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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
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 solution
the 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...)
> 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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
> 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...
>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.
> “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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
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.
You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.
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 solution
the 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...)
> 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
> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital
And 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
I'm pretty sure this exact concern was the impetus for slashdot's friend:foe system, HN should implement something
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.)
Quibi doesn't seem like a good example. It wasn't marketed as the next big thing. It was a trial balloon that popped.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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.
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.
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.
this is why oldschool chat > social media
curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion
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?)
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.
> 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...
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.
>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.
> “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...
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.
But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
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.
You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
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.
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).
It seems infinitely more likely to me that this is simple coincidence than something nefarious.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree; but the odds of that coincidence are extremely long.
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.
I'll be very sad if I discover that Angine de Poitrine's sudden rise is inorganic.
how could that crap possibly be organic
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.
Their look is almost "standard" French weird = art type stuff. I find it a little annoying actually, in general and for the band.
When reading this I immediately thought of them. Anyone I know who plays an instrument said their socials are flooded with them.
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.
As long as they keep making that music, wearing those costumes and mumbling those interviews, I could care less. I like it.
I only found out about them via word of mouth, but who knows. At least they're good stuff!
it's called astroturfing and has been around since the dawn of the internet
See payolla for the radio era equivalent.
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.
Being a good band isn't nearly enough to be a famous band.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Reminds me of the documentary, “merchants of cool” https://youtu.be/0tYRoiJvhJ4
Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.
https://archive.ph/Y7lS2
Why can't we have a system where this is baked in?
sitting in a local pub watching a musician I've never heard of play original music and absolutely loving it rn.
Ex CEO of Google says X about Y
I wake up There's another psyop I go to sleep I wake up
See also how Anthropic is playing us like a fiddle while making their models less capable.
I'll see your payola and astroturfing, and raise wining and dining newspapermen.
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".
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.
The government is broken. I'm not sure what you are hoping for.
Broken on purpose