Everything we like is a psyop?

That's multiple levels of "you're not the traffic, you are the traffic" right there.

> How slowly one advances in a boat that does not float along with the stream in a specific direction! How much easier it is when one can connect with the work of great predecessors whose value is not doubted by anyone. A personal experiment, a construction whose foundations one must dig himself and whose walls one must erect himself, runs a real risk of becoming a humble hovel. But perhaps one prefers to live there rather than in a palace that has been built by others. (Escher on Escher – Exploring the Infinite)

Looking at your site, you have a mission statement in your About page that roughly says "scrape other sources for anything relevant and interesting." Nothing about staffing, who you are, who your editors are, whether you even have editors. Every story seems to have the byline "DREAMREAL," which doesn't sound like a person.

It doesn't seem to me like you're interested in running a news org. It seems like you're dissatisfied with your ability to find things interesting to you in a single place and are trying to scratch that itch, probably in a mostly-automated way. I can sympathize with that, but a personal knowledge base with outgoing links to the original sources isn't a news org. By all means, share it. Maybe six other people in the world have exactly the same interests you do, but this is a far cry from journalism and you probably shouldn't frame it that way.

The font for the headlines also looks 'off' to me. Letters too close together maybe

Why is this every 3rd comment on this site? Every single post has multiple comments that are

"I hate that, here's my solution"

Correspondingly, if you are beginning the project, you should not make choices that will result in failure.

The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.

Some of it will suck.

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.

I live in a city where the bands you speak of get pushed further and further away from the downtown core. They're literally in the 'burbs now. It's counter-productive, but it seems downtown is more concerned with restaurants than other forms of entertainment these days.

Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.

"There are only two ways to find good new music - listen to a lot of bad new music, or outsource your listening choices to someone else - and the second doesn't protect you against the first."

Outsourcing your listening choices can look like lots of different things: that friend who goes to lots of concerts and always has an amazing new band they've heard recently, radio DJs, algorithmic suggestions like Pandora or Spotify, the Billboard Top 100, your local bar's live band choices, the Grammy Awards, going to clubs where DJs play new music, etc - but ultimately they come down to the same thing, letting someone else decide what you listen to.

And while my pithy version mentions "bad new music", included in there is anything which is not "good new music", including lots of mediocre or inoffensive stuff which doesn't rise to the level of being "good".

I first thought about it in the context of music, as I was looking for new songs to choreograph to, but it's true of discovering any new products where the quality is a matter of taste or subjective assessment.

- Want to find new food you like? You either eat lots of weird foods, or you find someone (a friend, a food blogger, the NYT food reviews, your mum, anyone) to recommend you try something they've discovered.

- Want to read a good new book? Either pick up random books, most of which will be trash, until you find something you like, or find someone to filter down the books (a small bookshop which carefully curates its titles, a library's recommended reading list, the best sellers lists, Oprah's book club, etc).

- New TV shows? Watch many bad shows until you find a good one, or wait for recommendations or awards nights.

- Restaurants, clothing designers, shopping malls, Youtube channels, content creators, movies, directors, websites, etc - the story is the same.

The only places where this does not apply, is in contexts which have objective measures which can be used as filters: if you want a new monitor, you can go to any store and filter or sort the options they have by objective measures like "display size", "resolution", "response time", "weight", "connectivity" etc, and find new products which meet the criteria. This is still dependent on someone to go and collate the information about all the products, but you are not forced to try lots of incorrectly-sized monitors to find one which optimises your preferences. Similar for microcontrollers, CPUs, car trailers, light bulbs, etc.

But even things with objective measures often have subjective qualities which have to be assessed - you can filter laptops on weight, RAM, clock speed, and storage, but how it feels to hold, whether the keys have a nice feel, whether the machine overheats too quickly - so you're often back to the original observation on these matters too.

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).

It's quite possible you saw something somewhere about it several days if not weeks or months previously and naturally didn't consciously register it. Advertisements are designed to work this way and the memory is a wonderful thing.

It's dangerous because it's manipulative, it removes agency from ourselves and its addictive to the marketeers. It hurts our identity to admit we are manipulated so psychologically we play along with the manipulation and deny being weakened (and they know this).

If I can sell you a book and make you think it's entirely your own choice then my marketing has been incredibly successful.

Or it may not be doing what marketeers and advertising agencies actually planned to happen and it could be just random coincidence.

I (after a few beers) found myself idly wondering about an electric folk band I hadn't seen or heard of for a good ten years, and looked them up to see if they were doing a new album or tour.

They'd played a final farewell gig the week before :/

Preferences and desires have to be the end of some causal DAG with entrypoints from the world outside of your own mind one way or another. Whether or not we're marketers or have any financial interest in the popularity of specific cultural artifacts, we all generally do things like evangelize our favorite stuff to friends and instill values and a love of similar things to our kids. It's overly cynical to have comments like this responded to as if any and all external influences are nefarious and inauthentic. What we want is for people to share the things they actually love rather than bullshit they know is bullshit but have been paid to shill.

I think of the fact I've been listening to Donna Summer so much for the past couple months. I know why it is. I grew up loving disco music and watching Alysa Liu win the figure skating gold medal performing to Macarthur Park reminded me of that love, something I haven't given much attention to in nearly 30 years. It's not "better" than anything else I'd been listening to in the past few years, but it's a lot more fun to sing thanks to 70s idols like Donna largely coming from a gospel background.

Going back a link, I'm reasonably sure Alysa, a 20 year-old who very likely did not grow up listening to disco music, probably picked this as her song for the season because of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and I've read Tim Burton's explanation of how the song got into the movie. He has a jukebox in his house and was listening to the Richard Harris original version of this song, which is one of the more ridiculous pop songs to ever get recorded, but full of wild changes in tone and a very long runtime that lended itself well to an extended wedding sequence interrupted by a police raid. The Donna Summer version playing over the credits is largely for contrast. I don't think Tim Burton or anyone else was motivated by wanting to boost the royalty fees going to Richard Harris and Donna Summer, who have been dead for 24 and 14 years, respectively.

Who hasn’t fallen prey to marketing and propaganda on social media?

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).

Marketing used to be obvious, now it's deceptive. You can't tell whether the content you're watching is genuine or astroturfing.

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.

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.

This comment is interesting because you took a narrative that was being pushed and marketed (Cursor was close to Opus) and accepted it as the ground truth.

The dominant narrative I saw around that, at least in my bubbles, was disappointment when they actually tried it and discovered it was not, in fact, close to Opus.

And how do we know that? How do we know Cursor is "withing spitting distance of opus" (whatever it means)?

Let me guess:

> that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that

It is obvious in retrospect but difficult to see in the moment

curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion

But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)

All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.

If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)

Came here to say this - I have always been extremely cautious and assumed most things online were just marketing tactics. But I never realize how far and how strategic some of these campaigns are.

I’ve recently started really getting my hands dirty with marketing for an app I’m building and the things I’ve learned in the past year have made me questions many of my views on things. At some point you realize that it’s all marketing or some form of effort to exert influence.

A good book somewhat related to this is Attention Merchants

I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.

In my eyes:

* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.

* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.

* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.

"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.

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.

Ultimately, I kind of hate the guy's voice. Sort of reminds me of... Parquet Courts? Who I don't really love, either.

Made me realize that it's still possible for things to organically get big.

It's just way way harder now.

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.