12 ms·
One million people saw my dumbest tweet
- rubatuga 5y agoTLDR: Don't let artificial metrics rule your life. Chasing Hacker News points is one of them.
- undeadcomment 5y agoImagine caring about HN points instead of the dang metagame.
- agogdog 5y agoWhere the hell can you even go online these days to avoid metrics? Maybe we should also be asking more of social media companies that know what these metrics are doing to us.
- bt1a 5y agoI, too, might be upset enough to ragequit Twitter if my most popular post was that & I believed my other posts were profound.
- causality0 5y agoYou hit the nail on the head. I don't have a good name for it, but this submission falls into one of HN's top ten tropes: Technology/startup blogger stumbles into mild internet fame for a single event/post, and then later feels the need to wax philosophical about it. That'd be fine, except none of them ever have anything original to say about it. Literally all of them boil down to "I didn't really enjoy getting my ten million likes, and social media is bad for me."
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI think it's because if you get a wildly viral post you quickly realize that it doesn't mean anything, you just got lucky. You need to go viral multiple times for it to make a significant impact, and I think people also realize that they just don't give a shit about growing an audience and wonder why they're wasting their time.
- noizejoy 5y agoIt seems very difficult for many (most?) of us to accept that outlier events in our lives are generally more random good or bad luck, rather than something caused by our actions.
- polynomial 5y agoWell, if they are not "content creators" they may not give a shit, but the whole thing (ie game) is to become a (successful) content creator.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoSure, but like I said, you need to go viral multiple times for it to matter. Going viral for a single piece of content is just a flash in the pan. It's way harder to be a "content creator" than people think.
- causality0 5y agoWhich begs the question, why do they hit the front page so often? What's the allure? Do readers expect to find anything except mild disillusionment and a faux-deep revelation that spending fourteen hours a day staring at a screen is bad for your mental health?
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI think the allure is that a large number of people haven't had something go viral are in awe/impressed, and they probably don't realize that this stuff is extremely luck based.
- Gigablah 5y agoThere's also the allure of retreating from the unwashed masses back to their solitary perch on top of their very, very high horse.
- xvector 5y agoExactly this. I feel like this blog post just feeds into HN’s superiority complex. Let people have fun
- 5- 5y agooriginal tweet (2015): https://twitter.com/neilknet/status/634448062040162304 https://twitter.com/neilknet/status/634448062040162304 (absolutely irrelevant to the discussion, but someone had to do this)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chris_wot 5y agoI think I managed to get to the point if not caring when I stated to right about Australian women on Wikipedia. Once I wrote an article about Ellen Atkinson, I realised the content was key, not the games. I already knew that, of course. I now write under another account. Hopefully I remain anonymous. If I get famous or respected under this account, I’ll create a new one where I’m not recognised.
- codeulike 5y agoCan someone explain it? How does it relate to the Mandalorian?
- sodality2 5y agoThe tweet caption- https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a29888972/the-mandalorian-this-is-the-way/ https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a29888972/the-manda...
- mcphage 5y ago“This is the way” was his text for the tweet. It’s a repeated line on The Mandalorian.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago“This is the way” is a mantra of the Mandalorians.
- sleepybrett 5y agoOf a specific cult/group/religion of mandalorians, 'The Children of the Watch'. It is brought up in season 2 by Bo Katan that not all mandalorians follow those practices.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoBut the other ones also say it out of respect? I’m surprised how much I am enjoying the show, but I wish they hadn’t showed us his face in season 1.
- sleepybrett 5y agoMaybe, the children of the watch are a subgroup of 'Death Watch' if I have my lore right (primarily concerned with 'foundlings' or adopted war orphans). Deathwatch was a much bigger deal around the end of the clone war. I think 'Clone Wars' covers them pretty well, however I've never fished through all of it to find the episodes to complete the storyline. At one point they pledge themselves to Darth Maul and take over Mandalore for a time. The Mandalorians that Din Djarin primarily concerns himself with in season 1 are all children of the watch. I'm not sure that you ever hear it uttered by Bo-Katan or her friends or Boba Fett, who are not children. However Bo-Katan was part of Death Watch before she broke away with her Nite Owls, so if it was a Death Watch thing she may have uttered in during season 2.. I don't recall.
- motohagiography 5y agoSuper useful observation that the metrics are the addiction. > Metrics are an addictive drug. Twitter is literally an incremental game. This comes up in the Nir Eyal "Hooked" model, but Eyal spends chapters outlining it, where the author here captures it as the main thing. Watch the number go up, get little hits of dopamine. It's gambling, trading/investing, SEO, literally anything with an 1/f distribution. (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/1/f_noise http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/1/f_noise) I'd wonder if you could drive engagement on an app by spacing out the arrival of user alerts and feedback so they only reached the user with a delay/period that was hidden, but detectable in the same sense of anticipation music creates. Seems like an unethical experiment, and probably hidden in the annals of FAANG companies.
- carrolldunham 5y ago>I'd wonder if you could drive engagement on an app by spacing out the arrival of user alerts I'm pretty sure twitter does this, for this reason. When you login you have no notifications. Aw. But then after you click around a bit... ding ding - you get the ones that happened while you were logged out. You could say it has to load them in the background. I don't buy it. The sensation is too close to what you described. A pause then a hit
- quotemstr 5y agoMore likely, the delayed notification thing was originally some kind of bug, and the bug fix tanked metrics, so they reverted the fix. I'm sure there was no conscious and deliberate effort to psychologically manipulate the user, but laser-guided metrics hill-climbing can produce the same thing without any one person deciding to do it.
- nate_meurer 5y ago> I'm sure there was no conscious and deliberate effort to psychologically manipulate the user Totally. Social media corporations would never do that.
- sharkjacobs 5y agoTake the social dynamics and mechanisms which have caused class clowns to seek attention from groups since time immemorial, and gamify it with a feedback mechanism which will dole out little hits of dopamine periodically for the rest of the day/week whenever you check the device and the number has gone up There's nothing profound about addiction but it's no less real and momentous in the life of afflicted for that
- ALittleLight 5y agoI used to have a small YouTube channel. Still do, I guess, but don't update it. One of my videos was very different than all my others and it did, for me, very well. This video earned something like 700k views compared to my average of high hundreds to low thousands. Like this author, my video was something different than I usually did. Unlike this author my thought was "I've got to start making more content like that new thing!" However, my approach kind of killed my channel. The reason my video did well turned out to be because a minor YouTuber (significantly more major than me) linked to it and almost all of the views came from him. He never linked to my other videos so when I made similar content it didn't do very well. When I went back to making my old content that did worse than before too. My mental model was that I had alienated my original audience with the shift to the new kind of videos and then alienated my new audience with the return to the old kind of videos. In the end, I felt that the random spike in views, and my poor handling of it, ruined my channel and reversed the modest momentum I had built over years. I used to have small but growing numbers of views and subscribers. After this incident I had declining numbers of both.
- dale_glass 5y agoI'm curious now. What was your original theme, and what was the popular video?
- ALittleLight 5y agoI originally was discussing social and political issues I was interested in. My approach was looking at academic research or government reports and putting their findings into the context of my personal political beliefs. The popular video - I just happened to notice on YouTube that someone completely unrelated was lying about something. They were faking a technical issue and accusing a company of something. I made a video that proved the original was a fake and explained how they did it. When my new video exploded in popularity I thought "debunking" was the way to go. I also had the problems that I didn't really know any other similar fakes to debunk, so I probably picked things that were either too obvious or I'd pick things that turned out to be legit so far as I could tell and just share my results on that. I've since removed my attempts at debunking and even my popular video from my channel. Didn't undo the damage though. (Also possible my channel was failing for other reasons not related. It was never clear to me how the algorithm worked).
- gjs278 5y agoauthor needs to get over themselves
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoJust as there are some people who seem to be remarkably resistant to e.g. opiate addiction, I find myself wondering if there are people who are resistant to whatever mechanism drives the "addiction" to social media (particularly likes). My wife does way more conventional social media than me (given that I never use FB or Insta, that's not hard), but as far as I can tell she's fairly impervious to the whole ratings game. For her, it really is just a communication mechanism. I'm not 100% sure about this, but fairly sure. Maybe we're just hearing about the majority (?) of humans that get helplessly trapped in this stuff, causing us to ignore the minority who can dip and out of it with ease.
- bogota 5y agoIt would be interesting to take a random sample of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter users and remove the ability to see likes for a few months and see what engagement and post frequency looks like. I have a feeling the companies might already know.
- Barrin92 5y agoWell you can I guess for a rough estimate compare your own use of say HN to websites with gamified mechanisms. From my own experience with Reddit HN is considerably less addictive and I attribute it to a large degree to the lack of instant notifications, the plain design and the diminished visibility of up- and downvotes.
- mardifoufs 5y agoUp here in Canada we already can't see likes on Instagram posts and I'm not sure I've seen any difference w. r. t content posted (even from mainly local accs that only deal with a Canadian audience)
- bogota 5y agoCan’t see the number of likes or can’t see that it is liked at all? I have a feeling removing the number helps but I know a few people who like to scroll through all the likes they get.
- floatingatoll 5y agoWhen I proposed a couple years ago (2019) that we remove all karma integers from the HN website for a week to see if the quality of the site would improve or worsen, people argued that it should be something they can opt out of. The most common argument I remember was “I need unread counts to know if a topic is worth reading”, which suggests the early stages of addiction to high positive integers that we’re seeing on every other site. Have we come around yet to agreeing that all like counts are harmful — whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN? Because I’d love to see what HN is like when people participate based on the content rather than the integers. (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267
- IggleSniggle 5y agoIt’s funny, but the only reason I care about my HN count is because it’s my only indication that someone has responded to something I’ve said, so when I notice my count has changed, I go glance at my comments section to see if someone has said something in response.
- Nadya 5y agoIf you use a Chromium-based browser this extension [0] was posted not too long ago on Show HN and I've been using it since. It is a more accurate way of seeing replies to your posts since not everyone votes before replying. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifications/bbkfblhdgiddlkfkipjdhhfoephonoba https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...
- IggleSniggle 5y agoGreat suggestion, but unfortunately I almost exclusively on iOS when on HN.
- saagarjha 5y agoI've used https://www.hnreplies.com/ https://www.hnreplies.com/ for a couple of years and it's served me well.
- SLWW 5y agoWhile i appreciate the premise and absolutely agree with the author. The fact that it goes straight from, "I made a dumb tweet that people liked." to "it's an addiction" was a jarring transition. This is one of those few times where more information would have made me get through it the first time without having to re-read, i felt like I missed something. Not being too critical or anything; i appreciated the views expressed. Though the twitter logo is still visible at the bottom of the page.. so will our dear writer stick to this conviction i know not.
- j4yav 5y agoThe middle bit that triggered the author’s disgust was “that was not a unique thought of my own but just echoing memes, and apparently this is what the community sees as value” I personally at least sort of disagree but I can understand the reaction. I.e., is peak Twitter just an kind of skinner box full of people with their brains turned off, echoing memes to each other in exchange for hits of dopamine, while ads play softly in the background?
- don-code 5y agoThe author here has a good point. Social media may encourage us to write in summary. My tweet can go viral if it's funny and captures an emotion - here, that product requirements suffer as soon as making progress becomes difficult. It's something that everyone here can likely empathize with. I don't even disagree with the author's conclusion, that he needed to stop encouraging this sort of behavior in his daily life. However, I do disagree that it's the only conclusion to be made here. There was definitely a missed opportunity to take this further. Now that you're being watched because of the witty thing, you have some more influence and eyes on you than you might have yesterday. What better time to capitalize on the moment, and write a short piece about the problem of requirements drift itself? Some may learn something from it; others may get a feel for someone else's viewpoint. I could write that piece myself now, but without a hook and followers, it's just a diatribe on a blog that nobody reads.
- jackcosgrove 5y agoI participate in other forums (not pointing a finger at HN) and I've noticed that my posts that might best be described as "pithy one-liners" do way better than long posts that I put a more work and sometimes research into. I think this is why Twitter is successful.
- planet-and-halo 5y agoThe fact that our political discourse is laundered through a medium that encourages the meme-ification of everything and thoughtless, emotional responses is a disaster.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jancsika 5y agoI understand how people get addicted to Twitter. But I don't understand why people started casually using Twitter in the first place. It looks like someone took web forum progenitors of HN, asked how they could possibly make them worse, then arrived at the epiphany of optimizing for greyed-out content. Edit: clarification
- polynomial 5y agoIt seems to me it's not too different from other media; optimize for controversial and encourage polarization, which leads to more engagement. Ezra Klein extends this thesis to describe group identification, but at its basis it just seems to be about heightening tension. Of course if it's a black box algorithm, we may not know its parameters, but are only able to guess what they may be.
- jancsika 5y agoThe algorithm doesn't matter-- we can see the results of it filling otherwise reasonable people with vinegar and shaking them up. E.g., Glenn Greenwald-- who won a Pulitzer and civilly debated both Michael Hayden and a former Bush-era drug czar-- has tweets where the content is, "Fuck you." What is the point, and why does that attract users in the first place? At least with Facebook it really did connect boomers with long lost boomers from summer camp.
- ribs 5y ago“Petrichor” The rest of the content of this post Come on This guy is just too far up his own wazoo.
- paxys 5y agoFWIW I don't think the Tweet referenced is dumb. It might not have taken much effort to create, but it is funny, easily digestible and presents a situation that a ton of professionals can relate to. Humor is situational and often counterintuitive. There is no formula for a good joke, and staying up till 3am trying to draft a successful Tweet is the exact wrong way to do it. While I am glad the author recognized the problem, writing a semi-pretentious blog post about it and posting it on HN for further validation rather than just switching off his computer tells me that he isn't out of the woods just yet.
- GuB-42 5y agoThe "dumb" part is that neither the graph nor the quote are his. He just slapped the two together and it made a hit. He brought little value to the joke. But that's how memes work, they mutate, evolve, and what he did was he introduced a slight mutation in the original joke that helped its spread. Maybe his Twitter account also has the right connections.
- garbagetime 5y agoI'm not seeing how that's dumb.
- alanbernstein 5y agoHe didn't actually call it "dumb", rather "my dumbest". Maybe compare to his other tweets for context.
- my_usernam3 5y agoI think "dumb" in text form might be the wrong word. In conversation this would sound normal to me. Given the blog post of what he is talking about, "dumbest" sounds better than "my super simple joke I thought of and made in a few minutes". Ironically, I think he partly considers it "dumbest" because he didn't overthink it... like I'm doing to the author's use of "dumbest" hehe.
- 5y ago
- karaterobot 5y ago> Twitter does not use me any more. I use Twitter. I use it logged out. I use it intentionally, and on the schedule I set, and for the duration I choose... That is to be celebrated, for sure! But, I have to say: an even healthier relationship to something you think is fundamentally bad is to not engage with it at all. Twitter is totally optional and voluntary; you don't need to negotiate on how little you use it, you can just quit.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoI clicked into his Twitter account. He currently has 1477 followers, so that gives some context. He probably usually doesn't see much traction with his tweets and for him this was a huge spike in activity. That kind of immense social attention, even for something as minor as a tweet, can really get to some people. And they can wonder how to replicate, where they went right -- or wrong -- etc. For people who have a lot more followers than that, they might not feel so derailed by a tweet going viral in a big way like that.
- oblib 5y agoThat's a pretty interesting take on the subject for me. I've never used Twitter much myself. Not quite, but pretty close to not at all. I love a good quip but that's not something I'd spend a lot of time looking for or working on trying to conceive and that's about all it's good for. I can see how it'd be useful for short announcements with links to details but HN is a lot better than Twitter for that (for me). But more to the point, the notion of the false sense of achievement that getting "retweets" and "views" and "comments" made it feel like "junk food" to me, with an added dash of fandom, which I also can't do. I am not a "fan" and don't want or need fans. Twitter offers the chance for anyone to be "famous". That's it's most appealing feature. I learned early on that anonymity is highly underrated in our culture. Those attributes of the platform seem to be exactly what the author experienced so it's interesting to read about how they got there.
- jollybean 5y agoWe are only scratching the surface of our understanding of social media addiction. I think that aside from content, debate, having an opinion - there is the views/fame concept. Conan O'Brian said "fame is more addictive and destructive than heroin, and we wouldn't give heroin to children would we?" in reference to the challenges child stars go through. The addiction of attention I think is overwhelming - it starts with a viral bit of this or that - a new mom on TikTok with videos of her cute kid getting millions of views ... but it grows into an addiction, increasing disruption of daily activities in search of views until for many it seems to consume people. The overlap of people's actual lives with the content creation, the fact there doesn't seem to be hard boundaries is particularly difficult. I see most casual content creators with 10K-1M followers almost like pack-a-day smokers, wondering how they deal with all of it.
- sundvor 5y agoGreat writing, kudos. I loved how the last part of the article linked with the "dumb tweet" in the end, with a much healthier perspective.
- da39a3ee 5y agoI'm very conscious of the fact that to some people twitter is highly attractive and somewhat addictive whereas to others (including myself) it doesn't seem to appeal at all; or rather, I have a nagging feeling that maybe I should try to like it because it might be good for me in the same way that giving more presentations at work might be good for me. I guess I suspect that it is correlated with some quite important structure in human personality space.
- m3at 5y ago> Social media are the Trojans at the gates of your mind. Their wooden horse is magnificent. It glistens with all of the fittest memes. I let those Trojans into the fortress of my mind, and it was a mistake. In the true spirit of social media, let me miss the point and note that the Trojans are inside the fortress (the Achaeans are at the gate). Good post though.
- freetime2 5y ago> I've turned off all of the numbers with Calm Twitter by Yusuke Saitoh. I could not give a rat's ass how many likes I get. It's amazing. I am curious to see if he is able to handle being on the front page of HN, with potentially record amounts of traffic being sent to his blog, without getting hooked again. If it was me I would probably be up late at night refreshing my analytics page instead of sleeping. And then wake up the next morning with a strong sense of self-loathing knowing that the day was going to be an unproductive one due to lack of sleep.
- nicbou 5y agoI stopped using analytics on my blog. It helps.
- satisfice 5y agoIt’s not a dumb tweet. It a little boring, sure. Not much of an insight, really. But my god there are so many actually idiotic tweets out there... this is actually an 90th percentile tweet.
- pizza 5y agoBasically you are not going to be able to shift a ton of people’s worldviews by a ton of bits towards any particular new worldview/perspective/probability distribution. But you can probably shift people’s worldview over the course of years, with a small followership, if you consistently get demonstrated popularity/interaction feedback, because people can’t help but pick up on when others get consistent attention and then they start to be more open to what you have to say. Dumb stuff doesn’t stick, it flies.
- black_puppydog 5y ago> Twitter is useful. It is a tool, like a pencil, or an axe. I think this is a common misconception and having it makes people put undue blame on themselves for "misusing" twitter. Of course, one can go the way the author did here, and I would recommend it. But to make this a problem of personal responsibility of every individual is to misunderstand the problem at hand. Social media platforms are not tools. They are active agents. An axe doesn't show you notifications of the most attractive wood blocks if you don't use it for too long. A pencil doesn't roll onto your notepad to tempt you to doodle. These are truly tools, and if you misuse them it is indeed your fault and nobody else's. If you get hooked to social media, that is exactly the intention of a system that is actively pushing for that result. If we realize that, then we can take actions against it beyond the individual.
- eimrine 5y agoSo funny that I can not read the content of the tweet because Twitter dropped support of operamini.jar and the tweet has not been quoted in the article.