Larry posted this on the Book of Faces, so I quickly grabbed it before they could memory hole it:
To put into perspective just how profoundly dishonest social media companies are, and this one in particular, and how hard it is for creatives to stay in touch with the audience who wants to buy their work…
I’ve been frozen around 24k FB followers for years. That number never seems to go up. It rose steadily for years, and then suddenly, poof. It just stopped. Cold. I could write something super viral with hundreds of shares to new readers, and literally thousands of comments, but nothing. Follower count stays the same.
Over on Twitter my follower count grew steadily for years, and then suddenly, for no apparent reason it just stopped around 10k if I recall correctly. No matter what I did or said, it was frozen. Elon buys Twitter, and for the first time in years that number started to grow. Now it’s at 27k with steady growth, and big jumps whenever I write something that goes viral.
Also amusing after the Elon purchase, I’d tweet something, and somebody who’d followed me years ago would go “wow! You’re using twitter again? I haven’t seen you tweet in forever.” Oh, I was there, they just didn’t show you anything I wrote.
When FB does show my followers what I wrote, it is often days later. This was one of the things that utterly ruined the Book Bombs I used to do for authors. It also pisses me off when I’m trying to do some charity thing and trying to build momentum to help somebody, but FB is all like, nope. Fuck you.
Not that the FB follower number actually means anything, because near as I can tell whatever I post only gets shown to a small fraction of them anyway. If I use any no-no or hurt-hurt words that offend the algos (which is basically everything) that percentage is far smaller. But even the most innocuous things only get shown to a handful.
I hear Instagram is better about the throttling, but I just don’t get it, and hardly ever use it. It’s pictures and hash tags. I’m a writer. So I mostly use it when I post a picture of a new book coming out.
Blogs? Blogs are a shadow of what they once were because the social media companies tricked all the creators into aggregating our followers into one convenient place before they pulled the rug out from under us. So now most of the audience doesn’t go to blogs anymore.
Email newsletters? I’ve got one that I use strictly for book product announcements only. (you can sign up for it on my blog) but how much of that ends up in everybody’s spam folder to do no good, I don’t rightly know.
It would be so nice and convenient if the social media companies had a feature we could simply pay for that was basically “show this post to all the people who voluntarily clicked to see my all posts.”
That’s it. Just a button with a dollar sign and an amount on it.
But nope. We get feeds full of ads for shit tier holsters and “fuel filters” and “recommended” pages of total fucking bullshit clickbait garbage that we don’t want. But we don’t get to see the actual stuff we signed up saying we wanted to see.
Seriously, I would pay actual money for that. I know your robots are reading this. Add that button, you greedy bastards.
Yeah, I still use RSS. It seems like a great model for aggregation. You put out a feed, I subscribe to the feed. My app checks the feed every once in a while, and shows me the new stuff you post to it. No intermediaries. If you offend me, or I get tired of your stuff, or for whatever reason don’t want to read your feed anymore, I unsubscribe.
Like the name says: Really Simple Syndication.
What are your thoughts on how I think even conservatives have grown concerned on the whole “Parallel Economy” thing as it can make an “echo chamber”?
Sure I am pretty sure anyone that thinks that “Minor Attracted Persons” or John Money’s research was remotely legitimate or ethical are slaaneshi cultists but more incompetent and non-combat worthy
But people still need to hear each other, at least as a chance to humanize one another, otherwise conflict is inevitable or maybe much much much faster to occur
Years ago, I read Christopher G. Nuttall’s A Learning Experience V2 Hard Lessons
The first volume was about how the Solar Union was formed, it was Libertarian SciFi WITHOUT the war between the old highly centralized corrupt and decadent vs the new vibrant decentralized Wild West frontier….mostly because the latter could wreck them all and too much information was already out
V2 was about how things would go if too many people Go Galt, it was essentially a massive Brain Drain, plenty who didn’t really have skills or education to begin with, but a willingness to learn and Brave the new frontiers….also had good incentive to just leave due to earth’s many nations becoming increasingly totalitarian and centralized and extra corrupt
Seriously, even with GalTech for decentralized spyware-free internet, many nations still became surveillance states and things like Political Correctness went into overdrive to the point people’s homes were redistributed for “ancestral sins”, the people of Tibet get extra slaughtered in spite of the information being out in the open, Western Europe gets taken over by a bunch of caliphates made up of many unemployed migrants, the Japanese make a law to force women to have kids, the USA decriminalizes outright pedrofilia and so on
One of the things lamented by some Solar Union guys is that “maybe if so many of us didn’t leave, we could have fixed Earth”
Even though they know by now what happens to many Dreamers and Doers on the home world.
Locked up, permanently blacklisted from work, homeless, tortured and worse.
First volume had the guys who founded the Solar Union curbstomp and humiliate a Homeland Security(?)force that was gonna Ruby Ridge Massacre them, made them all go out unarmed and naked…..decades later regardless of the worst being out in the open and people having alternatives, the majority of people still have to deal with those sorts of guys
Since I don’t think Going Galt is economically feasible for large populations, let alone legal or would stay legal….people have to still live with their “opposition” nearby and that includes online for better and worse
And even if things like Seasteading, experimental lowered tax and regulation zones(?), Vaults aka Fallout without horrific experiments etc came into existence….I think they would be annexed sooner or later or have their own differing policies overturned
That goes for the internet, even if decentralized or non-mainstream, I can see alternatives being nationalized or selling themselves out to Big Tech and so on
I still use RSS too–I use Feedly to track all the blogs I want to follow. I also still maintain a blog of my own for my books and life and such, though I haven’t updated it in a hot minute because I’ve been moving and got busy, so I should probably fix that lol.
You know, when it comes to Newsletters and personal Blogs, I think you’re much more likely to get genuine fans over or guys with genuine interest sticking around
Putting aside the Dead Internet Theory, that the internet is mostly bots, I think most of the guys engaging in social media aren’t really that much fans of the stuff
Or if they are, they are way way way more easily “dominated”, it’s why I consider Gatekeeping not to be too useful in the long run when you have “genuine fans” who feel like opening the gates and taking over, because their IRL politics are more important than canon, good writing, what people actually like, actual realism that’s not just making everything ugly and edgy, and the source material
With these newsletters and personal blogs, people at least get to engage with the actual creators. Sure I am pretty sure many creators have swallowed the Kool-Aid, but this is still more reliable a way to find your fans.
BAENSBooks sells a LOT and yet they barely have any comments on their YouTube channel, let alone their Subreddit
More explicitly politicized and outright political subreddits and YouTube accounts at least get actual attention even from those that hate them and like bashing and slandering them a lot, even if plenty of those are likely to be bots themselves
One thing I have learned over the years, is not to think that Mainstream Media, let alone the internet actually show how the majority of people think….most are likely neutral, have no actual opinions or are just very willing to stay silent where they know they’re not welcome. Even the burn loot murder types are ultimately a minority of a minority of a minority of the population and are ultimately just expendable tools who’re gonna lose all their finances sooner than most due to having gender studies degrees with no actual job to pay back for it
Still, I wonder how a truly decentralized internet would look like, how will some things get more attention than others? I mean there’s some really good works out there that are barely ever known to exist, in spite of active advertisement
Either way, you guys have cultivated your fans, keep doing what you’re doing and we’ll stay and more will come
Though, frankly I do hope the Indies succeed and also have faster output
Larry should have never transferred over to Social media in the first place. He should write on his blog and just post links on social media.
That way the lemmings on social media would still be informed about new content but those of us who wouldn’t touch facebook with your d1ck would still be able to read his stuff.
Oh well. I miss reading Larry’s wit and wisdom, but not enough to convince me to join the herd. My loss I suppose, but I can live with that.
I’m reading you because of an RSS aggregator right now! And I ignore the social media sites. I even get a little miffed that your posts here are from someone else pasting your tweets here. Don’t neglect the blog, sir!
Same here, I read everything here as soon as it hits my RSS feed.
But it was a pain to find that the RSS feed exists. Please, add it to the header next to newsletter signup.
The observation by Louis Rossman (great voice opposing companies pushing toward “you will own nothing and be happy”) that we’ve had an entire generation grow up on an internet that was never financially viable is something that has stuck with me. Twitter didn’t make money, only recording a minor profit two of the years of its existence that didn’t even come close to outweighing its prior losses. YouTube always lost money till Google stopped reporting on it it individually and has never mentioned it making profit once. Tumblr wasn’t profitable, and its value dropped off a cliff once the porn people actually gave a damn about was banned. It’s all been propped up by venture capital doing the following “plan”
1: Prop up company with absurd money
2: Get lots of users
3: ???
4: Profit!
Then realizing they can’t actually profit off what they created, selling it to a new venture capital and either A: Drive off users in failed attempt to monetize B: Realize it will never be profitable and push it off onto another sucker. The same is true of most internet “news” (activism) sites. Now the venture capital responsible is starting to dry up due to the Biden recession that they redefined recession to say we’re not in and these sites are either dying, or getting sold for peanuts to someone hoping to pump up trash with AI*. This is when the 2024 election SHOULD be giving these sites a boost.
The sole profitable company is Facebook. That’s only due to its internal ad sales which have been repeatedly shown to be fraudulent in their promises (supposedly able to reach more people in a demographic than exist, and, as mentioned on Write Dojo, serving to bots). Once companies start realizing that, it’s dead.
*It won’t work. Text generation “AI” just fundamentally does not work in a way conductive to anything but rephrasing existing information. It’s a glorified autocomplete, sometimes paired with a search engine. It’s also not all that cheap and won’t get much cheaper for at least 5 year because of the hardware and electricity cost. (“AI” image generation however is actually pretty decent tech that keeps getting better. It’s already good enough to work for rapid prototyping and placeholders and the way it works, reversing image recognition software, can actually progress. You can get some decent results on a sub 300 GPU and that’s only going to get better as GPUs advance)
It sounds paranoid, but I can’t help but feel a crash is planned
Lots of companies even before they started switching to AI, were already ran by and employing loads of actually unskilled weirdos that were political and oddly elitist before ESG as far as I can tell
Hell, the education system already breaks people more than it makes people with actual skills, all those many many many required extra topics fail to create either generalists or Renaissance men or even people who truly have skills in even one field
I swear I bet in the coming years, medical school won’t require that you have a college degree, just a willingness and ability to pay and actually learn ASAP and be tested properly via live tests like vivisectiong a cat and such
What’s really the longterm plan? Because I am pretty sure most of the Wokies will have come to be hated by 2030 or forgotten entirely alongside the current ESG trends
Less guys are going to college, even Lefties are becoming concerned about both that and that more men deciding MGTOW, PassPort Bro and following the Pence Rule
These companies and those that run them are losing their charisma, if they actually had any to begin with….I expect a LOT of changes in the coming years
Also, you sure YouTube and the like didn’t make money? I was wondering for awhile how they make money, given access is for the most part free, online piracy is a thing and people dislike ads
“What’s really the longterm plan?”
There isn’t one.
A look at history shows that:
1) Nobody has ever been a successful Machiavellian chess master mastermind
2) Those who appear to be so (like Bismark) were just good at taking credit for a run of good luck.
We like to think that these companies are all working according to some sort of nefarious plan, because that means that someone is in control. The idea that they really have no clue what they’re doing as they monkey with the controls is kinda terrifying.
Then the question is: is this what history taught *them*? Or do they believe in successful Machiavellian masterminds and are they trying to become such?
Or maybe (they think that) what previous generations of masterminds lacked was technology, such as instant communications and drugs.
If so, they could be successful, for a while, then produce a lot of damage on the way out.
Note: I am including Putin and Xi Jinping in “their” ranks.
Ironically, Machiavelli himself thought that road was a foolish one. I find it ironic when people who are anti-Marxist still buy into their Myth of Progress. Tech may change, but people really don’t- and won’t.
Even with better comms tech & mind-altering substances, the same issues that have inevitably doomed the goal remain. Better comms tech doesn’t overcome the tendency of people to see what they want to see over what’s real. If it worked, “The Marvels” would be the best-selling movie in history.
The drugs only temporarily mask the problems short term, and it’s doubtful true Soma will ever be developed.
In the end, you still got people, and people gonna do people things, which tends to include acting like a herd of cats.
But as far as I can tell, we never had this level of global/international cooperation and communication
There are plenty of guys all over the world, very rich and powerful, who attend all those WEF, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission etc meetings and spend billions just to go and attend yearly
That so many have bought into “Stakeholder Capitalism” regardless of the costs, makes it look like they have each other’s financial and social backs
Well, then, especially if you believe that there is no real progress and history repeats almost identically, then maybe the would-be masterminds have not learned any useful lessons from history and will keep trying.
They do not know how futile their quest is. Probably they have not even read the Ecclesiastes.
Oh, they have all sorts of plans. They’re just not based on reality and their logic is of the Underpant Gnomes variety. At some point all their Grand Schemes come down to ‘Because we say so!’
Sometimes their plans seem to work for a while because they’ve got the guns.
———————————
There is no shortage of people convinced they can create the Perfect World. They just have to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.
I don’t get why some people rightly understand that you can’t plan economy, but also believe you can plan events vastly more complicated.
So far, it looks like they have quite a LOT of control over corporations and governments and even have influence over the Vatican
So I can understand why they feel very secure
Plus, their plans have “succeeded” quite well in the past few years-decades
So far, there’s no actual resistance, I am pretty sure Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin still greet Klaus Schwab from time to time
Xi Jinping and the CCP were able to make their lockdowns more brutal and restrictive than average, as a “stress test” both in the economy and the people
Since it’s lasted this long, I can guess they think they’ll last forever….or at least a few more decades before things collapse or the human race gets really really really really sick
This may depend on how well those life extension technologies actually work or if they really do help them keep on going
It’s kinda funny, but I’ve heard “The Great Reset” compared to a cyberpunk dystopia, but even in that genre the corpos tend to get killed by people using the tech they made
Whereas IRL, I am pretty sure they are confident that they could shut down anyone using their tech
“Also, you sure YouTube and the like didn’t make money? I was wondering for awhile how they make money, given access is for the most part free, online piracy is a thing and people dislike ads”
It’s impossible to know for sure, but it never made money before reports on its fiances stopped and they’ve never mentioned how it made money since. I suspect that, at least historically, Google kept it subsidized to keep control of information. Rossman viewed the recent and sudden war on ad block as a desperate attempt to obtain profitability, especially as it came so soon after a CEO change, and a sign someone higher up demanded it be profitable.
My curiosity is only held in check by the fear of what the incoming chaos will look like
Just so you know, I do NOT think the Great Reset will come to pass, if it does, I expect a LOT of dissatisfaction and technocrats actually learning fear for the first time in their lives
Hell, I don’t believe the Biblical End Times are near either, because a charismatic AntiChrist will likely turn out to be VERY unpopular and be assassinated surprisingly quickly whilst the “ten kingdoms” get dismantled in a French Revolution of sorts
That’s the thing with Entertainment/Social Media companies that weirds me out, these years it seems like they’re trying to make a combination of Brave New World and 1984 but they antagonize their audience too much to make it a properly distracting experience….hell they end up seeing the horrors and problems of IRL be approved by what they see enforced in fiction
It feels like an economic collapse was purposely being made for over a decade, at least for a number of ESG related companies
It was less about venture capital (though that was also a thing) and more the zero interest rate policies that allowed companies to borrow huge sums, then roll it over into a new loan with a lower rate and simply pay the interest but never pay back the loan.
Obviously that couldn’t continue indefinitely, and when rates went back up a few years ago, all these companies suddenly realised that hey, we actually need to make money now. Oops.
I wonder how it is in all those companies
Especially with Larry Fink and the rest of WEF having them attend all those “masters of the universe” meetings at different surprisingly public and known venues…..ESG is still being pushed
You may laugh at all the Wokesters, but the particularly environmental oriented stuff can kill economies, look at Sri Lanka…..it’s NOT just the West being targeted
My guess, sometime this year or the coming years, there will be another thing like COVID to justify mass lockdowns and mass control, maybe this time of things like the internet
A big crisis to somehow “make these companies’ continued existence necessary” at the tax payers expense as well as many many many smaller businesses
Plenty of companies, insufficiently or not ESG oriented at all, will suddenly get visitations to “evaluate their stability”
I check here every day, just in case Jack has posted something Larry wrote elsewhere. I walked away from dreckBook years ago and haven’t regretted it a bit.
My feed was full of ads I’d told it I wasn’t interested in, and entirely bereft of anything from the people I was interested in. Reached the point, I’d just go to those folks’ timelines and see if they’d put up anything new, pretty much every day, because it wasn’t being sent to me the way I’d been told it would.
Better just to check the blog. Jack keeps us up to date on anything really entertaining, and I don’t miss the rest of the noise at all.
Bit lame to say “me, too!” but perfectly encapsulates my experience. Can’t rely on FarceBook to see anything interesting in my feed that’s not family-related. X is entertaining but noisy. Polling site is least worst option.
I have you on a RSS reader, but even if I didn’t I’m an near-daily visit anyway. “Come for the articles, stay for the comments.”
I’m not on Twitter/X, but I’m pretty sure I followed you on FB, and I’m 100% positive I’ve never seen your posts in my feed. Instead I get endless ads for sh!t I don’t want and “suggested” scantily-clad celebrities I don’t want to see.
Nah, I only ever see your memorable FB posts when Jack copy-pastes them here. (Thanks for that, Jack!)
The social media companies could indeed monetize the feeds of “undesirables”, or REALLY capitalize on “popular”(ly-suggested-whether-you’re-interested-or-not) pages, but I’m convinced their ideology demands they take the loss to keep conservative and libertarian voices silenced.
Besides, is there any doubt that if they had such a button, they’d take your money and limit your reach anyway, and just be more quiet and less transparent about it?
Ever used Substack? I have a theory that a “Parallel Economy” is slowly being accepted to be an inevitability
That’s why, even mid calls to “get rid of all the Nazi’s” to Substack, the founders who are from San Francisco said “no”
ESG is slowly being overturned
They want/need customers and if all these guys just blacklist all “right wing” people from things like Amazon’s kindle, they will make people too aware and too likely to leave
“That’s why, even mid calls to “get rid of all the Nazi’s” to Substack, the founders who are from San Francisco said “no”.”
Some places have caught on that accusations of “Nazi” are done by moral terrorists solely to maintain their unearned sense of moral vanity. Such people never use morally loaded slander like “nazi” or “racist” in good faith, it is always intended to morally discredit the accused.
Those screeching ‘Nazi’ the loudest are the ones acting the most like actual Nazis. Censorship? Check. Ban guns? Check. Use the legal system to attack their political opponents? Check. Brownshirts in the streets? Check. Vilifying Jews, even? Check.
Although even the Nazis didn’t go in for all the child sex insanity these ‘Progressives’ are pushing.
———————————
‘Progressives’ suppress free speech because they don’t have the means to suppress free thought.
Yet.
I think the Bolsheviks once had a bizarre sub-faction that was extremely hedonistic and really really really into destroying “the Four Olds” and were VERY into stuff like IdPol and may have hated Russian culture/tradition and got into some of today’s similar ball cutting and the like
Spoiler: After the Commies took over, they were killed….my guess is that they’re too freaky to keep around and would make everyday life way too hellish and bizarre
Plus, both the Maoists and Stalinists know that they actually NEED Masculine Men to fight wars and build industry
The IdPol of the now, is more to demoralize and take over and they sure as hell unlike the Russians and Chinese are more likely to actively destroy their own industrial base rather than build up to fight
Remember, this is “An Age of Plenty”, actually having men with higher testosterone levels and actual skills, would be more of a threat to the ruling powers who rely a LOT on Soft Power
Both economic and political and bureaucratic blackmail and social shaming sort of “Soft Power”
The thing is, Facebook really has made it impossible to go viral. That was a deliberate choice. They allowed it before, lured people in, then throttled all. Now, you want to go viral, you will pay for the privilege with Ads. That’s how they make money, a lot. It’s also actually very effective, if you pay attention to your metrics and target well.
I’m a part time staff in a non-profit on top of my day job, and some of our senior leadership push our marketing people to post things on facebook, ask us to share, etc. I was concerned, as I knew the reality that nothing spreads without spending money via Facebook. Fortunately, when I talked to our marketing head she laughed and told me she posts things to keep leadership happy, but had the metrics and spent times on things that metrics showed work.
There’s an odd cycle in business enterprises- the businesses that become hugely successful often move away from the actual thing that made them successful.
Usually because they start letting the People with the Right Degree from the Best Schools run things.
And when things inevitably start to fall apart, then they’ll double down on the stupid things.
Part of the problem is that for many of those companies is that they lose the members that made the stuff good to begin with
Or worse, those who were around for the good times, decide “my politics are more important than good writing or actually catering to the fans and FUCK the money”
That ESG Investments are a thing alongside Lefties playing “Game of Thrones” in the office better or actively playing it, helps them dominate….they rule over rot and ash
Things may only change in truly lean times, or they just decide to die whilst in denial of why they are losing or escape with the cash elsewhere whilst the company collapses
I’ll chime in with a bit of “me too”. In the good sense. I have a FB account. I mostly use it for Marketplace and for doing some research on a couple of my hobbies. I have few “friends”. I have never subscribed to your FB but I do have an RSS feed set up that I check every day, so that sends me here whenever you post something new. I also, and probably more importantly, own many of your books.
Email is still king – if you use it correctly. If you already have a newsletter, you should be sending it at least once a month, or your sending rep will suffer.
If you’re an author, please buy and read the Newsletter Ninja books and implement the best practices. Tammi knows her stuff! There’s also an FB group for questions.
Now, as of Feb 1, Google and Yahoo have new rules in place for email! You have to get fully authenticated. Google will now require that you provide a one-click unsubscribe in your newsletters, and keep your spam report rate below 0.3% going forward. Gmail said it will affect anyone sending 5,000 emails a day. Yahoo are applying the new standards to everyone.
You need to do three things:
1 – Authenticate your domain with your Email Marketing Service (EMS)
2 – Ensure your EMS has a one-click unsubscribe.
3 – Keep your spam report rate below 0.3%—as measured by Google Postmaster Tools.
Completely unrelated to the original post or the discussions above…
Earlier tonight, Amelia Watson of Hololive plugged the Grimnoir series during a stream, and talked several minutes about how much she liked it.
(My kid might actually read it now.)
I’m not quite sure what you’d like to do with that information, but given how successful you’ve been at marketing, I’m pretty sure there’s something.
Definitely got a boost in sales
Thing is though, for pretty much all of BAEN Books, there’s barely ANY attention to the stuff regardless of how much is sold both online and offline
Like seriously, the BAEN subreddit and YouTube channel barely have either likes or dislikes or comments
The MHI subreddit, last I checked was mostly less than 5 guys posting
Most I ever see when people in mention BAEN on social media is disparaging it for being “right wing” and having “sexist covers” or said covers being “too pulp and uncultured”
Larry Correia and many other guys who are NOT “on the right side of history” ARE popular, it’s just that their fans don’t do social media that much
Heh. There’s a reason I posted that here, in the hope that Jack would notice and pass it on, rather than FB or Twitter.
Between the two streams (Gura and Ame were playing Deep Rock Galactic) there were nearly 250K people watching live, and who knows how many will see it later. (The girls and Deep Rock Galactic all have enthusiastic fanbases.)
I can’t give a timestamp of the discussion, but it was during the Fungus Bogs mission.
As much as people worry about entertainment media being “Bread & Circuses” to pacify people
It only really works depending on how good it is, are there alternatives and/or now if they are “controlled”
Overly doomer religious conservative types who are also luddites lamenting how they gave kids iPads whilst avoiding thinking on how they already abandoned their kids to the schools which have long been controlled by weirdos like John Money
Really should remember/realize, that they can make use of it too and there’s more than just the usual social media sites to use
That said, I see “anime women” like VTubers….actually helping increase the whole “men leaving society” thing….mostly because ladies especially in the West are becoming increasingly ugly, increasingly overweight, increasingly like a bad stereotype of masculinity, increasingly expecting more from men for little in return, increasingly trying to dominate and humiliate men etc
That is, if they don’t just go to another country with “traditional women” to go and have a relationship
Civilization falls, because men prefer “fictional women” over “real women”
It’s like being made to fight for a country that actively hates and demeans you and pays you less and less whilst taxing what you got with higher rates….then being called a coward and greedy and selfish for NOT choosing to sacrifice yourself
They’ll go for Anime Waifus like those VTubers, less likely to treat you like crap…..unfortunately marrying an anime girl is probably gonna result in severe depression like that guy who married a Hatsune Miku hologram/doll
A VTube Larry? Sort of want to see this now…
1. Never be afraid to walk away. Social media companies need you more than you need them.
2. As a few people have mentioned Substack is a great tool. You write stuff and the people that follow you see it. I didn’t realize it til last month but Ringo is doing some of his writing over there now and if your doing something cool it seems to grow like a crazy.
3. As you say its a business. Be where your people are or have a way to reach your people.
4. Thanks to jack for sharing the post.
5. Thanks for all the cool stories Larry.
I still check here first to see if anything new is up. And I still do a daily blog, but I’ve never really gotten above about 2k clicks/day. I agree, I’d pay to have my stuff actually get out there!
Larry, I’ve talked to people who did content moderation on Twitter. If we ever connect at a con, I’ll tell you about some of the reasons things worked they way they did. I’m not saying these were good reasons, but there is a kind of twisted logic to the whole process. Basically, it was a spinning plate problem. Trying to fix one thing caused problems somewhere else.
I’m a dinosaur. I don’t Farcebook and I don’t Twittler. I’m reading this on Larry’s blog, because social media is crap. Always was.
I’m beginning to wonder about Amazoon too. Their author support does not amaze me, let’s just say.
YouTube actually supports their content creators. They give you a chance when you start out, and put your video in front of a lot of people.
One weird trend I notice for many books, even ones that are NOT on “The Right Side of History” is that plenty start off with a big number of raters or reviewers, like a few hundred to a few thousand
Then with time, the number goes down for the next few books
So either the novelty’s worn off, or the books just aren’t that great….or there’s a lot of fake posts and ratings involved to show there’s a lot of “love” even for the non politically correct stuff
As for things like YouTube, one thing I heard that aside from the usual ESG politico stuff, is that right now they are trying to “compete with TikTok” and want to promote shorts and as many videos published as possible, and maybe everyday no matter what
They’ll still demonetize you for random reasons, both political and not
Safe to say, I think “popularity” and “attention” is based more of than just “make a good product and wait for the customers”
You gotta learn to market/advertise things better and be your own businessman….leave yourself to these “platforms” and “publishers” and they may screw up
It’s one thing to be hated, it’s another to be barely known to exist
“They’ll still demonetize you for random reasons, both political and not”
There was one guy whose million+ view showcase of how bad a game’s weapon balance and level scaling was got demonetized because it had a tiny bit of blood splatter from an NPC at the start of the video (demonstrating it took 15 headshots to kill high level humans enemies). He made a point of showing how absurd YT’s rule on this was by including ultra-violence against mutated humans at the start of his next several videos, and ultraviolence against normal humans after 15 seconds into the video, all of which were approved for monetization. Apparently cutting the limbs off an emaciated man with a mind ravaged by radiation before blowing him into bloody chunks is perfectly OK even in the first 15 seconds, but a small blood splatter when a not that realistic looking bandit is hit is not.
There’s also a naval historian whose video on the Battle of Hampton Roads (CSS Virginia vs. USS Monitor) and historical reactions to it was demonetized for “graphic injury” and “frequent strong use of profanity”, even though there was no swearing and the video portion consisted entirely of still images whose ONLY depiction of humans in any situation remotely violent was a still painting of two armies charging at each other but not yet engaged in battle. His manual review was denied after a review that was finished literally seconds of him requesting one (for a video over a half hour long), then his appeal on that was denied with an admission there was no swearing, and no violence, but they were going to keep it demonetized anyways for reasons they had just now made up and he couldn’t appeal. Only after he made the story of this “final decision” public did they retract it.
When it comes to corporations, the bigger they are, the more they become like governments
In that they are ran by an increasingly large number of fat, lazy, psychopathic, effeminate, backstabbing, brown nosing, corrupt, incompetent and random paper pushers with connections
Having loyal customers isn’t as attractive as having powerful well connected investors and connections to corner a market, any market, so even if your products and services are terrible you’re the only ones who’ll people get to buy from
It’s a “time of plenty”, big corporations and big governments can afford to screw over their customers and those who really help make them money, especially if they lack connections. The WEF ESG types are confident they can starve millions by shutting down farms, it’s not like they need the money and labor of said millions.
Read-through numbers almost always drop, especially as a series gets longer. Part of it is people decide they don’t like the story/series (tried the first book, but didn’t love it enough to keep going). Part is that people have been burned by series that stop, or get cancelled, and wait until a series is “finished” before committing. And as you point out, sometimes, the writing gets poorer, or the plot wanders more and more, as the number of books increase (“I had a three book idea and a five book contract. Oops.”)
Full disclosure: I’m a writer with several series.
Larry is also not a fan of H*g* Award Committees, I suspect, these being the committees that just shot themselves in a foot with a grenade launcher. Firing atomic hand grenades. Set on full automatic. Apparently the vote counts for the 2023 H*g*awards ignored the rules. Or are partially fake. Or worse.
Given how much cash they still have and at times how actual financial success doesn’t mean much compared to “connections” to keep a Zombie Company safe
I expect that for the next few years to decades, that “committee” will remain “popular” on the “mainstream” and in forums and subreddits where Lefties easily dominate due to Admin and Mod assistance, algorithms and sheer psychological need to dominate
Breitbart has direct quotes from the Hugo people along with their phony apologies. Gut-churning.
Hi Larry,
I visit around 20 blogs most mornings. I have a folder in my browser favourites and it’s like reading the newspaper, I just drop in on each site to see what everyone has to say.
This blog is at the top of that list, but I haven’t bothered stopping by very much over the last 12 – 18 months because you rarely say anything here. You seem to have lost interest in your own blog.
Can I suggest you use this blog as your central point of truth and post absolutely everything here first?
Maybe a week or so afterwards repost your work strategically on the social media pages that hate you with the intensity of a thousand burning suns? But being very sure to point back to your blog here.
Stop giving money, time and attention to people that hate you.
That’s really easy for you to say, but you are an anomaly and the overwhelming majority of traffic is concentrated on those shitty social media sites.
Plus, I’ve not had much time for actual blogging over the last couple of years anyway.
Doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Good luck.
I’ve been laughing my butt off at Farcebook being torpedoed for the past day. We’ll see how long they continue to not operate. For now, I’m just enjoying MeWe, Larrry and Sarah’s blogs, as well as reading in Mad Genius Club.