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This is the sad truth for many things that go "viral". If you are a creator or trying to sell an online product and you have scruples about this sort of thing,

This is the sad truth for many things that go "viral". If you are a creator or trying to sell an online product and you have scruples about this sort of thing, you are inherently working at a disadvantage. They allow steroids in this league and everybody who isn't taking them is almost certainly a loser by default.

riazrizvi 3y ago
People don’t realize just how many books and blogs, websites, apps and open source projects are out there. What’s going to happen on day one, most likely, is that the only entities that will view your works will be bots, scraping for content to train off. If you think you won’t succeed because you just refuse to buy likes, I think you’re still way off the mark. You need to release to a market, that you directly engage with. Releasing into the void is a mostly self-serving exercise.
- paxys 3y ago
  I think this can be further generalized as – advertising and marketing are as important as building the product itself. Too many people (especially engineers) think that if you create something that is 10% better than the existing mainstream solution then the entire user base will flock to you overnight, but in reality no one will care because no one will know about it.
  - fitnessrunner 3y ago
    Not only that, but even if I *do* know about it, I still won't want to use it. I already know the old mainstream thing. 10% efficiency gains isn't enough for me to invest my limited time in learning a new tool, platform, data model, etc. 70%, 80%? Maybe then, but I'd still be suspicious. What usually does cause me to adopt something new is 2+ co-worker / colleague recommendations. For example, I would never have started using k9s until 2+ colleagues started to hound me to stop typing out kubectl commands and to switch to k9s ASAP.
    - pizzaknife 3y ago
      just being a stickler here but 10% is probably enough
      - colinchartier 3y ago
        Paul Graham would say for exponential growth, 10x better is the bar
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        If it's consistently 10% better, and every other aspect remains the same.
  - aio2 3y ago
    This is really important. One of my friends worked in a startup, an online retail store similar to Amazon, and it came out before Amazon) but the marketing wasn't there, so that service failed. Nobody knew about it, so it didn't make any profit. Great concept? Absolutely! Look at Amazon today.
TheCapn 3y ago
I have a friend who basically kickstarted his entire career by boosting posts on Reddit with bots he ran. I won't knock his talent, he's a brilliant engineer, but I 100% believe he's gotten where his is in life because he knows how to play the game properly. Heck, getting his indie business off the ground is only one of several examples he's admitted to me of using Tor networks and bots to boost his ranking in competitions or sites like reddit/twitter/etc.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Funny you should mention Reddit, because IIRC Reddit itself started with first-party bots pretending to be users, manufacturing "social proof" to cheat around initial user acquisition hurdles.
  - evandale 3y ago
    You recalled correctly! Huffman isn't shy about it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
    - arp242 3y ago
      This is a very old trick; the Nazi party started their membership numbers at 500 to make it appear they had more members. A certain failed Austrian painter had membership number 555.
  - throw_m239339 3y ago
    > Funny you should mention Reddit, because IIRC Reddit itself started with first-party bots pretending to be users, manufacturing "social proof" to cheat around initial user acquisition hurdles. "started"? They are still doing that today to inflate their user count...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
  Maybe any game where the "proper" way to play involves dishonesty and sociopathic behavior isn't one we should be structuring society around, and therefore we really shouldn't be trying to play it in the first place.
faeriechangling 3y ago
Yes and no. To give an example, people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those people by using YouTube’s analytics to crush the algorithm. Also as you scale up, the less viable the strategy becomes due to risk of exposure. The idea that any creator or advertiser NOT buying views is “almost certainly a loser by default” is an exaggeration.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those people by using YouTube’s analytics to crush the algorithm. This... doesn't sound much better. In some sense, it's buying view with extra steps. Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content.
  - koonsolo 3y ago
    "Quality content" is decided by YouTube's algorithm (viewer retention etc). So no in the end, the winner of the algorithm is the one creating the "quality content". Or in other words, if your viewer retention is terrible, it's probably because your videos are just not that good.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    >Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content. If you scrape away the abstractions for a second, what you will find is Mr. Beast used data to tailor his videos to get his viewers to watch lots of ads and buy lots of products and love his videos and become repeat customers. Mr. Beast is rather transparent about all of this. If you think he’s a creepy manipulative guy, you just don’t watch his content. The whole thing with buying engagement is that you’re confusing the signal. Instead of coming through the legitimate channel where you openly pay for advertising, you intentionally deceive people, you make it just a little bit harder for the poorer and unconnected to achieve social mobility, you pollute a useful signal with false data, and you do a large number of things which annoy netizens in particular. All I’m just saying, is that there’s more than one path to be successful. I know people who used cert dumps on the pretence that everybody else is doing it and they won’t put themselves behind, and I know others who literally just did the work and it really didn’t take THAT long in the grand scheme of things and they actually came away having learned something useful at the end of the day. Both kinds of person succeeded.
wnevets 3y ago
It used to be called "growth hacking".

riazrizvi 3y ago

People don’t realize just how many books and blogs, websites, apps and open source projects are out there. What’s going to happen on day one, most likely, is that the only entities that will view your works will be bots, scraping for content to train off. If you think you won’t succeed because you just refuse to buy likes, I think you’re still way off the mark. You need to release to a market, that you directly engage with. Releasing into the void is a mostly self-serving exercise.

paxys 3y ago
I think this can be further generalized as – advertising and marketing are as important as building the product itself. Too many people (especially engineers) think that if you create something that is 10% better than the existing mainstream solution then the entire user base will flock to you overnight, but in reality no one will care because no one will know about it.
- fitnessrunner 3y ago
  Not only that, but even if I *do* know about it, I still won't want to use it. I already know the old mainstream thing. 10% efficiency gains isn't enough for me to invest my limited time in learning a new tool, platform, data model, etc. 70%, 80%? Maybe then, but I'd still be suspicious. What usually does cause me to adopt something new is 2+ co-worker / colleague recommendations. For example, I would never have started using k9s until 2+ colleagues started to hound me to stop typing out kubectl commands and to switch to k9s ASAP.
  - pizzaknife 3y ago
    just being a stickler here but 10% is probably enough
    - colinchartier 3y ago
      Paul Graham would say for exponential growth, 10x better is the bar
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      If it's consistently 10% better, and every other aspect remains the same.
- aio2 3y ago
  This is really important. One of my friends worked in a startup, an online retail store similar to Amazon, and it came out before Amazon) but the marketing wasn't there, so that service failed. Nobody knew about it, so it didn't make any profit. Great concept? Absolutely! Look at Amazon today.

TheCapn 3y ago

I have a friend who basically kickstarted his entire career by boosting posts on Reddit with bots he ran. I won't knock his talent, he's a brilliant engineer, but I 100% believe he's gotten where his is in life because he knows how to play the game properly. Heck, getting his indie business off the ground is only one of several examples he's admitted to me of using Tor networks and bots to boost his ranking in competitions or sites like reddit/twitter/etc.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Funny you should mention Reddit, because IIRC Reddit itself started with first-party bots pretending to be users, manufacturing "social proof" to cheat around initial user acquisition hurdles.
- evandale 3y ago
  You recalled correctly! Huffman isn't shy about it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
  - arp242 3y ago
    This is a very old trick; the Nazi party started their membership numbers at 500 to make it appear they had more members. A certain failed Austrian painter had membership number 555.
- throw_m239339 3y ago
  > Funny you should mention Reddit, because IIRC Reddit itself started with first-party bots pretending to be users, manufacturing "social proof" to cheat around initial user acquisition hurdles. "started"? They are still doing that today to inflate their user count...
AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
Maybe any game where the "proper" way to play involves dishonesty and sociopathic behavior isn't one we should be structuring society around, and therefore we really shouldn't be trying to play it in the first place.

faeriechangling 3y ago

Yes and no. To give an example, people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those people by using YouTube’s analytics to crush the algorithm. Also as you scale up, the less viable the strategy becomes due to risk of exposure. The idea that any creator or advertiser NOT buying views is “almost certainly a loser by default” is an exaggeration.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those people by using YouTube’s analytics to crush the algorithm. This... doesn't sound much better. In some sense, it's buying view with extra steps. Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content.
- koonsolo 3y ago
  "Quality content" is decided by YouTube's algorithm (viewer retention etc). So no in the end, the winner of the algorithm is the one creating the "quality content". Or in other words, if your viewer retention is terrible, it's probably because your videos are just not that good.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  >Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content. If you scrape away the abstractions for a second, what you will find is Mr. Beast used data to tailor his videos to get his viewers to watch lots of ads and buy lots of products and love his videos and become repeat customers. Mr. Beast is rather transparent about all of this. If you think he’s a creepy manipulative guy, you just don’t watch his content. The whole thing with buying engagement is that you’re confusing the signal. Instead of coming through the legitimate channel where you openly pay for advertising, you intentionally deceive people, you make it just a little bit harder for the poorer and unconnected to achieve social mobility, you pollute a useful signal with false data, and you do a large number of things which annoy netizens in particular. All I’m just saying, is that there’s more than one path to be successful. I know people who used cert dumps on the pretence that everybody else is doing it and they won’t put themselves behind, and I know others who literally just did the work and it really didn’t take THAT long in the grand scheme of things and they actually came away having learned something useful at the end of the day. Both kinds of person succeeded.

wnevets 3y ago

It used to be called "growth hacking".