Yeah, I instantly disagreed with that point in the comment you replied to - TikTok's algorithm seems to reward sticking to your niche.

Does TikTok even have persistent personalities of this type? I thought a big part of the service was its recommendation algorithm that will keep recommending you other new stuff, not just reruns of the same influencers.

This definitely seems true to me, from my limited short content usage. I try to avoid getting sucked into the feed (Youtube Shorts is the one I have used), but if I do find myself scrolling through the morass of clips from Shark Tank or Family Guy [1], the one guy I'll almost always stop for is FunkFPV, who just does a duet on clips of stupid "hacks" and incidences of dumb stuff happening in factory / warehouse / construction settings.

He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche.

Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least.

[1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention

[2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase

Hello! My name is Xandiloquence Bizarre the Ab3rd, and today I will make a hat entirely out of dried cucumber.

not true because the meta changes constantly. The accounts that are popular for a long time have someone talented at the head.

yes except all of this stuff...fundementally sucks, right? its why influencers generally don't become actors. there's very little depth to it. Versus for example Hank and John Green who sure, they have good hooks, but they also have depth?

idk can't tell if this is me hoping or coping

Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.

Attention-seeking is indeed the original genetic algorithm.

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Thirty years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, in which he made very similar points about broadcast television. I don't remember all his points, but I vividly remember how talked about how you'll be watching a news story about something awful, maybe an earthquake in which hundreds of people died, and then with practically no warning you'll be hearing a happy jingle from a toothpaste commercial. The juxtaposition, he said, was bad for the human mind, and was going to create a generation that couldn't focus on important things.

I suspect that the rapid-fire progression of one one-minute video after another does something similar, and is also equally bad for you.

Fifteen years ago, I ran a YouTube channel with hundreds of obscure French videos about pediatrics and parenting. One of them suddenly attracted massive attention worldwide, especially from Pakistan and Indonesia. According to the stats, 99% of the viewers were male. Millions and millions of views. For months, it sat in the top five French videos on YouTube. Ad revenue went through the roof, like three figures per day, for months, from that single video. None of the others on the channel saw anything remotely similar. It was baffling.

Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand.

Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.

How I hate the trend of videos like YouTube shorts to almost show the punchline of the video at the start before the full video.

And when propaganda is injected into it - subtly, through many channels and methods - it becomes worse. I'm confident that the western world's rightward shift is down to targeted social media campaigns. It doesn't help that said social media stopped checking for fake news and bent the knees to said rightward shift, because money.

I've started using these platforms for learning (stretch exercises, argentine tango patterns/musicality I might want to lead, etc) and am finding the experience to work better in those kinds of situations. Agree it can be brain rot if using it for entertainment, politics, etc.

Yeah, I had to get rid of my youtube plus subscription because I was getting too addicted to the shorts.

Wait until a generation of people who have been mainlining that since infancy while their thought patterns were still being formed becomes old enough to vote.

Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to.

https://www.kexp.org/

https://somafm.com/

I went back to CDs because the friction of having to stand up, walk to the player and change the disc is enough to stop me from skipping songs every few seconds.

For discovering new music, I go to the flea market every so often and buy some random discs. Some are unlistenable, but a lot are alright. I found New Mind[1] this way and really loved it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sharp#New_Mind

> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.

No, I think you're right.

I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.

There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.

I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.

Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"

> less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music

For the same reason (plus curiosity of what people are listening to in weird places) I recently switched to Radio Garden [0], highly recommend it (not affiliated)

[0] https://radio.garden

We have these answers already. At least the successful tubers like Mr. beast do. They ab test everything. That super creepy saturated image of him? Works really really well.

And the other factor is I think the "rat pulling a lever" thing.

A rat is in a lab, pulls a lever, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again... no treat. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. This goes on, 10 pulls with no treat, but sometimes something comes out so the rat keeps going. You get the idea.

This is a lot of social media. You end up scrolling through a lot of shit, adverts and subtle propaganda, passively absorbing it until you get rewarded with something you genuinely enjoy and get the good hormones from.

Damn, I'm in the wrong industry.

I think it's different for tiktok (as a non-tiktok user so take this with a huge grain of salt lmao), people don't watch one creator's videos one after the other, they get put in the big soup of clips that people scroll through for sometimes hours a day. And a lot of that is people sticking to one formula, because for many, the predictability is comforting / puts them in the tiktok brain off frame of mind.

Which isn't a new phenomenon - lots of people have "comfort shows" on e.g. Netflix, often the studio series with long seasons like sitcoms. They're comfortable because they often maintain a similar energy or formula over their run time, and missing parts of it (like current-day episodic films) isn't a big issue.

There is no lizard brain. The "triune brain" theory has been debunked by modern neuroscience for years.

I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok!

Here's a guy who rigged a theremin and a hurdy gurdy up to Singer sewing machine and performs spectacular covers on it https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/751772710192...

And here's someone living my dream, he moved to the Scottish Highlands to start a workshop creating mechanical sculptures inspired by my childhood heroes the Cabaret Mechanical Theater and he just made a piece for them! https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...

This is such a perfect term for it. Thank you for starting my day with a chuckle. I feel validated.

More about this weird phenomenon: https://fenwick.media/rewild/magazine/dead-broets-society-be...

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The Machine Fired Me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 - June 2018 (554 comments)

I have rule on Youtube. If the title of the video is click baity then I pick "Don't Recommend Channel", always and without exception.

"The Machine Fired Me" would not get me to block the channel but I've blocked hundreds of channels.

I also block any channel that appears to be a rando repeating the latest hot topic.

Another common mistake I see "thoughtfluencer" bloggers make is they think they need a brand new idea per post. This not only isn't sustainable, it's bad for the audience.

Instead, I think a successful blog is really about finding your, at most, 3 - 5 big ideas and instead showing the audience how they apply in many different context. For example, Matt Levine returns to a few commmon catchphrases across years of his writing: "People are worried about bond market liquidity", “Everything Is Securities Fraud” etc. that crop up in odd and wonderful ways in totally new contexts across years of writing. Forming a relationship with his writing is deepening your appreciation of these concepts.

> Netherlands

Medieval Netherlands had a single easy-to-harvest resource: sea fish; a very valuable commodity for protein-starved medieval peasantry. They were very lucky to be able pivot from that to trade (the pivot required a war between merchants and nobles, which the merchants won) before the herring and cod started to run out.

Venice was small by land mass, but controlled the Eastern Mediterranean, and therefore the Black Sea endpoint of the Silk Road, which was immensely profitable.

Consequently, Vasco da Gama rounding Africa in 1498 doomed Venice as a great power.

(All from memory, 100% factuality not guaranteed)

Yeah, but even that isn't going to make me care about why Gwern is obsessing over Venice. Part of that is that I follow Overly Sarcastic Productions on youtube and "Blue" did a vastly better job of expressing/performing "I'm excited about Venice, and in a couple of minutes you will be too!" - an advantage of the medium and of their chosen style, for reaching someone like me who isn't all that compelled by European history.

(Yes, I get that it was an example to make a point about a writing style; one of the risks of really concrete examples is bouncing off of the example itself :-)

I like where you’re heading with this and to a degree I think that it leads toward considerations about the personality of the author in tow with their writing and writing ability which on its head evokes questions about what makes a person, well, personable. Which turns this into a sensitive discussion about what one can glean about an author’s character traits based on their writing style and when the author in question is only a ‘public figure’ in the eyes of the niche collection of online enclaves who are even aware that Gwern exists it becomes tough to candidly critique his literary persona with the sort of freedom that one may have when talking about say, some guy who’s written for the Atlantic for 30 years and is further from the spaces where criticisms about his work are held.

My criticisms about Gwern’s writing is not meant to be taken...ahem...personally in the sense that I don’t want to use Gwern as a subject for whatever literary critique I’m trying to proffer beyond how useful it is—and is presenting itself—as a fine case to help make whatever point I’m trying to make more clear about how Writing style is inextricable from and indicative of personality or lack thereof. And this is probably a part of what makes reading and writing such a profound experience.

One of the most interesting remarks about Gwern’s writing is this comment [1]:

> Everything I read from gwern has this misanthropic undertones. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but it grits me when I try reading him.

— <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135302>

While I can't agree with the entirety of `mola’s comment—I simply haven’t put that much thought into making as grave of an evaluation into Gwern’s character as such a judgement would demand, nor am I that interested in deliberating over such an evaluation—it still resonates with me as a reader and you’ll find in my comment downthread from `mola’s remark that it’s at least plausible that an affinity for self-expression and intellectualizing about the world doesn’t necessitate an interest in the rest of its inhabitants in a way that causes me not to find the thesis behind “First, make me care” to be coloured with a stroke of irony, considering who’s behind it.

You say "style is more important when you want to reach someone who hasn't heard of you.” I agree with that and I reckon that it’s still style that forms a non-trivial amount of how you identify with ‘who’ the author is once you’ve become familiar with they’re work and can set an expectation for why their ideas may be worthwhile to engage with in the first place. Again, Paul Graham’s writing has a style although no where to the degree that Maciej Cegłowski does. You can evince characteristics about each of them relative to how and what they write about. You can even speculate on ways that their respective personalities could lead to friction between them. [2]

When we interrogate the “who” behind “who wrote” we are making judgements about the personality of the author and how that that makes us interested in their ideas. Today there are various non-literary mediums that give us a glimpse at a person’s personality with which we can anticipate whether it’s worth reading what they write. But if all you go by is their writing then how they write is about the only way for you to speculate about 'who' the author is and what they’re like as a person.

There are probably holes in this line of reasoning but I don’t think the lines between writing style, personal appeal and the ability to appeal to readers through how you write—effectively signaling to your personality in the process!—are as distinct as I think you’re portraying them. What’s the opposite of orthogonal? Correlated?

To end: Gwern’s writing lacks personality to me. This makes it hard to reconcile with the point he’s making in this article (which I agree with!) and my perception of his own writing (which invariably and perhaps even unfortunately invites speculation into any writer’s own personality).

Again, please, Does Gwern have anything that sounds as striking as “Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” or was that example a tacit hat tip to Brett Devereaux’s work? I don’t think the guy is a misanthrope but I do sense a wall of text—both figuratively and literally—between he and I when engaging with his writing. He is evidently well and widely read and despite my dislike for the visual form of his website I think that it is still a solid technical display of hypertext for personal web design and information architecture. But in spite of this all I find that it lacks depth, not intellectually but personally. ’Spiritually’, if you will.

[1] Now you may be able figure out my reasoning for the first paragraph re: public figures and criticism. I guess that’s this puts me in the camp of those who don’t believe that’s possible to separate art from the artist. Discussing one commands a look into the other, otherwise why bother with ‘art’ and ‘artists’ at all?

[2] Those who are familiar with both Graham’s and Cegłowski’s writing can take a guess at who once called the other a “big ole weenis” in an exchange on this very site.

> "you are assuming the reader will find your ideas as important and interesting as you do. It is the writer's job to show the reader why they should be interested, why they should care."

This is writing-as-bookselling and marketing. If you find your ideas interesting and want to write about them, it's not your job to show the reader why, you only expect readers who share your interest to be potential readers. You may not think the reader should be interested or should care at all?

To his credit and with the exception of mentioning an objective to show his smarts off to readers (which I don’t think he wants to do anyhow) Gwern informs us that he is assuming that we will find what he writes as useful as he does, because his objective is to write things that are useful to himself:

> The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.

— <https://gwern.net/about#target-audience>

We can reconcile this with the purport of the writing of his that we’re discussing now—it’s a notice with his future self in mind. And we can compare and contrast the above quote and the aforementioned piece with some of PG’s writing which I find is meant to be public-facing literature at full bloom. [1][2]

I think there’s a difference between 'writing for my future self’ and ‘writing with the public in mind’. Howard & Barton (1986) would argue that they represent separate stages of the writing process and I agree with that and prefer writing that is primed for the latter form. [3] I associate the maxim “First, make me care” with the latter as well and by-and-large feel like Gwern’s writing—that which I’ve come across most frequently—is geared toward the former form. Which I’m sure serves him well, as well as I’m sure it’s served well to those who enjoy his work. I’m yet to determine whether that’s a good or bad thing.

As I’ve cited earlier, some consider Gwern's writing to evoke a sort of misanthropy. But hey...I’m sure there’s someone else to say the same about Paul Graham and his stuff. I’ll withhold judgement against the both of them on that matter—for now—lest I get caught unprepared to be deemed one myself.

[1] <https://www.paulgraham.com/field.html>

[2] <https://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html>

[3] <https://search.worldcat.org/title/13329813>

ACX is honestly an incredible writer. I think it's a very high bar to clear.

I think I know the answer, but people don’t want to hear it. Gwern has a kind of formula/structure really effectively markets his blog to the HN audience, which is Not Bad Actually, just effective messaging + giving people what they want.

You can’t really separate the content from its medium, its contex, and its audience if you’re thinking about “why is this successful” (why does the medium express the content n a particular content that works for some particular audience). What the blog post is really about is not “writing” or creating good content per-se, but how to structure content for a blog-like/feed-based medium where you’re competing for clicks, views, attention, participation in external narratives, and relevancy/memorability with an audience mostly looking to be entertained or scratch some curiosity itch.

Gwern has a good formula for that which matched the HN context and audience:

1. Pique interest and grab attention. Give me a reason to click.

2. Let the reader in on the secret, you and me vs all these other idiots. Validate me.

3. Back it all up with sources/references and a post that articulates something the reader already was aware of but fundamentally agreed with. Teach me something but make me feel like “Finally someone who gets it” rather than challenged or threatened.

4. Do the work to actually deliver on the hook. Satisfy my curiosity and give me a reason to come back and share it.

None of this is even necessarily manipulative, it’s just the form that successfully competes in a click-driven market for attention and information (the context). Nobody has to click or read through or share or comment on the thing. Most likely very few will click through to the sources, but they might peep them or be interested to know that they exist. It’s very effective progressive disclosure.

The thing is, this audience REALLY does not want to believe that they can be marketed to or that their decision making is many ways pretty damn emotional/predictable. Gwern does an excellent job validating that for them AND successfully marketing to them anyway. I think that’s the part that’s missing from this post.

The context is completely non-captive, the audience wants to feel smart, and believes that they are “too smart to be marketed to”. Here they are scrolling through an attention market looking for interesting information that they need to be convinced to click, read through, share, and engage with. Why was the link shared and content created to being with, and how did it structure itself to fit its content/audience, and why does a particular structure/messaging work while others don't?

The word for all of that is Marketing. It's just a Good Thing when done right.

I just finished this response to a sibling comment of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760312

I think it inadvertently touches on some valid points that you raise, especially the one about criticizing people within earshot.

> Gwern seems to be onto something about how to engage readers. What do you think that is?

I think that people read for different reasons; there are different kinds of readers. I think that there’s a dissonance between the point that he makes in this article and my perception of the rest of his work. That’s all. Of course defending my opinion so that it is received in good faith reveals more than I want to be taken as an assumption about what I think about Gwern the person, but these assumptions are inevitable when we’re talking about writing to incite intrigue in other human beings and how writing is peculiar form of expression and exchange not just of ideas but also of personality.

Some people may read Gwern’s work and find that its informational depth satisfies their interests as readers. “Embryo Selection For Intelligence” sounds like an interesting topic to me, but not interesting enough on its own to make me 1) wait for the page to load because the entire page took approximately 13 seconds to to yield almost 12MB of data and 2) read it all, in the form what is self-described as a “cost benefit analysis” on the issue, which makes it seem like more technical/scientifically-driven piece of writing as far as what we can expect by way of style. [1]

Lots of people on HN, I assume, are of the sort who are indeed engaged by technically-minded expositions on a subject and if they are at all interested in narrative then they reach for fiction writing and may even find non-fiction books that attempt to wind narratives as wastes of time unless they are immediately entertaining. And entertainment is not something that I intend to advocate for. But I suspect that there are a lot of readers on HN who view reading as a means to an end—the information; and the more the merrier and merit-worthy the writing is thought to be.

Gwern discusses a lot of topics. I’m probably sharing my reaction to the stuff that I’ve read from him that I think lacks personality. If my impression of the dominant literary bloc on HN is accurate then maybe I’ve only come across the information-dense-but-stylistically-lacking prose served on a Xanadu’s sled of a web page sort of work of Gwern's.

It’s been 4 hours. I am yet to come across an "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” in his oeuvre.

> If you crack open some of the mustier books about the Internet—you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones which invoke Roland Barthes and discuss the sexual transgressing of MUDs—one of the few still relevant criticisms is the concern that the Internet by uniting small groups will divide larger ones.

Loading in 6 seconds and serving a little more than 4MB of content, "The Melancholy of Subculture Society” seems like a good candidate. [2]

[1] <https://gwern.net/subculture>

[2] <https://gwern.net/embryo-selection>

Assuming the poster's recollection of the quote is correct, there is nothing to be negated, coming to terms with something does not mean you overcame it, No clue how close that is to the actual quote but it sounds like Wallace's phrasing.

I think that's a little extreme to say it's one of the worst. It's definitely a different style to a lot of blogs, but I like how much information is spread across the site. It's satisfying to explore on a desktop.

I agree, but I think I know why I personally have this opinion. I don't like reading hypermedia, and Gwern is all about hypermedia.

Hypermedia is fine when you're reading reference material, like Wikipedia. We've all done https://xkcd.com/214/, but at some point you just learn to tune out the hyperlinks.

When reading an article written by a single human, I want it to have a well-defined linear structure. I don't even like footnotes or pull-out quotes. Gwern likes to put a "blind" hyperlink or two in literally every sentence. Here's what an "orthoxerox-optimized Gwern article" would look like:

- blind links to literal Wikipedia: gone, I can search for more information myself - blind links to external websites: please just pull the relevant information into the body of the article or, if that's impossible, spend a sentence on why you want me to click it - blind links to other pages on the website: again, if it's some relevant information, please just pull it into the body of the article; if it's self-promotion, I can live with links like these if they are the only blind ones left, but the "Similar links" box under the article is already there

Gwern does actual research into usability, and that's the reason there aren't any ads on Gwern.net (which alone makes it far from the worst for readability, I mean have you used the internet without an ad blocker on the median blog??).

Anyway, it's readable for me, and I quite enjoy it, so perhaps you just aren't the target audience. That doesn't matter at all, you don't need to read Gwern at all.

There are definitely less readable blogs, even restricting to ones that aren't intentionally hard to read. For example: https://www.lilywise.com/amusement (Disclosure: written by my kid, who was just shy of 7yo then)

Personally, I like Gwern's style and aesthetic a lot, and don't have trouble reading his stuff.

Never cut out stuff that you felt important to include. Just forget the reader. The content you write should reflect you, not the reader. It's your expression. Don't make it a sales pitch, or a reflection of average reader's taste.

I get scared when an author is talking to me, the reader. I stop reading when they pretend to be aware of my context. Things like "So you are reading this book because you want to learn about AI" sounds very cheap.

Also I hate when the actors on TV suddenly start talking to the viewer about what they did and why did etc. Disgusting.

Audience want to observe the performers, not converse with them. Your best performance comes out when you are not much aware of the audience. Like a child playing, ignoring people around.

This is fairly uncharitable. The goal is not to trick people into reading, it is to motivate them as to why they should read. It is more about highlighting the most interesting part of your article to tell people why they should spend the time. You still have to deliver on your promises.

I feel like Gwern’s example is quite illustrative of this point. Just framing the content differently makes you more motivated to jump into it, even if you’re reading about the same content as before.

So basically TL;DR :)

I studied the entanglement formed during a quantum nonlinear process

It could definitely be my systems-oriented writing. May I ask what your profession is? I’m a software engineer.

In this era, it takes credibility to grab my attention before I even care about your promise of benefits.

It’s not “make me care.” It’s “make me believe and care, every step of the way.”

> Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1].

I think this is an important distinction. I would argue that it's better to make the point clear to find readers that care, than to try to make all readers care.

Ideally you wouldn't need to make them care. Just give them enough information up front for them to determine if they care.

Do they have a special name? I haven’t seen them in books.

True, but any re-reading will let you pick up a lot of the typos. If you write it once and ship it unedited, then you weren't interested, and the reader likely won't be either. Typos clue the reader into that early.