the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I'm the hedgehog masque replica guy

嘘だらけ塗ったチョースト


twitter, if you must
twitter.com/the_damn_muteKi
You must log in to comment.

in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

this goes after the effect on posters/creators, but in the inverse, yes, it absolutely does. there's a ton of shit out there that is hard to find because you won't know how to find it, and even basic shit like "tags related to things you've liked" or "people that a lot of people you follow follow" are helpful for branching out

That's explicitly not what I'm talking about though, and in fact the assumption that those two things are symmetrical goes directly to the heart of my question. Discoverability in the algorithmic timeline sense creates more ability to consume, trivially: More eyes in front of thing. But does that translate meaningfully to developing an audience? Does it bring people in at all?

The reason I ask is that I've run quite a few ad campaigns for various groups and businesses and only one, a campaign for a particular nonprofit whose only conversion metric was one-time donations, paid off in any way. The others got eyes on, got impressions, but over the course of multiple years created basically no organic sales, but only got customer contacts that never panned out. The campaigns that were looking for higher levels of engagement than organic sales fared even more poorly.

So this goes to the question: Does accelerating zero-effort consumption meaningfully pay off for the producer? If it does, at what scale? The baked-in sales pitch for toxic algorithms is that Going Viral leads to Success; does it?

your case is that you're referring to paid ads and finding they don't work, right? because they're ads. nobody wants ads! there have been studies that show people do their damndest to ignore them because they're always worthless

but you can't treat them as asymmetrical. if a recommendations system, even as basic as "here's other posters in the same circle" or "here's other things that use the same tags you use often", that helps people find you. if, say, twitch catches on to the fact that i spend hours watching someone play ftl, showing me another ftl stream on the side might actually get me to look at it. and in doing that, that helps build the audience of whoever is streaming it.

"It helps people find you". No, it exposes your content which is not the same thing. There's a lot of baked-in assumptions here; primarily, it assumes people seeing your content translates to some amount of engagement (even just a click) that counterbalances the costs of that sort of automatic exposure.

Also I'm trying not to expose too much information but the campaigns I was talking about were not all traditional ad campaigns. The behavior was the same regardless; the only "successful" one was a traditional ad campaign.

i mean on the converse i have no clue what you're getting at, because how exactly are you supposed to find content that's not exposed outside of being directly pointed to it or searching for it, and that assumes you even know what you're looking for

at the same time, you don't define what the "costs" of this mythical exposure supposedly are, only that they exist; and similarly implies that there would be no innate way to disable this sort of thing, which in the context of cohost (if something of the sort did come into existence) seems profoundly unlikely

i can only go on how i've seen things and interacted with them personally, and while i don't always find recommendation engines particularly helpful they have certainly fucking helped me discover a bunch of shit, on youtube and elsewhere

If I post something that pisses off a bunch of Nick Mullen fans and I get my account mass-reported and banned again, my "free" posts and "free" discoverability just cost me a good chunk of my work and audience development to that point that I have to recreate. Is it "free" if the death threats and SWATtings lose me my housing?

The costs of virality are not mythical, they're well-understood. Come on.

you're turning "discoverability" into "going viral", and they aren't the same

i mean, fuck, you've been here, you see that shit here can fucking blow up and go viral without a shred of "discoverability". people have gotten run off of the site from people dogpiling on them because one fuckin post got shared around and "went viral", with no discoverability

your situation could just as easily happen if someone followed you because you have a pink display image and found a post you made that shits on Nick Mullen and shares it with "look at this clown who hates Nick Mullen" and if they have a large enough audience discovery doesn't fuckin matter.

Okay, so as far as I can tell you think:

  • It's a ridiculous question to ask.
  • There's no relationship between algorithmic discoverability and main character syndrome.
  • Any exposure is good exposure.

I don't agree, I think there's a lot of reasons to believe otherwise, but that's a valid anawer

the inverse is that what i've gotten from your arguments is that any discoverability at all is both functionally worthless and directly leads to main character syndrome, apparently; but similarly i guess i don't see things on, say, youtube popping off nearly as badly as elsewhere and yet that very obviously has algorithmic recommendations (and has basically since its inception), similarly with other places

I said what I said: Algorithmic discoverability is unproven as a way to actually build audience and there is no proven symmetry between ease of consumption and benefit to the producer. The costs for "free" discoverability are well known and well understood so it's not reasonable to argue that any benefit, no matter how small, is automatically worth it.

Youtube is a great example.on both hands. How often do you see videos where the creator says something like "only 10% of you are subscribed! Hit the notification button!" Popular creators tend not to get popular by algorithmic discovery but by getting boosted by existing, popular creators. You can look at viral videos with millions and millions of views and the account's other videos will have practically nothing in many cases.

On the other hand, attacks in creators are well documented, and it is also demonstrably true that algorithmic boosting contributes; how often do you see YouTubers, Tiktokers, IG posters etc talk about their videos ending up on the "wrong side or the site"?

Based on all this, it is in no way either unreasonable or extreme in any sense to ask the question, "do these mechanisms contribute to building an audience in a sufficiently valuable way to justify their drawbacks?"

at the end of the day if you consistently ignore the direct and actual ways discoverability has helped me and countless others actually find new things then yes, there's no point in arguing with you. you can say it's "not proven", and i will simply roll my eyes at you and continue to occasionally look at Related Things that catch my eye. continue to pretend that i don't exist; i don't care.

"the wrong side of the site" exists because social media excels at removing context and encouraging dogpiles. again, you ignore the evidence of it happening on this very site, as it has repeatedly already, with no "discovery" whatsoever.

correlation and causation are not the same.

like fuck 90% of the people i get linked to i'm not going to follow and subscribe either, that doesn't suddenly mean that organically sharing links is fucking worthless

Organic sharing links is explicitly not what I asked about. However, after all this pointless arguing, you do have an asset to my original question and that is: Yes, I have an example personally. Thank you for sticking with this. God almighty.

my larger issue is the Cohost UI moves everything with various interactions so I would love to be able to find whatever post I was writing to. especially when like, I need to correct a comment I made since you can't find those from the profile page.

self discoverablity is more important but we don't really have that outside of... googling site:cohost.org which is a solution that's got a long memory, compared to something with more curated bounds as the first line.

(search with a 6mo/1y horizon would solve a lot, even if you can Google deeper, just because people are lazy. but a short memory allows growth without obliterating your bad posts no one ever sees unless they're digging, if you've made any and learned in the intervening time)

Oh, here's what I said:

Discoverability in the algorithmic timeline sense creates more ability to consume, trivially: More eyes in front of thing. But does that translate meaningfully to developing an audience? Does it bring people in at all?

The reason I ask is that I've run quite a few ad campaigns for various groups and businesses and only one, a campaign for a particular nonprofit whose only conversion metric was one-time donations, paid off in any way. The others got eyes on, got impressions, but over the course of multiple years created basically no organic sales, but only got customer contacts that never panned out. The campaigns that were looking for higher levels of engagement than organic sales fared even more poorly.

So this goes to the question: Does accelerating zero-effort consumption meaningfully pay off for the producer? If it does, at what scale? The baked-in sales pitch for toxic algorithms is that Going Viral leads to Success; does it?

:yeah:.

I also think very little thought is put towards the dark side of that kind of discoverability -- targeting is so bad that it drives people who dislike what you do, to you, as often as it does people who would be great.

algorithmic topical aggregators that you opt into is maybe the most I'd be willing to go, but really having people opt-into being shown randomly in the "need to follow more people? Here's people who've volunteered to deal with new people" box staff are currently burdened with.

I mean this sorta goes to things I've talked about in the past too, free and convenient at point-of-sale (point of post?) is largely amortizing the actual costs. If I post something that pisses off a bunch of Nick Mullen fans and I get my account mass-reported and banned again, my "free" posts and "free" discoverability just cost me a good chunk of my work and audience development to that point that I have to recreate. Is it "free" if the death threats and SWATtings lose me my housing?

I follow someone who did a big meltdown about how not having algorithm bullshit or like/retweet statistics made it impossible for them to make a living as a creative because they want to pander to whatever gets the most likes, and that they were going to leave forever because Staff refused to redesign the entire site to be just like twitter for them.

they're still posting here. they have never managed to make a living as a creative on twitter either.