and wonderfully, along the way on your search, if you ask people who/what *they* are looking for, you will find people that you can connect with other people! This is very gratifying to do. Every wonderful connection blesses the entire network
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the flattening of metrics and the lurid quality of metric-gamers means that many people are inclined to assume that any person looking to “grow an audience” etc *is* metric-gaming. when it might really just be a sort of side-effect of what they’re really trying to do
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money is a useful analogy here
1: some people are obsessed with making money
2: some people (👀) are obsessed with rebuilding the Baghdad House of Wisdom, and might be selling ebooks to fund that expedition
and some people can’t tell the difference between 1 & 2, maybe bc:
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a thing that took me a long time to understand – I’d say I’m only just finally beginning to understand it – is what it means when people project their insecurities onto you
for example, if someone is badly insecure about money, they’re likely to process everything thru $ lens
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I don’t mean to imply that making money for its own sake, or seeking followers for its own sake, is necessarily an intrinsically “bad” motivation… but it IS very tricky stuff, precisely because of the flattening. The market seduces metric-optimizers with devil’s bargains
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greatly exaggerated to illustrate:
A: I just want money/followers I don’t care about anything else
Devil: cool, will you murder an innocent person for a million dollars / followers?
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In practice the bargains are more subtle, and can be laundered through bureaucracy
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Devil: will you poast outrage bait for more followers?
and I don’t even wanna really revisit rn how much cruelty and suffering is downstream of greed expressed through proxies, but it’s very bleak
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and of course this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of, when you think the outrage bait is actually the right thing to do. Hell hath no fury like the righteous mind
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anyway, let's rebuild the baghdad house of wisdom
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threading for future reference – something here about overproductization stifling originality and imagination. the narrowing, fragilizing effect of specific outcome-focused blinders
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hehe; while I’m a marketing guy, I am not interested in people delegating decisions to me and I have no interest in automating anything for anybody’s speedy delight and convenience. no darling, up in this mf we’re going to do things the slow and gruelling way. 50 year long game twitter.com/vgr/status/149…
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this thread also seems like it goes here somewhere
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anyway, ive noticed people get this weird relationship with "the audience" (everyone online seeks some kind of audience, even if its small), and this gets into their head. i thought about this a lot and suddenly made a connection to an aspect of my life that relates to this.
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