alt Hacker NewsAs someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it
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There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit:
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.
The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation
Gametheorys all defectors.. they are real. And that is why we must have lynch mobs ocassionally to regenerate the allmende
Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.
You should have just said quick example: Windows
I value both great devs and great marketers because I’ve seen dev teams build awesome tech that never found its audience.
It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.
Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.
It’s the old lifecycle of a scene.
1) cool people do cool things, start a scene
2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word
3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass
4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers.
5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs
Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.
Unironically UBI or something similar could eliminate the need for -most- people to resort to petty scams.
let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do.
how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?
it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”
at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.
I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.
With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.
The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.
Dunning Kruger springs to mind.
Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.
Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.
This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.
After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.
In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.
I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.