12 ms·
Everything we like is a psyop?
- AlexCoventry 6mo agohttps://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- ryanmerket 6mo agoit's called astroturfing and has been around since the dawn of the internet
- foolserrandboy 6mo agoSee payolla for the radio era equivalent.
- Levitating 6mo agoI was really surprised that term wasn't used in this article. I agree it's old, but I think it's reached a new high with short-form content. Now that people don't subscribe to creators they like but rather get an algorithmic feed it's much harder to detect astroturfing. Like the articles says, these creators are easily identifiable, they typically create multiple videos a day about the same topic. But for the platform that doesn't matter.
- dylan604 6mo agoOh no!!! Tell me it ain't so! Someone--like a PR firm--is gaming the system to get attention for their client? No, surely not. Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.
- georgemcbay 6mo ago> Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper. The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was. But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.
- sneak 6mo agoAlmost everything that you haven't heard before on Spotify-generated playlists is payola.
- B1FF_PSUVM 6mo agoI'll see your payola and astroturfing, and raise wining and dining newspapermen.
- simplyluke 6mo agoI think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit" I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that? Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
- mumbisChungo 6mo agothis is why oldschool chat > social media curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion
- sph 6mo agoThis is why influencers are making bank. Everybody still believes randos on the internet might be genuine.
- kylecazar 6mo agoA good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly. Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest. Also bring back blogrolls.
- SyneRyder 6mo agoI agree, but I also think the point about "Is [your opinion] based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience" is really important. Relying on other bloggers is still delegating your thinking to others. Having your own objective measures and your own direct experience is useful, and sometimes it might contradict the prevailing wisdom.
- dfhvneoieno 6mo ago[dead]
- roflchoppa 6mo agoReminds me of the documentary, “merchants of cool” https://youtu.be/0tYRoiJvhJ4 https://youtu.be/0tYRoiJvhJ4 Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.
- kibibu 6mo agoI'll be very sad if I discover that Angine de Poitrine's sudden rise is inorganic.
- genghisjahn 6mo agoAs long as they keep making that music, wearing those costumes and mumbling those interviews, I could care less. I like it.
- Biganon 6mo agoYou couldn't care less.
- genghisjahn 6mo agoI could.
- foolserrandboy 6mo agoWhen reading this I immediately thought of them. Anyone I know who plays an instrument said their socials are flooded with them.
- InexSquirrel 6mo agoSocials being flooded across the board feels weird, but it's also how network effects are _supposed_ to work. I just hate the fact that I feel jaded and cynical about this as my default position.
- sph 6mo agoSocial media is not driven by network effects though. It’s driven by algorithmic engagement and its operation is opaque.
- the__alchemist 6mo agoYea... I'm mixed because it feels like something too creative and weird for this sort of marketing, but it's perhaps as weird how they're all over Youtube suddenly.
- johnfn 6mo agoBut Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.
- radlad 6mo agoI had never heard of Geese until all the stories about how Geese bought their popularity. Now I feel I should give them a listen to know what all the fuss is about!
- tombert 6mo agoI'm not a huge fan of them in general, but they did a pretty ok cover of Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place" that I heard on Sirius XM.
- autoexec 6mo agoI would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence.
- phpnode 6mo ago> Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? Yes, exactly this. It is extremely difficult to get attention these days, no matter how good your offering.
- arcfour 6mo agoI know the best way to solve a problem with corruption and lack of transparency: involve the government! Nobody could ever pay off a politician. Surely that would only work in our favor.
- operatingthetan 6mo agoSee also how Anthropic is playing us like a fiddle while making their models less capable.
- mitchbob 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/Y7lS2 https://archive.ph/Y7lS2
- vermilingua 6mo agoI had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning. I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
- sonofhans 6mo agoI’ve had similar experiences. After watching it for a decade I think it’s a mostly over-active pattern recognition combined with a flood of incoming information. I believe I’m careful with the information I consume, but compared with 25 years ago it’s literally orders of magnitude more. IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).
- squigz 6mo agoIt seems infinitely more likely to me that this is simple coincidence than something nefarious.
- vermilingua 6mo agoDon’t get me wrong, I agree; but the odds of that coincidence are extremely long.
- ryankrage77 6mo agoI'm sad my second thought about this (after dismissing it as a coincidence) was that it could be used for marketing - "I randomly thought about this book/show/movie whatever, and hey what do you know? The sequel is coming out!". Basically another variation on 'organic' advertising in comments that's been around for a while. Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I hate advertising, I don't want it messing with real interactions with other humans. I'm not sure how to express the idea, it's like its so pervasive I'm thinking about it when its not even present.
- guelo 6mo agoThey're violating ad labeling laws and the FTC should come down hard on them. While Republicans pretend to be against defunding of police that's only the police for poor people, commercial and rich people police have suffered all kinds of defunding and kneecapping at their hands. We need an aggressive war on slop or democracy is not going to make it.
- jrecyclebin 6mo agoThis is not true though. My two favorite bands from the past year were poorly-attended shows that I stumbled into. You can still seek out good underground, obscure artists - you just have to look for them. Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
- tombert 6mo agoSomething I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10. Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon. I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.
- jrecyclebin 6mo agoFound a favorite band through a similar technique: pile of CDs given from a friend who worked at a music store and no one wanted them. You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.
- tombert 6mo agoYeah, most of the CDs there were pretty unremarkable; a lot of them were unsurprisingly stuff that was extremely popular (since those have the most CDs available). A lot of the stuff that wasn't extremely popular was pretty bad. Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking. Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.
- majormajor 6mo agoYeah. It has literally never been easier to find good niche music, and that's been true for over a decade. Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.
- autoexec 6mo agoIt's such an insane amount of waste that there are rooms filled with cell phones just to churn out spam. The same job should be doable by a single server. I imagine that it's only required because platforms are fingerprinting the phones to check for spammers but obviously those systems have gone from being simply useless to becoming harmful since it's now generating massive amounts of e-waste. This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
- NicuCalcea 6mo agoYou can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoThat's, unfortunately, the free market at play. Competition is adversarial. It has many of good sides, but resource efficiency is not one of them.
- Schmerika 6mo agoAnd the inevitable continued degradation of all our resources leads where, exactly... Because once you answer that question for yourself, you'll hopefully care a lot less about the "many of good sides".
- mumbisChungo 6mo agositting in a local pub watching a musician I've never heard of play original music and absolutely loving it rn.
- unethical_ban 6mo agoWell I for one appreciate TC for giving us and the masses a heads up of new spins on old astroturf methods. You simply cannot trust the algorithm to be organic. Find trusted people or specific trusted reviewers of things. Everything else you hear could be paid for. I'd love for this kind of scam to be regulated, at least. "Not a real fan - paid endorsement".
- heddycrow 6mo agoWhy can't we have a system where this is baked in?
- koolala 6mo agoEx CEO of Google says X about Y
- jottinger 6mo agoDang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news https://bytecode.news, and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric and unsustainable and undeserved success, even if "organic and slow growth" means failure in the end.
- sneak 6mo agoChoosing to fail means you shouldn't begin the project in the first place. Correspondingly, if you are beginning the project, you should not make choices that will result in failure.
- jottinger 6mo agoI don't think i'm "choosing to fail," I'm choosing to accept the outcome given an effort to prevent it. Sometimes you try and it doesn't work out; I'm not committing the mortgage to the site or the effort, and I'd like it to pan out because I think its progenitor had a raison d'etre, and I was part of it when it was good and I think there's room for it now. And if the moment's gone, well... that's the way it goes. That's not the same as "choosing to fail."
- absoluteunit1 6mo agoSEO, Reddit and Paid ads probably
- jottinger 6mo agoI'm not going to optimize content for SEO - been on the other side of that, and I think it creates content that's bland and ineffective. Humans gonna human, machines gonna machine, and I'm not paying for ads. If humans want the site to succeed, it'll succeed. Otherwise, it won't. Such is life.
- RobRivera 6mo agoI wake up There's another psyop I go to sleep I wake up
- jrmg 6mo agoRyan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)
- blast 6mo agoA 'psyop' psyop!
- vjk800 6mo ago> “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.” Here it is. I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Google results. The only thing achieved here was that the marketing team gave some money to Google. I have never been even close to anything marketing related, but I'd assume that measuring its impact is highly non-trivial in the statistical sense. Also, only the companies selling marketing even have access to the relevant metrics and they have an incentive to exaggerate the results (sometimes maybe even internally).
- stemlord 6mo agoIdk, it seems like the marketing process on tiktok doesn't constitute trying to get people to go out of their way to interact/click with your content, tiktok users are just involuntarily fed content on some level (you don't know what the next autoplayed video will be)... how can it not be trival to manipulate that userbase with, in this case, a band whose music is just-good-enough for mass appeal?
- plastic041 6mo ago> “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted. Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake! It's worse if you read the context[0]: Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online? Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want. [0] https://www.billboard.com/pro/digital-marketers-secret-tactics-viral-songs/ https://www.billboard.com/pro/digital-marketers-secret-tacti...
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoMakes me think of a 20-something old running a popular YouTube channel interviewing people for business advice, and in one episode, stressing the important message of their interviewee, that was literally "don't trust advice from people who have never actually done the thing you're trying to do". That's multiple levels of "you're not the traffic, you are the traffic" right there.
- fasterik 6mo ago> don't trust advice from people who have never actually done the thing you're trying to do Probably one of the most important heuristics to have in the age of self-help gurus and influencers. 99.999% of them haven't accomplished anything other than profiting off of desperate and gullible people.
- r-w 6mo agoIt's so weird to see empathy-speak be regularly co-opted by habitual mass manipulators. "I don't know if this will make you feel better... but we're concerned with manipulating the reactions to the reactions as well! See how much we care?" It makes me do a double-take every time someone shows actual empathy, because it's used so often as a manipulative tactic to shield oneself against critiques of soullessness.
- kevinten10 6mo ago[flagged]
- arjie 6mo agoWell, one thing I've discovered with the advent of AI music is that there are lots of things I like that are not particularly notable. I can listen to the 100th "1996 ESCAPE FROM DATA CITY + Unreal Tournament Mix" and enjoy it. I can't say that I've "discovered" an artist who then went on to become big. Back in the day, on amie.st there were quite a lot of cheap singles that I really enjoyed too but I can't find those artists again. So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects. Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it. If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
- Schmerika 6mo ago> The psyop is perfectly okay. Is it? You really don't mind if everything that gets put in front of you is controlled? What if the people who talk about class war, the people who speak up about US and Israeli terror and torture and atrocities, the people who speak up for the voiceless are never/very rarely permitted to surface by the 'tastemaker' algorithm's controller? Because it sure seems like that's at least partly the case today, and rapidly getting worse.
- egonschiele 6mo agoI actually don't think Getting Killed the album is well mixed, what turned me on to Geese was their From The Basement performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 the music and the mixing are incredible. I've followed From The Basement for a while, ever since their collaboration with Radiohead. So maybe this was a psyop, but the music is genuinely really good.
- akcd 6mo ago[dead]
- sph 6mo agoThe fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page. But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms pushing the same thing to people. It’s quite apparent when browsing music on Youtube and finding new discoveries. Everybody in your same niche is pushed the same new bands, rather than the algo pushing different bands to different people, as one would expect. The reason that I completely missed Geese until the psyop reached HN is probably because it was pushed by TikTok which I don’t interact with, so I was insulated from it until the word-of-mouth phase of the viral spread.
- badc0ffee 6mo agoI heard about them a few times before finally deciding to listen to an album. I can't remember if it was Reddit or Instagram. In each case they were just mentioned offhand in a comment, like I should already know about them. Ultimately, I kind of hate the guy's voice. Sort of reminds me of... Parquet Courts? Who I don't really love, either.
- sph 6mo agoThanks for the Parquet Courts psyop, I'll give that a listen ;)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jongjong 6mo agoNever thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates and it's an interesting article. Also, I understand why some people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see. We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?). We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language. The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form. To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts. Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
- nirui 6mo ago> But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development. Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together. This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure. The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
- JimsonYang 6mo agoas someone who works does marketing, "first time?" People paying UGC creators to have ads is nothing new. Posting en masse to fool the algo is, but there's alwasy been bot farms. And before that there's still the trick of getting published by a low rated news org, then letting journalist at a more reputable organization let them know of this trending news. And so on til you end up in the NYT. FYI this works even when you actually bought placement for those low quality placements On the upside, the product/service needs to be good if you want to gain traction AND staying power. Psyops are cheap tricks, if your product sucks, then there's no word of mouth and you can't scale regardless of how many reviews you botted. Drake,Katseye, etc. aren't doing doing well becuase they're doing cheap marketing techniques, they're doing well b/c they have a loyal audience and make good music.
- verisimi 6mo agoDo you personally like Drake, Katseye? And think they make good music?
- tbossanova 6mo agoSome of it is really good, yes. But of course music taste is extremely subjective
- cal_dent 6mo agoEveryone needs to revisit William Gibson's the Blue Ant books. Still holds up as the best distillation of our current times culturally. On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook
- haunter 6mo agoBoards of Canada releasing a new track yesterday and possibly a new album after 13 years of waiting is everything but a psyop
- arcanemachiner 6mo agoThat's exactly what they want you to think!
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6mo agoMost things you think you know is a psyop too.
- dust42 6mo agoI once worked for a company that bought a spot in the evening news (french TF1). It worked that way: a french minister was visiting a fair and coming to stop in front of the booth and getting a product demo. And that ended up in the evening news. Since that time I kind of watch the news with different eyes.
- madrox 6mo agoLots of social sites are facing this problem. It's nearly impossible to grow on Twitch without viewbotting: https://x.com/Reedjd/status/2028533060632010759 https://x.com/Reedjd/status/2028533060632010759 and Nikita is calling out Perplexity on X: https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2044902122995548330 https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2044902122995548330 The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels. Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.
- kilroy123 6mo agoI have thought exactly as you do for a long time. Recently a side project of my blew up and it was completely organic. I'm just a solo dev. No marketing budget at all. No PR team. Made me realize that it's still possible for things to organically get big. It's just way way harder now.
- wartywhoa23 6mo agoA first-hand anecdote: I write music. Ambient variety, you know, almost static drone, very niche style per se. Never did anything to promote it in any way. Just released it via my friend's digital label on a handful of platforms. Never had more than ~100 listens a month, and never expected that to change and earn any substantial royalties. One day, the friend calls and tells he's willing to pay me some pretty penny, and replies to my bewilderment that just a single track from the whole album blew up, glitched the Matrix and obtained some 10'000s of listens. I investigated a little bit and found out that the track's title coincided with that of some other, much more popular and promoted band. So I just happened to ride on those coattails. Edit: removed extra zero in the number of listens :)
- kilroy123 6mo agoGot a link? I want to hear it.
- phendrenad2 6mo agoSomething occurred to me, I wonder if the "hipster" is a creation of these marketing firms also. What do you do when tastemakers are getting their friends to listen to underground artists you don't make money off of? Flip the script, call THEM uncool and disingenuous posers. They didn't find good underground bands by having TASTE, they only like underground bands because they're narcissistically drawn to being different than everyone else!
- sersi 6mo agoSo TikTok is for b2c. What's the equivalent for b2b product targeting developers or opensource software? Stars on github? Or are there a lot of adtroturfing hn accounts to influence the narrative? It reminds me of pg's article on submarine and the pr industry
- kjkjadksj 6mo agoI regularly see instagram ads for chinese factories taking massive wholesale volume orders.
- utopiah 6mo agoSince influence became monetized Goodhart's law kicked in, making popularity irrelevant as an indicator of quality. It's really the same mechanism every time : - capitalism is about making money, more money, "better" - someone finds a way to package an activity to a product to be sold - that activity gets perverted beyond recognition by cutting all corners in order to "just" earn more money by "wasting" less. Rinse & repeat to the next activity. PS: context: one recent a16z investment is doublespeed.ai
- 3RTB297 6mo agoSo the formula is basically: (Late 90's Pop Group Framework)*(Dead Internet Theory) = Clicks and Streams
- fedeb95 6mo agoSocial media are to be used for a very short amount of time daily. Discipline is required.
- wartywhoa23 6mo agoAn apologetic damage control piece of "journalism". Someone was caught cheating and manipulating, so... > Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an industry plant, but do we actually care? ...the article tries to normalize that. But hell yeah, Amanda Silberling, I do actually care and won't ever accept that crap as norm.
- Quarrelsome 6mo agoBill Hicks had a really good point when he said people who work in advertising or marketing should kill themselves. They turn everyone elses experiences to shit just so they can have more money.
- jasonvorhe 6mo agoToo bad he then became Alex Jones.
- coffeebeqn 6mo agoWhat do you mean? He pretty much died at the peak of his career in comedy. I don’t remember any Alex Jonesy material
- leethomp 6mo agoThe commenter is referencing a conspiracy that Bill Hicks faked his death and became Alex Jones. This imo was less stupid some years ago when Jones could conceivably be seen as an exaggerated satirical caricature, though it's very hard to imagine Bill Hicks taking the bit this far now
- jasonvorhe 6mo agoWas supposed to be somewhat of a joke but I forgot emoji can't be submitted in comments. If you're curious though: https://rumble.com/v5495j6-matthew-north-psyop-alex-jones-is-bill-hicks-whether-you-like-it-or-not-8.0.html https://rumble.com/v5495j6-matthew-north-psyop-alex-jones-is...
- baxtr 6mo agoWouldn’t it be wiser to ignore the messages of adversaries and marketers rather than suggesting people kill themselves? Who hasn’t fallen prey to marketing and propaganda on social media?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- atoav 6mo agoAs a musician in a small band: find a venue that sells tickets at the door and just go look at some bands whose name you have never heard of. If they sell tickets at the door, that means they may not be in one of the big ticketing monopolies. Going for bands/artists you have never heard of will give you a mixed bag, sure, but (1) it will be your mixed bag, (2) you support the ecosystem that creates new bands and (3) it is much more authentic and personal, because it is usally also smaller.
- TheServitor 6mo agoUninstall TikTok, listen to less shitty music, have less first world problems.
- replwoacause 6mo agoUninstall Reddit too for that matter.
- keybored 6mo agoI enjoyed watching Adam Ruins Everything. But it was a bit weird. It didn’t ruin everything. It’s just about how seemingly every American thing is a marketing “psyop”. I’m not an American so learning about how spending X amounts of salary on a specifically diamond engagement ring or something is a Diamond Industry (or something) marketing campaign didn’t really “ruin” it for me since I don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings around it. But I imagine that’s the same for many Americans. There are many this-is-just-what-is-done “values” that were discussed like this. Not quite as on-the-nose as spend this ridiculous amount of your salary on specifically X ring. I’m not singling out America here. I don’t think this shows that it is a uniquely American thing. It is just very convenient for me: I’m not part of the culture so I can watch a little from the outside. And America is a big country (we are told) so naturally there are pop-exposes like this. I do not expect the same amount of resources to be poured into my own corner of the world and all the “organic” things that we value. But that show helped me think about all the things closer to home that might be influencing me. And since then, or before it, I’ve believed that all of society is a marketing gimmick. The asymmetry of mass media is too great in favor of Big Bad Things (governments, corporations). What a weird feeling. To know (or believe) that you are a spoiled brat in terms of access to information, many conveniences and such (except my mortgage), and that it just comes at the small price of a Panopticon of constant brainwashing. And so you go about your day. A Special Occassion on this and that day, which is just a marketing campaign to sell you gifts that you are obligated to buy on this Special Occassion. You know it. But you go along with it. Because what are you going to do? Complain at the nearest plaza to drones like you that also knows the truth but go along with it because it’s just the way things are done and anyway no one cares about your particular eight-page manifesto on how society is slightly broken? As to the article, naive to the point of being suspect, even. This has been going on for let’s say a long time. But as usual the classic outlet is the Evil Corporation with stupid-arse names like Chaotic Good who has some hateable yuppie press release person who just says, Yes, the Internet is bot-filled and there is a demand and we fill it, in fact we are so proud of it. It’s just, hey these people are doing it, look, it’s these people right here. But the reality is so insidious and rotten that TikTok Comments on Demand Inc. and Korean Executive-created K-pop is just a farcically shallow treatment of it. Am I saying that TFA is a psyop?
- eracle1 6mo agoPsyops can be CF created by social media themselves OpenClaw is one of those
- shermozle 6mo agoThe best marketing has always been a psychological operation.
- dbattaglia 6mo agoPsyop feels a bit dramatic. Either marketing turned you on to a band you otherwise wouldn’t have found, or your tastes are driven by trends and social/status signals from others. Either way that’s just (admittedly intense) marketing isn’t it? Maybe I’m missing something?
- Levitating 6mo ago> Either way that’s just (admittedly intense) marketing isn’t it? Marketing used to be obvious, now it's deceptive. You can't tell whether the content you're watching is genuine or astroturfing.
- hendo3000 6mo agoI think all the comments like "I'm immune to psyops, I listen to what I like!" are interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
- waffletower 6mo agoTaqueria style chile de arbol salsa roja is not a psyop. So I don't like the title. But I enjoy the examples in the article -- I am only Geese adjacent, and much closer to actual Canadian Geese on a daily basis, but my daughter has been critical of Geese hype.
- garethsprice 6mo agoThis isn't new, Theodor Adorno was making the point in the 1940s that taste isn't something formed in a vacuum and then expressed in the market, it's something the market produces in you and sells back. Chaotic Good is just an extension of the same tricks from back when Eddie Bernays was staging fake suffragette marches to sell cigarettes to women in 1929. The more disturbing implication is that it's not just "everything on the internet" is fake so much as the whole surrounding culture of consumerist societies - and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences. Mark Fisher is a good read on whether we're even capable of comprehending what it would mean to live outside such a system at this point.
- rsync 6mo ago"... and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences." Obligatory "Cerulean Top" clip: https://youtu.be/vL-KQij0I8I https://youtu.be/vL-KQij0I8I
- dwroberts 6mo ago“possibly every thought you ever had” immediately brought White Noise by Don DeLillo to mind
- brailsafe 6mo agoYep, everything is astroturfing, and it's cheap to employ. Not Reddit or HN, those only contain authentic organic opinions. /s
- treebeard901 6mo agoHow much of the Internet is like Moltbook where you don't know the other users are bots? Does the private sector or Government control them? ... How long has it been this way?? Yes everything is a psyop
- scoofy 6mo agoFor folks that don't appreciate the power of marketing and advertising, I would strongly recommend the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. The point isn't to say "well ackchyually marketing is good," but is instead to say that the human mind has some built-in irrationality, and understanding the our behavioral predispositions interact with the world means that we can make better decisions in life and in business. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
- mike50 6mo agoThe meta is that Wired (Conde Nast) is peak psyop.
- BobbyTables2 6mo agoAren’t Christmas, Easter Bunny, and drinking milk all psyops too?
- ardline 6mo agoThis is the kind of thing that looks simple until you're three layers deep in edge cases.