I think for a lot of people, simply having "Author: Gwern" (or some other author they like) is the sufficient bit of information to make them care, it's generic on the content. I've read a lot of not very stylish writing simply because of who wrote it. Or in other words, "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." Whatever quirks of bad style there are will get a pass because I already care -- style is more important when you want to reach someone who hasn't heard of you.

>David Foster Wallace (on KCRW? Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with the purpose of writing not being to show off how smart you are to the reader.

He expands on this in his conversation with Bryan Garner (of Garner's Modern English Grammar) published as Quack this Way, and I think he gets to the core issue, which is that your ideas are not interesting to anyone but you; if you are showing off how smart you are, 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.

Infinite Jest is a also a good example of something which goes against TFA's point, it opens with a very sterile, impersonal, literal and completely disconnected first person narrative, he gives us nothing to care about. But it evolves, but he still doesn't give us anything to care about, just has the narration turn in on itself despite it seeming to have nothing to turn in onto. All he really gives us is the suggestion that there is something more than what we can see. He gets us interested and curious but I don't think we really care at that point.

Besides the quote, which I think is a good practice, having never read his stuff, he seems like he publishes his notes directly from his note taking app.

That's fine if you want to publish ideas in short form, but I don't think any of that is considered a piece of work that has been fully fleshed out. I don't really see any stuff that's designed to actually be a publication.

It’s a good quote from DFW but like all great useful pithy quotations it’s usually negated somehow by the activities of the utterer elsewhere. It seemed almost granted that one of the metaconcepts within Infinite Jest was that his ability to churn out reams of that stuff was far in excess of your ability to even read through it.

I feel the same. I found that blog from SSC/ACX and I still much prefer SSC/ACX despite gwern discussing topics that are much much more relevant to my interests (sw dev, Haskell, anime). I can't formulate why but your analysis sounds close enough.

I agree, the citations having the little icons were distracting and I had to force myself not to skim. Still though, it's a very illuminating article that applies the very simple concept we all learned in theory to hook the reader but never really seen explicit examples of. I also found the similar pages feature interesting!

Gwern's point stands on its own merits regardless of what you think of the rest of their blog. And the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way: Lots of people, and especially lots on HN, are very engaged with Gwern's writing, so Gwern seems to be onto something about how to engage readers. What do you think that is?

That would be valuable analysis. Or provide constructive feedback. The complaints aren't constructive and don't inform us about the OP. To me they seem pointless and in the wrong spirit, especially when someone is in the room, within earshot.

Edit: removed an error in what I said originally, sorry.

Gwern has hands down one of the worst blogs, readability wise, ever created on the internets. His writing style can be hit or miss too.

Everyone's a critic, hey?

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever

That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.

>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology

Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind.

I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.

Attention is all you need, after all.

On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit like a superweapon.

> This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video.

Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video. There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that time.

This is part of why I hate TikTok so much.

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.

A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else.

I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention.

Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.

There almost is no hook, the hook is that the time investment for each video is so small your brain doesn't even need to think about whether it should watch or not.

It’s so addictive but so soul destroying. I feel dirty after spending time on that platform. The term brainrot fits perfectly.

Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks that give you a pinch.

We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day.

I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were talking about. After 3 months, I got it.

And I deleted it.

I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more structural. I could feel it gnarling.

In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.

Except the hooks only attach to the lizard brain while the rational brain just sits there with a palm in its face.

You say "human psychology", but there are a ton of people who can't stand any of that shit and see it for the tarpit that it is.

It's not very effective at doing anything but making lowbrow content slightly more appealing.

Reminds me of Veritasium's recent videos, really driving that initial hook and maintaining the viewer's attention. He had an explanation video about it which explained how people who would be interested in something like "the Lorenz equation" probably don't know what it's called, so it might be more accurate to phrase it in terms that someone would search for or initially peak their interest.

And I think it fits neatly with making people care first. I want to learn more about the machine that fired you, that's more the start of a narrative arc. It's almost like I have more trust that you will make it interesting, since you put a little more work up front.

"The Machine Fired Me" is one good hook. I found the original post and its good: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me

That's the LinkedIn "broetry" formula.

LI only shows a sentence as a teaser, and good "broets" have learned to write a good teaser line.

Venice is the extreme "tail wagging the dog" situation. Venice is dinky. It's not much bigger than San Francisco. Yet it was a major European power for centuries.

Thanks. Ironically, the article started off great with that but clearly it wasn't going to answer the question, so I only read the first paragraph.

I agree with your first assertion but not so much on the rest. There is more than one reason to write and for many it is about communication, they have something they want to express and you would be wise to consider your reader if that is your goal.

Hooking the reader with the opening page is swinging to the other fence of having a terrible opening page that no one will get through, generally not good to swing to the fences. I think the writer should be honest and upfront with the reader, the opening pages should be representative of what is to come, they should represent the whole and not just the beginning.

The primary goal of writing is communication. If you are trying to convey information, you need someone to actually sit down and read it. Most of the time, this isn’t a problem, you’re writing for someone you have a pre-existing relationship with and they want to read what you have to say, whether that be a friend, a coworker, or your future self.

Problems arise when you move from one:one, to one:many communication. If you are trying to pass knowledge on to people you have no prior relationship with, you do need to attract their attention in a sea of options. If you actually have something important to say that other people need to hear, it does nobody any good for you to go unnoticed. In those circumstances, I don’t see anything wrong with taking Gwern’s advice.

> Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing.

This is common advice in English classes and it predates the World Wide Web (and likely the Internet).

Hook them in the first few sentences or lose them.

And yes, of course, it does depend on who the intended audience is. You wouldn't do it in The New Yorker.

> You don't write for the reader. You write for yourself first. Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it about as much you do.

Depends very much on the medium. It's definitely not true that most professional writing is written for the author's sake. It is for an audience. Read books on writing and you'll often find the advice to cut out things if they won't interest the reader - no matter how valuable it is to you.

I myself struggle with this. Some years ago, I took a trip to my childhood home in another country after being separated for decades. Almost none of my friends from the time have been there in decades either. I made notes during the trip, and when I got back I started writing what I saw, and shared it with my friends who grew up with me. How various neighborhoods have changed. Anecdotes from my childhood tied to those places. And a lot more.

I got 30% done, and then decided to hold off sharing till I'd written the whole thing. I now have a first draft. It's the size of a proper book. It contains a lot of stuff that is of value to me, but likely not to most of the (small) audience. I know if I share it with them, chances are high no one will read it.

On the one hand, the stuff I wrote is highly valuable to me - it's become an unintentional memoir. But on the other hand, I do want to share quite a bit with my friends, and I know they'll value it if they actually read it.

I'll either have to cut a lot out, or write two versions (impractical).

The point being that even when you have a very limited audience, it is important to care about them and sacrifice your needs to an extent.

> Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing [...] You don't write for the reader.

This is contrary to all writing advice I have read, from Robert Olen Butler to John Gardner. Sure, the natural geniuses might write from themselves or their friends (like Kafka) and because they're geniuses the writing is good, but most people aren't geniuses, so they need to keep the reader and its needs firmly (VERY firmly) in their minds.

Speaking of John Gardner, here is a quote about writing that perfectly encapsulates what the job of writer is:

"A true work of fiction does all of the following things, and does them elegantly, efficiently: it creates a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind; it is implicitly philosophical; it fulfills or at least deals with all of the expectations it sets up; and it strikes us, in the end, not simply as a thing done but as a shining performance."

..."Make me care" is part of the "expectations it sets up". "Make me care" begins with the first word of the first chapter, continues with the first paragraph and the first page and, through the first scene, it eases the reader into the "vivid and continuous dream" from which the author should never jolt awake the reader.

Yeah, there are two basic schools.

1. Broadcast what the article is about to let the interested readers find it easier

2. Trick people into reading as much of the article as possible through any means

The first makes sense if you want readers. The second makes sense if you're counting page impressions.

I now try to follow something like bottom line up front (BLUF) when I'm trying to quickly communicate something and respect someone's time: the most important, actionable detail first with details expanding as you read more.

I first heard that it has a standard in an email from someone ex-military; they started the email with "BLUF: blah blah blah". Turns out the military had (has?) it as a standard for emails. Go figure.

Before then, I remember someone asking Adam Ragusea (Youtube cooking channel) why he gives away the point of the video at the very beginning. Ragusea explained that he was previously a journalism professor, and he refused to bury the lede.

I don't watch cooking content anymore, but I've remained impressed that he was able to have a Youtube career while avoiding that manipulate-the-audience behavior to drive stats.

I'm usually the opposite. Mystery feels like the characters, the narrator, etc are all being intentionally obscure, for no reason other than to pad page count and incite drama.

I prefer stories that are either about evoking feelings (adventure, romance, slice of life) or about exploring ideas / what-ifs (scifi, fantasy). And ideally stories at the extremes of this spectrum. Maybe I've read too many but ones in the middle tend to be too cliched to hook me.

It's really too bad it's not a quote from an actual book.

My personal distaste for typical narrative presentations of interesting information is how often the first interesting details come 4-5 paragraphs in and then are slowly peppered from there. Really doesn't seem at odds with the advice here which can easily be applied to the opening sentence or paragraph, and title.

Someone may have already been curious about the topic beforehand. I’m guessing they already have some kind of itch or curiosity. For example, someone who is interested in reading a dense technical textbook that gets straight into the details likely has a preexisting question waiting to be answered, which is why they care. That’s what motivates them to keep reading, even when the material jumps directly into the details

Know your audience: Technical people want the details.

Most people aren't technical.

This is why good writing on the web is broken up into multiple posts split by concern, and with links to the others at the top of the article.

The real problem is when they SEO the shit out of it and replace those links with irrelevant trash meant to steal your attention and people only want to share the "make me care" posts.

The writers stop bothering even posting details when they have them. They bury the lede because it's what the "make me care" crowd forces them to do.

First, make me care and tell me the answer. In 30 seconds.

Then expand on it in increasingly advanced levels of detail.

If your knowledge is high, I won't care about the video production. If you're not getting to the point quickly, you're manipulating the audience into getting views; education and sharing knowledge isn't the main driver of your video.

But what I want is idealistic.

Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1]. I fairly often often put the conclusion in the title, and must have been on the HN front page over 20 times by now.

This is obviously not the only way to construct an article (nor the only one I employ), but it is surprisingly reliable, and will attract and retain the readers who are actually interested in what you have to say, while letting those that aren't interested find something else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

Understanding your audience is your first job as a writer or communicator.

Speaking to them and making them care is job two.

Eh, if your hook is interesting and your writing is generally solid, I'm not about to begrudge a few typos

It literally says 2026 in the URL. Perhaps it was written before the new year and published now, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant to the advice given anyway.

Agreed, because it's not very actionable advice. At best it provides some examples of what not to do.

The example leads to one classic bit of writing advice: tell only the very most important things and omit everything else. Start the story as late as you can and end it as early as possible. This applies to nonfiction just as much as to fiction.