[Shacklz]

> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.

[tomhow]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930602.

> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

> I find it deeply depressing

Please don't fulminate on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[fhd2]

I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.

It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.

[hliyan]

The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels. However, the fact that influencing those channels is itself a commodity that is available on the market, paradoxically affects the operation of the market adversely.

If supplier A has a product of quality Q at price P, and supplier B has a competing product of quality 1.2Q or 0.9P, all else being equal, we would expect B to prevail in the market, or at least gain a superior market share. However, if A's marketing budget is superior, a larger percentage of the market will hear about their product sooner, and will gain traction earlier. Since all businesses have finite viability, B may go out of business before the market has time to correct the distortion brought on by A's marketing.

There was no solution to this in Adam Smith's time, but we now have something that points to a solution: aggregated reviews/ratings from verified purchasers, indexed or curated in such a a way that is uniformley accessible and conveniently query-able to all market participants. In an environment where such a mechanism is universal, theoretically, there should be no benefit to marketing.

[motorest]

> I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got.

This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing, both the product/service they are pushing and their own marketing effort.

I've seen plenty of people in LinkedIn just generating absolutely worthless noise that can't possibly reflect positively on them.

[inopinatus]

It took a while for their sector to become a mainstream byword for snake oil, but when it did, the SEO touts switched to peddling "content marketing" services instead. Not surprising that the internet's most insipid forum remains their favourite target-rich environment.

[terminalshort]

If nobody knows about your product, nobody will buy it. If nobody buys it, you haven't created any value.

[alansammarone]

Same reply as I wrote above:

No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.

[lisbbb]

I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.

[nathanaldensr]

It is depressing. There's nothing spiritual in it--nothing grander than just base greed and psychological manipulation.

[Imustaskforhelp]

To me what is _spiritually_disturbing (in the sense that it hurts my spirit) is the fact that I think that such behaviour is going to keep on happen and the world would get EVEN more polarized, less trustworthy overall.

Greed and psychological manipulation to me feels like they will always continue and I am a pessimist in that sense.

There is good, and then there is greed and greed creates psychological manipulation in most cases.

The most fundamental issues in our society stems from greed imo and this cycle will perpetuate like a cancer. Greed is cancerous. I don't know if I even can bring a change in this greedy world at a scale which can matter.

[spicyusername]

To play devil's advocate here, can any value be created if no one knows about your product?

[alansammarone]

No. People do need to know about your product. What appears to be a (_very_ sad and at the same time telling about the human condition) fact is that business people ("decision makers") apparently can't spot blatant, extremely low quality and low effort, marketing-driven snake-oil, laughingly ignore it, and do a 5 minutes google search to find something better by themselves, perhaps with the apparently tremendous effort of having to click a Github link (which provides actual proof, or at least a test, of actual skill), and from there click on the heavily, kind of honest marketing driven website (i.e. it has images) that would allow them to verify the quality of the product.

[Aurornis]

> The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

If people subscribe or follow it’s because they found some value in the content.

Developers often start with the “if you build it, they will come” mindset. They might get lucky with some early leads that make it feel like it’s working.

But marketing works. It’s not “mind hacks” it’s getting your product out there in front of potential customers. The people seeing your content aren’t hypnotized into clicking.

[wohoef]

In my experience people subscribe and follow easy to digest content that makes them feel productive for consuming it.

[simianwords]

Convincing people to buy your product _is_ value creation.

[ndriscoll]

Unless there was a better alternative that you drowned out, in which case it was value destruction.

[ohdeargodno]

Convincing people to buy your rotten meat is value creation!

Convincing people to buy a bridge is value creation!

Convincing people to buy your Teflon pan that will seep into the environment for centuries is value creation!

Because after all, nothing else matters. Value creation. Value. Creation. Consequences ? Thoughtfulness ? That's for the dumbasses not creating _value_

[Imustaskforhelp]

Convincing people to buy your product by hijacking the algorithm to just gather their attention thousand times and not meaningfully providing any justifiable content in return all in order to somehow sell your product is net negative for society.

Seriously, if being a slop machine in some sense (while mostly) sell slop itself to either other slop machine wannabe's etc and this cycle continues..

I am not saying that all linkedin is like this, but to me most do seem like this.

But is being a slop machine / being mediocre just to sell your product, itself net value creation though?

[lurk2]

> Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.

Are you mind-hacking your friends when you text them “Good morning”?