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quibonotoday at 9:26 AM5 repliesview on HN

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?


Replies

ryukopostingtoday at 11:38 AM

By McHealy's logic, we ought not be concerned about that. After all, it's low-stakes content.

apitoday at 12:00 PM

I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators.

This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.

But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.

There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.

So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.

I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.

I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.

psychoslavetoday at 9:54 AM

No, but to misinform people you have two main strategies: limiting through tailored scarcity and dilute in extra-generic overabundance. Don’t get it wrong: both can be combined and even can sometime overlap.

It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.

Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.

mjdtoday at 10:23 AM

Or maybe Ms. McHealy was simply lying.