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Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

Adjective inflation. Yet another consequence of the advertising business model.

Let’s say this business model were banned or didn’t exist. Getting people to choose to read your articles instead of the billions of other things they could be doing with their time on the internet would still be critical if you want to get them to subscribe.

I think it’s less to do with the business model of advertising but rather I think both that business model and the tendency towards inflating adjectives are both caused by there simply being too much information, entertainment etc. for us to make a reasonable decision of what to pay attention to. We’ve exceeded our own human capacities to process and choose between different streams of information.

That might be true, but I think if a business doesn’t rely on views/advertising to fund itself, it has more room for creating a quality brand and attracting subscribers that way. As opposed to writing clickbait headlines.

This is essentially what the Financial Times does.

Agreed. Social media's the prime example. Take Youtube's monetization. Creators are plugged into a payment per view world. That's definitely an aggravating factor, but the competition for attention is there in a similar form with or without the ad model.

I think another cause that we do not notice or just take for granted is the way our language itself is designed, it almost seems deliberately designed to support imprecision, ambiguity, confusion, etc. without it being obvious the speaker had that intent.

"the advertising business model" or the modern world more broadly?

One way or another, there's a lot of short attention span razzle dazzle these days. Maybe adjective inflation is just positively correlated with the volume of media or even of people trying to talk to each other.

It's hard competing with impending asteroid collision.

I follow many people online because I care what they have to say. Because I have read their works before and find their ideas insightful.

Not because they write clickbait headlines.

How did you know about those to follow in the first place?

They are known because 1) they care to publish their opinion, and 2) they tell others about their work.

2) is also known as marketing, a.k.a. advertising. We're often told it isn't enough to do good work to advance our career, we have to tell others about it as well. How well you present your story has big impact on how far reached and well received your work can be.

Bottom line is, you are influenced by marketing/advertising, whether you want to admit it or not. You following someone is for sure not solely because of the quality of their work.

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