so far! I'm working on getting there.And "dreamreal" is a person - it's me. That's the IRC handle I've used for years, and that's actually one of the admin identities for me the bot had first, and it stuck. Easy to change, but honestly, it's not about me and shouldn't be.But you're not wrong in the slightest.

thinkingemote: We don't remember the vast majority of advertising we see by design. That's how a) it's designed and b) why it's so dangerous.It's quite possible you saw something somewhere about it several days if not weeks or months previously and naturally didn't consciously register it. Advertisements are designed to work this way and the memory is a wonderful thing.It's dangerous because it's manipulative, it removes agency from ourselves and its addictive to the marketeers.If I can sell you a book and make you think it's entirely your own choice then my marketing has been incredibly successful.Or it may not be doing what marketeers and advertising agencies actually planned to happen and it could be just random coincidence.

jottinger: Ooof! If I'd thought of that, I'd have kept my trap shut. :(Art as expression, not as market campaigns, will still capture our imaginations - that's more my driving force than trying to sell more hotdogs.

the-mitr: Your comment reminds me of a quote by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, that has helped in my lows> How slowly one advances in a boat that does not float along with the stream in a specific direction! How much easier it is when one can connect with the work of great predecessors whose value is not doubted by anyone. A personal experiment, a construction whose foundations one must dig himself and whose walls one must erect himself, runs a real risk of becoming a humble hovel. But perhaps one prefers to live there rather than in a palace that has been built by others. (Escher on Escher – Exploring the Infinite)

jottinger: That's an excellent quote and I love it. I think of it more as Thoreau, or in my own terms, but I LOVE that quote, which I'd never seen before.

jottinger: Hrm. If you're talking about me: I doubt it. I've been a programmer for 30+ years: I've built a LOT of products, some of which got used, some of which ... didn't. If I was going to complain, that'd be new.And I know how to do SEO and why. And I'm just not interested. "Success" for me... well, I mean, I'd love to retire today based on the brazilians of dollars some mogul hands me for the IP behind the site, but, uh, that's not what it's for. SEO at the service layer? Sure, it has a mode for the bots, it tries to make scanning easy for the machines. But at the content level... nah, I have been watching the world tune information - one aspect of the psyop the OP talked about - for decades, and I can't bring myself to do it.

throwanem: Well, you know. Every med student goes through this "I Am An Earthly God" phase. Usually it passes. But the guy isn't obviously in favor of the concept for which his account is named, so there isn't the contradiction here that appears to exist on the face of it. (Speaking of usernames, hello, Grima! How on Middle-earth did you survive that fall?)

jottinger: This is the second comment like that. It was honestly not intended - it was actually me trying to respond in my own context to the post, and WHY I was responding; "why" is more important to me than "what," and I have a hard time saying "this" without explaining why I felt "this" - or at least trying to explore it. I'm working on a site; reading the "this kind of thing is how people do things these days" actually made the concept of working on the site (which I hope has value) harder. That's what I was saying, or trying to; the "advertisement" was context, not intent, or else I'd have tried to post my own thing to HN saying "look at how ossum my seite are!"

arcfour: I know the best way to solve a problem with corruption and lack of transparency: involve the government! Nobody could ever pay off a politician. Surely that would only work in our favor.

wartywhoa23: Well, I don't want to make this look like a coordinated psyop in the vein of the topic, sorry)..

Quarrelsome: I am reminded of the second episode of Black Mirror :D.

watwut: It is different. If you SEO, you are actively changing content toward worst and less interesting. That is not the same as making the decision between market and not-market.

jottinger: Also: one of the features of the underlying tech stack is that the UI is actually a completely separate module than the backend API. Different github repo, everything: the site is akshually https://api.bytecode.news and the UI at the "base url" is just one layer for that API. The goal was always to have multiple interfaces, all tuned for whatever the technology supported best: see https://enigmastation.com/2014/07/09/repost-some-of-what-id-... (from my personal blog).BCN actually has multiple UIs for it, although I've been concentrating on the content rather than the front-ends - I'm not a front-end guy, so my UIs tend to be impenetrable. The model works. If it's my implementation the other front ends will suck from a UX perspective, because I don't see the UI the same way most people do (there are reasons, they're not important, bottom line is that I avoid UI.)What would YOU suggest for a UI? I'm very much curious, because I would LOVE for the UI to sing and I would have no idea how to make that happen.

wartywhoa23: I absolutely adore it when stumbling occasionally upon great musicians who have laughable numbers of listens on various platforms, dunno if that's mere chance or the algorithm trying to balance things out, but that surely brings some hope for the pure art.

vermilingua: Literally the first person to understand the reference in ~14 years of using this handle, thank you.

jottinger: Thanks. I decided long ago that I wasn't the kind of magnetic personality who'd be able to market a mass site - as a "face" I'm a very poor candidate, and I despise cults of personality, which seems to be the "go-to" for a lot of such things. It's the modern version of "smile more!"I hope you're right. Not for my own sake, but for everyone's. I'm trying to do what I can to put stuff worth reading out there - and whether it's worth reading or not isn't actually mine to judge; if I make it "worth reading" by SEO terms, it's not actually worth reading all that much, being neutered and hedged to the point of milquetoast oblivion.IMO.

badc0ffee: I heard about them a few times before finally deciding to listen to an album. I can't remember if it was Reddit or Instagram. In each case they were just mentioned offhand in a comment, like I should already know about them.Ultimately, I kind of hate the guy's voice. Sort of reminds me of... Parquet Courts? Who I don't really love, either.

sph: Thanks for the Parquet Courts psyop, I'll give that a listen ;)

throwanem: You are most welcome! - especially at such long last.

Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an industry plant, but do we actually care?

wartywhoa23: An apologetic damage control piece of "journalism". Someone was caught cheating and manipulating, so...> Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an industry plant, but do we actually care?...the article tries to normalize that.But hell yeah, Amanda Silberling, I do actually care and won't ever accept that crap as norm.