12 ms·

First, make me care

813 points by andsoitis 10mo ago

arjie 10mo ago
This insight is what caused the rise of the clickbait headline and its predecessors in eras past. You need a hook or there's no point reading the tale.
DeathArrow 10mo ago
This is even more true for public speaking. Try to hook people from the start.
huhkerrf 10mo ago
"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.
- some_furry 10mo ago
  Know your audience: Technical people want the details. Most people aren't technical.
- sublinear 10mo ago
  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.
- acc077877 10mo ago
  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
- furyofantares 10mo ago
  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.
simonw 10mo ago
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. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.
- PeterStuer 10mo ago
  "You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever" Biology tends to disagree.
- sublinear 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - simonw 10mo ago
    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/7517727101923953943 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/7598189362823695638 https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
    - sublinear 10mo ago
      Opinions of what's "weird and fun" can vary a lot. I find this stuff about as appealing as watching AI-generated Queen Elizabeth fight Stephen Hawking, or someone sneaking into Chernobyl to practice their parkour. I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does everyone else who avoids TikTok.
OtherShrezzing 10mo ago
This was quite a good article. It could have been excellent if it answered its own hook somewhere the piece though. I came away not having a resolution to the hook - violating the articles second principle.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
makeitrain 10mo ago
I can’t click on any links on pages (the header works). Using brave on iPhone. Firefox and Safari works…
skybrian 10mo ago
Suppose you fed this article into an LLM, along with whatever other documents you had, and asked it to come up with some good candidates for opening sentences? And picked one, and let it take it from there? I assume you'd get a mess, but it might be an interesting mess.
bondarchuk 10mo ago
I think "Just… start with the interesting part first" is quite different, and actually much better advice than "make me care". I'm more than done with stupid hooks and attention grabbing techniques, just plainly and honestly state at the outset what the point is of what will follow.
- marginalia_nu 10mo ago
  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.
  - sothatsit 10mo ago
    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.
    - bondarchuk 10mo ago
      I don't know. It's almost universally assumed to be true that "making someone want to read on" is inherently good but IMO it's not. Why is it good to be "more motivated to jump into it"? If a plain description and some context does not motivate you, it would be better to spend your time elsewhere.
      - sothatsit 10mo ago
        I prefer reading interesting stories to textbooks. It's that simple. If all you want to read is textbook entries, then you are an outlier.
treetalker 10mo ago
Zeroth, proofread.
- swiftcoder 10mo ago
  Eh, if your hook is interesting and your writing is generally solid, I'm not about to begrudge a few typos
  - jfengel 10mo ago
    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.
isoprophlex 10mo ago
This article succeeded spectacularly in making me want to know all there is to know about medieval Venice, that's for sure.
- skybrian 10mo ago
  It's really too bad it's not a quote from an actual book.
treelover 10mo ago
"When writing, your first job is this: First, make me care." It really depends on who the audience is...
- bravura 10mo ago
  Understanding your audience is your first job as a writer or communicator. Speaking to them and making them care is job two.
  - wtetzner 10mo ago
    Ideally you wouldn't need to make them care. Just give them enough information up front for them to determine if they care.
tines 10mo ago
I have often thought that all good fiction is mystery. This is obviously an overstatement, but I think it’s not too far off. Humans are mystery solvers. If I don’t have a compelling mystery to solve—something like the “what’s going on beneath the surface in this town?” that David Lynch does so well—when I’m reading your book or watching your tv show or playing your game, I’m usually out unless I have a strong prior interest (which simply means that I brought my own mystery).
- Frotag 10mo ago
  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.
  - tines 10mo ago
    It could definitely be my systems-oriented writing. May I ask what your profession is? I’m a software engineer.
    - Frotag 10mo ago
      Same, code monkey. But mostly fromt end these days.
pcrh 10mo ago
The hook was great, but article was mediocre. I glazed over at the mention of LLMs in the second paragraph, skimming the article through to the end didn't improve things. If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...
zkmon 10mo ago
> When writing, first, make the reader care, one way or another. Because if I am not hooked by the first screen, I will probably not keep reading—no matter how good the rest of it is! Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing. This artificial goal pollutes the connection between writer and reader. It makes them buyer and seller and rewards sales tactics. You don't write for the reader. You write for yourself first. Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it about as much you do.
- ofalkaed 10mo ago
  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.
- BeetleB 10mo ago
  > 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.
svilen_dobrev 10mo ago
aaand, how to apply this technique to a CV? prepending a one-liner-about-some-feat that might interest that particular company, before the usual cv afterthat? hmm. made me think..
firefoxd 10mo ago
I wrote my story and titled it, "My experience at work with an automated HR system". I sent it to a few friends, only a couple of them read it. A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew up! I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book is that you know the punch line before you even pick up a copy. A boy is stuck with a bengal tiger in a boat. Now that the punch line is out of the way, the story has time to unfold and be interesting in its own merit. That's what I was trying to recreate with my own story.
- stephenbez 10mo ago
  "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 https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
  - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    The Machine Fired Me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 - June 2018 (554 comments)
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
  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.
  - cindyllm 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - nicbou 10mo ago
    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-behind-the-strange-story https://fenwick.media/rewild/magazine/dead-broets-society-be...
oncallthrow 10mo ago
This didn’t make me care
- jfengel 10mo ago
  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.
tolerance 10mo ago
You know I’ve never read an article by Gwern that made me feel like he was sensitive to this idea, one that in my head essentially breaks down to the use of narrative and the leverage of “stakes” that inform the reader of kinds of conflict that make a narrative special. I’m reminded of a remark made by 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. Instead your writing has to evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue. A lot of writers are tainted by the expectations set in grade school. Write for a grade and good writing is what yields a good grade according to the standards set by the subject which often is not ‘Composition’ but more like ‘Prove to me that you remember everything we mentioned in class about the French Revolution’. I’ve never felt drawn into an article by Gwern at least not in the way that I have been by some writing by Maciej Cegłowski, for example. Reading Gwern I am both overwhelmed by the adornments to the text (hyperlinks, pop-ups, margin notes; other hypertext doodads and portals) and underwhelmed by the substance of the text itself. I don’t consider Paul Graham a literary griot either. But I find that his own prose is bolstered by a kind of clarity and asceticism that is informative and not entirely void of good style and form. Lawrence McEnery of the University of the Chicago contributed a lot of good thinking to this kind of stuff though. This wasn’t meant to be a criticism of the author of this post’s own work. But here that’s how it’s left. I haven’t come across any writing of his that’s as intriguing as "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” seems. If anyone has any recommendations, do share.
- wetpaws 10mo ago
  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.
  - 1dom 10mo ago
    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.
underdeserver 10mo ago
Probably should be marked (2025).
- zahlman 10mo ago
  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.
tpoacher 10mo ago
Counterpoint. People our so tired of sensational intros and baiting questions which bury the actual lede up to the point where you discover it requires an annual subscription to find out the actual answer, that now it's actually counterproductive to start with an interesting "question". It's facts first or gtfo. Prove to me that I'm not going to waste my time until you deliver what you promised, by delivering enough of that relevant background up front, otherwise I don't have time for your shenanigans.
- marginalia_nu 10mo ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
  - wtetzner 10mo ago
    > 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.
Jap2-0 10mo ago
Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question: - They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult - They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply - Fish - They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats (note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)
- eulgro 10mo ago
  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.
- Animats 10mo ago
  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.
  - BurningFrog 10mo ago
    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)
- mdnahas 10mo ago
  It is a recurring phenomenon. Venice, Netherlands, and today Singapore. Small countries without resources and, hence, needing trade. They become open trading hubs and grow. Sadly, countries with a single easy-to-harvest resource —- like oil, gold, or gems —— are more likely to become closed dictatorships.
  - tetromino_ 10mo ago
    > 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.
yetihehe 10mo ago
And thus "question-bait" was born.
blauditore 10mo ago
I disagree with the stated examples and literally quit reading there.
seydor 10mo ago
10 reasons why clickbait is good for you: 1)
fukukitaru 10mo ago
Chuunibyou-tier slop.
mvkel 10mo ago
This seems like a cheap trick to hook someone into a blog post (ironically, Gwern seems to disregard this almost universally). If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post. Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead... Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment. Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...
- jodrellblank 10mo ago
  Chapter I: IN WHICH PHILEAS FOGG AND PASSEPARTOUT ACCEPT EACH OTHER, THE ONE AS MASTER, THE OTHER AS MAN Chapter II: IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT IS CONVINCED THAT HE HAS AT LAST FOUND HIS IDEAL Chapter III: IN WHICH A CONVERSATION TAKES PLACE WHICH SEEMS LIKELY TO COST PHILEAS FOGG DEAR - https://www.online-literature.com/verne/aroundtheworld/ https://www.online-literature.com/verne/aroundtheworld/
otikik 10mo ago
Careful with this advice. If you max it out you end up with "You won't believe the weird trick that the city of Venice did to feed itself"
- julianeon 10mo ago
  This article is just a slightly upscale version of the million "YouTube hooks" videos you can find on, well, you know. Down to the "create a gap" advice. Once upon a time "one weird trick" was good advice too, before it got ran into the ground.
  - directevolve 10mo ago
    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.”
firasd 10mo ago
I'm beginning to think that origin stories are an underrated way to find these angles. Like why exactly did you start thinking about this topic. I guess the recipe bloggers were on to this with their long rambles about where they first tried this dish (albeit it may have been for SEO too...)
danderedandolo 10mo ago
Know your audience is right, and Gwern misses the most interesting thing about Venice- that it was a merchantile Republic with reasonable independance from the Catholic Church. Lots of the political ideas which influenced British and American democracy came from the Italian city states. Ruskin's Stones of Venice and Bowsma's "Venice and the defense of republican liberty" capture this well, as do parts of Quentin Skinner's "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought."
PeterWhittaker 10mo ago
Perhaps I am too much of a curmudgeon, but the example first sentence made me not care at all - not about Venice, but about the writer's approach, which seems to want to conjure breathless mystery about something I could easily look up on Wikipedia (or read in tl;dr comments in this thread). It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you? A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied. Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.
dvrp 10mo ago
Care is the most important trait of people who make great things; it's not money or time. Is not even skill. I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a project inside their personal website was not working. I told him my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and it was working on his local machine. A few hours after the interview, the project was online. The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing, and yes, software engineering. That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such that I don't feel I was just scammed. It's all the same. Lack of care. I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.
atmosx 10mo ago
Adrian Wooldridge (the Economist) in "Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World" argues, rather successfully IMO, that what made Venice the maritime super-power was meritocracy. Indeed, he argues, that the fall of the Venitian empire came swiftly when the Doge was forced to place only Venitians (birthright) to top positions, instead of the most "capable". Hence the available talent pool shrunk. The book makes for a fine read IMO: https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern-World/dp/1510768610 https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern... ps. this book came out as a response to Michael Sandell's "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" which was a best seller at the time.
oytis 10mo ago
So how did Venice maintain its dominance?
imoreno 10mo ago
There's a spectrum of writing, corresponding to supply/demand or push/pull. The article is giving advice for oversupplied writing, where the audience doesn't really want to hear you, and you're trying to badger it into reading it anyway - typically, for some sort of personal gain (getting an interview, making a sale, promoting a political cause). Yes, attention hacking is important in this case. There is also a writing where people are looking for the information, and they are showing up at your door because they already care. Presumably you wrote, because you saw the open question, and want to try answering it. History books, encyclopedias, classic literature by dead people, falls under this. Ironically, so does the example of Venice - you would read about Venice if you were already curious; there is little profit in "making someone care" about Venice otherwise. An attention grabby style would be forced and counterproductive in this.
deadbabe 10mo ago
I hate this. Basically it’s saying use constant clickbait to keep your reader reading. Increasingly, readers don’t have time for this shit. Be direct, and if the reader doesn’t care, they were never meant to be your reader anyway. Someone will care, write for them.
davidw 10mo ago
The actual story of how cod from Norway came to be a thing in the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Querini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Querini
kazinator 10mo ago
Video edition: 1. First, make me care. 2. Then provide an indication (e.g. in the video description) giving the time in the video where the question starts to be answered. If you make me somewhat care, but I have to binary search through your video to skip the rambling, I'm likely to back button out.
- NegativeK 10mo ago
  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.
mmooss 10mo ago
Expanding Gwern's well made point, just a little, is that writing of any length needs a thesis statement in the first paragraph or so. Thesis statements are not a new techniques, and these days they are needed much more because there is so much to read. Many articles don't state their thesis at all or not for a long time. I don't have time to read that far to find out if it's worthwhile to me. Unless you are Satoshi Nakamoto, I'm not going to read far to find out.
hnfraudswil 10mo ago
[dead]
nathan_compton 10mo ago
A good writer should be able to write a catchy hook. A wise person should be able to read text that is flavored like cardboard. In general, one thing I dislike about this moment, is the incredible emphasis we place on the first five seconds of everything because everyone is thinking about all the other things we could be doing. But many things are great because of how they feel 20 years later. The first five seconds of playing a musical instrument is horrible, but 20 years later and it is sublime. Emacs, Vim, are both notoriously forbidding, and yet, they are wonderful tools. Some things can be massaged to meet both criteria (I can imagine some emacs configuration that made it less painful and surfaced its true power in the first five seconds maybe), but other things are hard by nature and derive their value from how we have to adapt to them instead of how well they are adapted to us. I feel like the AI era is going to just accelerate this trend where everything we interact with is a slick surface and many people will never experience depth. Read boring shit.
gizajob 10mo ago
I felt like the movie Marty Supreme completely failed to make me care about the main character until the final act where the filmmakers had to pull out all the big easy stops to force me to care about him. A third of the way in to the movie I was wondering if it was going to be explained at any point why I should be interested in this guy or care about his difficult and fairly unremarkable personality. A lot of the time it seems as if creatives assume that if you’re watching/reading/engaging with their movie/book/artwork then you already care enough to care.
ziofill 10mo ago
This reminds me of what my PhD supervisor told me as he was trashing my first draft of my first paper: “up until this point in your life you’ve been trained to convince someone who knows more than you that you know something by writing impressive equations and complex concepts. Now you are the expert and if you do that nobody will read your papers. And if someone stops after a few sentences you’ll lose citations too.”
- bawis 10mo ago
  What was your PhD thesis about ?
  - ziofill 10mo ago
    I studied the entanglement formed during a quantum nonlinear process
- muzani 10mo ago
  Similar experience with my bachelor's thesis after I presented it. Supervisor: "Great job with this." Me: "The assessor didn't seem too impressed." Supervisor: "You should have sold it better." That was the point where I realized that all the technical stuff doesn't really matter if nobody realizes how hard it was or why they should care.
shalmanese 10mo ago
There is content you write for acquisition and content you write for retention and my #1 tip for writers who want to engineer growing an audience is be clear before you sit down to write a piece which it’s going to be. Content for acquisition, the reader’s relationship is to the topic, they have to be convinced the topic is relevant to their life goals but it’s valuable despite who the topic. Content for retention, the readers relationship is to you as the writer and the topic is merely there as a MacGuffin to help illuminate some aspect of you that is unique. Business Insider had this down to a science over a decade ago. They started a series called “So Expensive”, detailing why various things were expensive, the first 4 videos in the series were: Caviar, Saffron, Rolexes and Horseshoe Crab Blood. Statistically, some tens of millions of people have organically had the thought of why the first 3 were expensive but zero people have even wondered why horseshoe crab blood was expensive. The 4th video was a way to test, of all the people who were willing to click on the first three, how many were willing to follow along to the 4th because of a trust in BI? The next 4 in the series was Vanilla, Silk, Louboutins & Scorpion Venom. Creating all content for acquisition is both too exhausting and also sub optimal for the reader because they want deeper stuff to follow as well. I suggest up to 1 in 3 acquisition articles if you can manage when starting out but then ramping down to no more than 1 in 10 fairly quickly or you burn out.
- kqr 10mo ago
  This mirrors reflections I've had recently as well. I have been, for the most part, focusing on what you would call "content for acquisition", i.e. easily relatable, somewhat shallow, extensively researched articles that show off what I can write at my best. But in trying to aim for a regular cadence in the past year, I've realised I cannot maintain that level across the board. So I've started to write things that aren't as "good", in my flawed subjective judgment. Yet surprisingly often those are the things I get positive emails about, from readers who are glad I took the time to put things into words. I am trying to come to terms with the idea that some of my more enthusiastic readers might really be happy to read even things that aren't up to what I consider to be my standards. But it's deeply uncomfortable. Triggers my impostor syndrome like little else.
  - 10mo ago
njarboe 10mo ago
“Venice built a maritime empire from a city that couldn’t feed itself; so who fed it—and why didn’t its enemies simply starve it out?” I love ancient history and would read a good book about the Venetian empire, but the sentence answers the final question. Venice was a maritime empire (it's capital on an island), that's why its enemies could not starve it out. All in on finding out who fed it.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
coolThingsFirst 10mo ago
What are those sun symbols after paragraph ends. Always found them interesting.
- clort 10mo ago
  Well they are sun symbols. I guess if you are asking how are they produced, they are embedded SVG in the CSS at https://gwern.net/static/css/style.css https://gwern.net/static/css/style.css see for instance --GW-image-sun-verginasun-black-svg
  - coolThingsFirst 10mo ago
    Do they have a special name? I haven’t seen them in books.
    - clort 10mo ago
      they probably do, I've seen that kind of thing (a logo) placed throughout the text before now, but more of a fancy print rather than cheap paperbacks. In the old days it would have cost more, but since DTP took over then I don't see why that would be a problem. perhaps just "paragraph divider", eg https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/12217904-collection-set-of-hand-drawn-dividers-template-perfect-for-wedding-text-decoration https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/12217904-collection-set-...
teiferer 10mo ago
> We could easily have a 2026 LLM deliver high-quality editing advice to fix this up extensively, but it would still be mediocre. This seems to suggest that a human needs to be in the creative loop, but that could be short sighted. LLM training has humans in the loop which optimize for not being bored. That's a reason for LLM texts typically being recognizeable because at the current stage they are a little too simplistically flashy. But give it a few iterations and the machine will excel humans at catching their attention, i.e., making them care. As others wrote: Tiktok is already excellent at that. While the content in there still has humans in the loop, the choice what to show to whom and when is already entirely mechanical.
miki123211 10mo ago
What I find extremely off-putting and overused is the pattern of making you care about an article by saying something about the person being interviewed, usually related to the interview itself. Think "he was a balding man[...] drinking his matcha latte[...]" It's always something which has zero bearing on the situation in question. Whenever I see this, I immediately turn to cmd-a + cmd-c + `pbpaste | llm 'summarize this'`
aucisson_masque 10mo ago
That’s basically what tv shows do every time. The pilot is great/awesome then the 10 episodes are boring and the very last one get exciting enough for you to wait the second season. Best example: the walking dead season tv shows.
orleyhuxwell 10mo ago
For the last 30 years I've decided that the best stuff (most engaging books, stories, experiences in life) require investment. It gets worse (you go through some pain while exercising) before it gets better. That's essentially a definition of a good life to me - finding the things worth sacrificing resources and getting the payoff. So 'first make me care' to me is a manifest of Gen Z - tiktok - brainrot approach. From my perspective you miss most of the really good stuff by cultivating this approach. I.e. my favorite books - Tai Pan, Noble House; tv series - Better Call Saul! - require you to go through so much of initial boredom. It's also the same discussion as 'learn to code vs only do AI Slop' or 'learn math and algos vs only import functions from libs and never check what's inside'. *Exceptions apply, ofc. There are things that hook you and progressively ad depth, but it's really rare. I.e. Arcane tv show is both easy to access and quite deep. Edit: ...so I can imagine math teacher that first tell you what are some amazing uses of derivatives and integrals - PIDs, SGD, better estimation, wave functions, generalized description of problems, accessing interesting physics etc. And after that they make you grind. I think it would be quite great. But it is so rare, that you have to make a leap of faith and assume most of the good stuff is boring initially.
d--b 10mo ago
The author is right, I care a lot more about the Venice thing than reading the rest of the article.
deleted 10mo ago
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raincole 10mo ago
Is this a good advice? Yes. And what would happen if everyone followed it? Clickbait titles like "the third one will surprise you" and TikTok.
wosined 10mo ago
Sorry, but I have to disagree. I don't like books that read like adverts.
smeej 10mo ago
I found it really ironic that the author started with something attention-grabbing about a topic completely unrelated to his point, but then made a series of such mundane statements to begin his own writing that I didn't care enough to go past his first screen. He didn't make me care about why I should make people care.
MarkusWandel 10mo ago
So LLMs can't do that? Every LLM-written historical or pseoudo-historical (i.e. made up) thing that comes up in my Facebook feed does start with a "hook" like that. Doesn't make them great articles but obviously you can prompt them to do it.
throwaway743 10mo ago
Part of the hook is asking a question. It immediately gets people investing in thinking of an answer
greenie_beans 10mo ago
read about what gordon lish has to say about opening a story: https://www.tetmancallis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-Gordon-Lish-Notes.pdf https://www.tetmancallis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-...
ziofill 10mo ago
I’m from Venice and it’s heartwarming to see someone from a different country/culture so into the history of Venice <3
nasorenga 10mo ago
TLDR

813 points by andsoitis 10mo ago

arjie 10mo ago

This insight is what caused the rise of the clickbait headline and its predecessors in eras past. You need a hook or there's no point reading the tale.

DeathArrow 10mo ago

This is even more true for public speaking. Try to hook people from the start.

huhkerrf 10mo ago

"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.

some_furry 10mo ago
Know your audience: Technical people want the details. Most people aren't technical.
sublinear 10mo ago
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.
acc077877 10mo ago
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
furyofantares 10mo ago
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.

simonw 10mo ago

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. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.

PeterStuer 10mo ago
"You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever" Biology tends to disagree.
sublinear 10mo ago
[flagged]
- simonw 10mo ago
  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/7517727101923953943 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/7598189362823695638 https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
  - sublinear 10mo ago
    Opinions of what's "weird and fun" can vary a lot. I find this stuff about as appealing as watching AI-generated Queen Elizabeth fight Stephen Hawking, or someone sneaking into Chernobyl to practice their parkour. I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does everyone else who avoids TikTok.

OtherShrezzing 10mo ago

This was quite a good article. It could have been excellent if it answered its own hook somewhere the piece though. I came away not having a resolution to the hook - violating the articles second principle.

deleted 10mo ago
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makeitrain 10mo ago

I can’t click on any links on pages (the header works). Using brave on iPhone. Firefox and Safari works…

skybrian 10mo ago

Suppose you fed this article into an LLM, along with whatever other documents you had, and asked it to come up with some good candidates for opening sentences? And picked one, and let it take it from there? I assume you'd get a mess, but it might be an interesting mess.

bondarchuk 10mo ago

I think "Just… start with the interesting part first" is quite different, and actually much better advice than "make me care". I'm more than done with stupid hooks and attention grabbing techniques, just plainly and honestly state at the outset what the point is of what will follow.

marginalia_nu 10mo ago
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.
- sothatsit 10mo ago
  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.
  - bondarchuk 10mo ago
    I don't know. It's almost universally assumed to be true that "making someone want to read on" is inherently good but IMO it's not. Why is it good to be "more motivated to jump into it"? If a plain description and some context does not motivate you, it would be better to spend your time elsewhere.
    - sothatsit 10mo ago
      I prefer reading interesting stories to textbooks. It's that simple. If all you want to read is textbook entries, then you are an outlier.

treetalker 10mo ago

Zeroth, proofread.

swiftcoder 10mo ago
Eh, if your hook is interesting and your writing is generally solid, I'm not about to begrudge a few typos
- jfengel 10mo ago
  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.

isoprophlex 10mo ago

This article succeeded spectacularly in making me want to know all there is to know about medieval Venice, that's for sure.

skybrian 10mo ago
It's really too bad it's not a quote from an actual book.

treelover 10mo ago

"When writing, your first job is this: First, make me care." It really depends on who the audience is...

bravura 10mo ago
Understanding your audience is your first job as a writer or communicator. Speaking to them and making them care is job two.
- wtetzner 10mo ago
  Ideally you wouldn't need to make them care. Just give them enough information up front for them to determine if they care.

tines 10mo ago

I have often thought that all good fiction is mystery. This is obviously an overstatement, but I think it’s not too far off. Humans are mystery solvers. If I don’t have a compelling mystery to solve—something like the “what’s going on beneath the surface in this town?” that David Lynch does so well—when I’m reading your book or watching your tv show or playing your game, I’m usually out unless I have a strong prior interest (which simply means that I brought my own mystery).

Frotag 10mo ago
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.
- tines 10mo ago
  It could definitely be my systems-oriented writing. May I ask what your profession is? I’m a software engineer.
  - Frotag 10mo ago
    Same, code monkey. But mostly fromt end these days.

pcrh 10mo ago

The hook was great, but article was mediocre. I glazed over at the mention of LLMs in the second paragraph, skimming the article through to the end didn't improve things. If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...

zkmon 10mo ago

> When writing, first, make the reader care, one way or another. Because if I am not hooked by the first screen, I will probably not keep reading—no matter how good the rest of it is! Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing. This artificial goal pollutes the connection between writer and reader. It makes them buyer and seller and rewards sales tactics. You don't write for the reader. You write for yourself first. Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it about as much you do.

ofalkaed 10mo ago
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.
BeetleB 10mo ago
> 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.

svilen_dobrev 10mo ago

aaand, how to apply this technique to a CV? prepending a one-liner-about-some-feat that might interest that particular company, before the usual cv afterthat? hmm. made me think..

firefoxd 10mo ago

I wrote my story and titled it, "My experience at work with an automated HR system". I sent it to a few friends, only a couple of them read it. A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew up! I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book is that you know the punch line before you even pick up a copy. A boy is stuck with a bengal tiger in a boat. Now that the punch line is out of the way, the story has time to unfold and be interesting in its own merit. That's what I was trying to recreate with my own story.

stephenbez 10mo ago
"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 https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  The Machine Fired Me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 - June 2018 (554 comments)
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
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.
- cindyllm 10mo ago
  [dead]
- nicbou 10mo ago
  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-behind-the-strange-story https://fenwick.media/rewild/magazine/dead-broets-society-be...

oncallthrow 10mo ago

This didn’t make me care

jfengel 10mo ago
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.

tolerance 10mo ago

You know I’ve never read an article by Gwern that made me feel like he was sensitive to this idea, one that in my head essentially breaks down to the use of narrative and the leverage of “stakes” that inform the reader of kinds of conflict that make a narrative special. I’m reminded of a remark made by 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. Instead your writing has to evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue. A lot of writers are tainted by the expectations set in grade school. Write for a grade and good writing is what yields a good grade according to the standards set by the subject which often is not ‘Composition’ but more like ‘Prove to me that you remember everything we mentioned in class about the French Revolution’. I’ve never felt drawn into an article by Gwern at least not in the way that I have been by some writing by Maciej Cegłowski, for example. Reading Gwern I am both overwhelmed by the adornments to the text (hyperlinks, pop-ups, margin notes; other hypertext doodads and portals) and underwhelmed by the substance of the text itself. I don’t consider Paul Graham a literary griot either. But I find that his own prose is bolstered by a kind of clarity and asceticism that is informative and not entirely void of good style and form. Lawrence McEnery of the University of the Chicago contributed a lot of good thinking to this kind of stuff though. This wasn’t meant to be a criticism of the author of this post’s own work. But here that’s how it’s left. I haven’t come across any writing of his that’s as intriguing as "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” seems. If anyone has any recommendations, do share.

wetpaws 10mo ago
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.
- 1dom 10mo ago
  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.

underdeserver 10mo ago

Probably should be marked (2025).

zahlman 10mo ago
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.

tpoacher 10mo ago

Counterpoint. People our so tired of sensational intros and baiting questions which bury the actual lede up to the point where you discover it requires an annual subscription to find out the actual answer, that now it's actually counterproductive to start with an interesting "question". It's facts first or gtfo. Prove to me that I'm not going to waste my time until you deliver what you promised, by delivering enough of that relevant background up front, otherwise I don't have time for your shenanigans.

marginalia_nu 10mo ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
- wtetzner 10mo ago
  > 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.

Jap2-0 10mo ago

Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question: - They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult - They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply - Fish - They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats (note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)

eulgro 10mo ago
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.
Animats 10mo ago
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.
- BurningFrog 10mo ago
  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)
mdnahas 10mo ago
It is a recurring phenomenon. Venice, Netherlands, and today Singapore. Small countries without resources and, hence, needing trade. They become open trading hubs and grow. Sadly, countries with a single easy-to-harvest resource —- like oil, gold, or gems —— are more likely to become closed dictatorships.
- tetromino_ 10mo ago
  > 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.

yetihehe 10mo ago

And thus "question-bait" was born.

blauditore 10mo ago

I disagree with the stated examples and literally quit reading there.

seydor 10mo ago

10 reasons why clickbait is good for you: 1)

fukukitaru 10mo ago

Chuunibyou-tier slop.

mvkel 10mo ago

This seems like a cheap trick to hook someone into a blog post (ironically, Gwern seems to disregard this almost universally). If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post. Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead... Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment. Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...

jodrellblank 10mo ago
Chapter I: IN WHICH PHILEAS FOGG AND PASSEPARTOUT ACCEPT EACH OTHER, THE ONE AS MASTER, THE OTHER AS MAN Chapter II: IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT IS CONVINCED THAT HE HAS AT LAST FOUND HIS IDEAL Chapter III: IN WHICH A CONVERSATION TAKES PLACE WHICH SEEMS LIKELY TO COST PHILEAS FOGG DEAR - https://www.online-literature.com/verne/aroundtheworld/ https://www.online-literature.com/verne/aroundtheworld/

otikik 10mo ago

Careful with this advice. If you max it out you end up with "You won't believe the weird trick that the city of Venice did to feed itself"

julianeon 10mo ago
This article is just a slightly upscale version of the million "YouTube hooks" videos you can find on, well, you know. Down to the "create a gap" advice. Once upon a time "one weird trick" was good advice too, before it got ran into the ground.
- directevolve 10mo ago
  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.”

firasd 10mo ago

I'm beginning to think that origin stories are an underrated way to find these angles. Like why exactly did you start thinking about this topic. I guess the recipe bloggers were on to this with their long rambles about where they first tried this dish (albeit it may have been for SEO too...)

danderedandolo 10mo ago

Know your audience is right, and Gwern misses the most interesting thing about Venice- that it was a merchantile Republic with reasonable independance from the Catholic Church. Lots of the political ideas which influenced British and American democracy came from the Italian city states. Ruskin's Stones of Venice and Bowsma's "Venice and the defense of republican liberty" capture this well, as do parts of Quentin Skinner's "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought."

PeterWhittaker 10mo ago

Perhaps I am too much of a curmudgeon, but the example first sentence made me not care at all - not about Venice, but about the writer's approach, which seems to want to conjure breathless mystery about something I could easily look up on Wikipedia (or read in tl;dr comments in this thread). It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you? A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied. Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.

dvrp 10mo ago

Care is the most important trait of people who make great things; it's not money or time. Is not even skill. I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a project inside their personal website was not working. I told him my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and it was working on his local machine. A few hours after the interview, the project was online. The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing, and yes, software engineering. That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such that I don't feel I was just scammed. It's all the same. Lack of care. I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.

atmosx 10mo ago

Adrian Wooldridge (the Economist) in "Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World" argues, rather successfully IMO, that what made Venice the maritime super-power was meritocracy. Indeed, he argues, that the fall of the Venitian empire came swiftly when the Doge was forced to place only Venitians (birthright) to top positions, instead of the most "capable". Hence the available talent pool shrunk. The book makes for a fine read IMO: https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern-World/dp/1510768610 https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern... ps. this book came out as a response to Michael Sandell's "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" which was a best seller at the time.

oytis 10mo ago

So how did Venice maintain its dominance?

imoreno 10mo ago

There's a spectrum of writing, corresponding to supply/demand or push/pull. The article is giving advice for oversupplied writing, where the audience doesn't really want to hear you, and you're trying to badger it into reading it anyway - typically, for some sort of personal gain (getting an interview, making a sale, promoting a political cause). Yes, attention hacking is important in this case. There is also a writing where people are looking for the information, and they are showing up at your door because they already care. Presumably you wrote, because you saw the open question, and want to try answering it. History books, encyclopedias, classic literature by dead people, falls under this. Ironically, so does the example of Venice - you would read about Venice if you were already curious; there is little profit in "making someone care" about Venice otherwise. An attention grabby style would be forced and counterproductive in this.

deadbabe 10mo ago

I hate this. Basically it’s saying use constant clickbait to keep your reader reading. Increasingly, readers don’t have time for this shit. Be direct, and if the reader doesn’t care, they were never meant to be your reader anyway. Someone will care, write for them.

davidw 10mo ago

The actual story of how cod from Norway came to be a thing in the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Querini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Querini

kazinator 10mo ago

Video edition: 1. First, make me care. 2. Then provide an indication (e.g. in the video description) giving the time in the video where the question starts to be answered. If you make me somewhat care, but I have to binary search through your video to skip the rambling, I'm likely to back button out.

NegativeK 10mo ago
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.

mmooss 10mo ago

Expanding Gwern's well made point, just a little, is that writing of any length needs a thesis statement in the first paragraph or so. Thesis statements are not a new techniques, and these days they are needed much more because there is so much to read. Many articles don't state their thesis at all or not for a long time. I don't have time to read that far to find out if it's worthwhile to me. Unless you are Satoshi Nakamoto, I'm not going to read far to find out.

hnfraudswil 10mo ago

[dead]

nathan_compton 10mo ago

A good writer should be able to write a catchy hook. A wise person should be able to read text that is flavored like cardboard. In general, one thing I dislike about this moment, is the incredible emphasis we place on the first five seconds of everything because everyone is thinking about all the other things we could be doing. But many things are great because of how they feel 20 years later. The first five seconds of playing a musical instrument is horrible, but 20 years later and it is sublime. Emacs, Vim, are both notoriously forbidding, and yet, they are wonderful tools. Some things can be massaged to meet both criteria (I can imagine some emacs configuration that made it less painful and surfaced its true power in the first five seconds maybe), but other things are hard by nature and derive their value from how we have to adapt to them instead of how well they are adapted to us. I feel like the AI era is going to just accelerate this trend where everything we interact with is a slick surface and many people will never experience depth. Read boring shit.

gizajob 10mo ago

I felt like the movie Marty Supreme completely failed to make me care about the main character until the final act where the filmmakers had to pull out all the big easy stops to force me to care about him. A third of the way in to the movie I was wondering if it was going to be explained at any point why I should be interested in this guy or care about his difficult and fairly unremarkable personality. A lot of the time it seems as if creatives assume that if you’re watching/reading/engaging with their movie/book/artwork then you already care enough to care.

ziofill 10mo ago

This reminds me of what my PhD supervisor told me as he was trashing my first draft of my first paper: “up until this point in your life you’ve been trained to convince someone who knows more than you that you know something by writing impressive equations and complex concepts. Now you are the expert and if you do that nobody will read your papers. And if someone stops after a few sentences you’ll lose citations too.”

bawis 10mo ago
What was your PhD thesis about ?
- ziofill 10mo ago
  I studied the entanglement formed during a quantum nonlinear process
muzani 10mo ago
Similar experience with my bachelor's thesis after I presented it. Supervisor: "Great job with this." Me: "The assessor didn't seem too impressed." Supervisor: "You should have sold it better." That was the point where I realized that all the technical stuff doesn't really matter if nobody realizes how hard it was or why they should care.

shalmanese 10mo ago

There is content you write for acquisition and content you write for retention and my #1 tip for writers who want to engineer growing an audience is be clear before you sit down to write a piece which it’s going to be. Content for acquisition, the reader’s relationship is to the topic, they have to be convinced the topic is relevant to their life goals but it’s valuable despite who the topic. Content for retention, the readers relationship is to you as the writer and the topic is merely there as a MacGuffin to help illuminate some aspect of you that is unique. Business Insider had this down to a science over a decade ago. They started a series called “So Expensive”, detailing why various things were expensive, the first 4 videos in the series were: Caviar, Saffron, Rolexes and Horseshoe Crab Blood. Statistically, some tens of millions of people have organically had the thought of why the first 3 were expensive but zero people have even wondered why horseshoe crab blood was expensive. The 4th video was a way to test, of all the people who were willing to click on the first three, how many were willing to follow along to the 4th because of a trust in BI? The next 4 in the series was Vanilla, Silk, Louboutins & Scorpion Venom. Creating all content for acquisition is both too exhausting and also sub optimal for the reader because they want deeper stuff to follow as well. I suggest up to 1 in 3 acquisition articles if you can manage when starting out but then ramping down to no more than 1 in 10 fairly quickly or you burn out.

kqr 10mo ago
This mirrors reflections I've had recently as well. I have been, for the most part, focusing on what you would call "content for acquisition", i.e. easily relatable, somewhat shallow, extensively researched articles that show off what I can write at my best. But in trying to aim for a regular cadence in the past year, I've realised I cannot maintain that level across the board. So I've started to write things that aren't as "good", in my flawed subjective judgment. Yet surprisingly often those are the things I get positive emails about, from readers who are glad I took the time to put things into words. I am trying to come to terms with the idea that some of my more enthusiastic readers might really be happy to read even things that aren't up to what I consider to be my standards. But it's deeply uncomfortable. Triggers my impostor syndrome like little else.
- 10mo ago

njarboe 10mo ago

“Venice built a maritime empire from a city that couldn’t feed itself; so who fed it—and why didn’t its enemies simply starve it out?” I love ancient history and would read a good book about the Venetian empire, but the sentence answers the final question. Venice was a maritime empire (it's capital on an island), that's why its enemies could not starve it out. All in on finding out who fed it.

deleted 10mo ago

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coolThingsFirst 10mo ago

What are those sun symbols after paragraph ends. Always found them interesting.

clort 10mo ago
Well they are sun symbols. I guess if you are asking how are they produced, they are embedded SVG in the CSS at https://gwern.net/static/css/style.css https://gwern.net/static/css/style.css see for instance --GW-image-sun-verginasun-black-svg
- coolThingsFirst 10mo ago
  Do they have a special name? I haven’t seen them in books.
  - clort 10mo ago
    they probably do, I've seen that kind of thing (a logo) placed throughout the text before now, but more of a fancy print rather than cheap paperbacks. In the old days it would have cost more, but since DTP took over then I don't see why that would be a problem. perhaps just "paragraph divider", eg https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/12217904-collection-set-of-hand-drawn-dividers-template-perfect-for-wedding-text-decoration https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/12217904-collection-set-...

teiferer 10mo ago

> We could easily have a 2026 LLM deliver high-quality editing advice to fix this up extensively, but it would still be mediocre. This seems to suggest that a human needs to be in the creative loop, but that could be short sighted. LLM training has humans in the loop which optimize for not being bored. That's a reason for LLM texts typically being recognizeable because at the current stage they are a little too simplistically flashy. But give it a few iterations and the machine will excel humans at catching their attention, i.e., making them care. As others wrote: Tiktok is already excellent at that. While the content in there still has humans in the loop, the choice what to show to whom and when is already entirely mechanical.

miki123211 10mo ago

What I find extremely off-putting and overused is the pattern of making you care about an article by saying something about the person being interviewed, usually related to the interview itself. Think "he was a balding man[...] drinking his matcha latte[...]" It's always something which has zero bearing on the situation in question. Whenever I see this, I immediately turn to cmd-a + cmd-c + `pbpaste | llm 'summarize this'`

aucisson_masque 10mo ago

That’s basically what tv shows do every time. The pilot is great/awesome then the 10 episodes are boring and the very last one get exciting enough for you to wait the second season. Best example: the walking dead season tv shows.

orleyhuxwell 10mo ago

For the last 30 years I've decided that the best stuff (most engaging books, stories, experiences in life) require investment. It gets worse (you go through some pain while exercising) before it gets better. That's essentially a definition of a good life to me - finding the things worth sacrificing resources and getting the payoff. So 'first make me care' to me is a manifest of Gen Z - tiktok - brainrot approach. From my perspective you miss most of the really good stuff by cultivating this approach. I.e. my favorite books - Tai Pan, Noble House; tv series - Better Call Saul! - require you to go through so much of initial boredom. It's also the same discussion as 'learn to code vs only do AI Slop' or 'learn math and algos vs only import functions from libs and never check what's inside'. *Exceptions apply, ofc. There are things that hook you and progressively ad depth, but it's really rare. I.e. Arcane tv show is both easy to access and quite deep. Edit: ...so I can imagine math teacher that first tell you what are some amazing uses of derivatives and integrals - PIDs, SGD, better estimation, wave functions, generalized description of problems, accessing interesting physics etc. And after that they make you grind. I think it would be quite great. But it is so rare, that you have to make a leap of faith and assume most of the good stuff is boring initially.

d--b 10mo ago

The author is right, I care a lot more about the Venice thing than reading the rest of the article.

deleted 10mo ago

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raincole 10mo ago

Is this a good advice? Yes. And what would happen if everyone followed it? Clickbait titles like "the third one will surprise you" and TikTok.

wosined 10mo ago

Sorry, but I have to disagree. I don't like books that read like adverts.

smeej 10mo ago

I found it really ironic that the author started with something attention-grabbing about a topic completely unrelated to his point, but then made a series of such mundane statements to begin his own writing that I didn't care enough to go past his first screen. He didn't make me care about why I should make people care.

MarkusWandel 10mo ago

So LLMs can't do that? Every LLM-written historical or pseoudo-historical (i.e. made up) thing that comes up in my Facebook feed does start with a "hook" like that. Doesn't make them great articles but obviously you can prompt them to do it.

throwaway743 10mo ago

Part of the hook is asking a question. It immediately gets people investing in thinking of an answer

greenie_beans 10mo ago

read about what gordon lish has to say about opening a story: https://www.tetmancallis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-Gordon-Lish-Notes.pdf https://www.tetmancallis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-...

ziofill 10mo ago

I’m from Venice and it’s heartwarming to see someone from a different country/culture so into the history of Venice <3

nasorenga 10mo ago

TLDR