The Reality of Depending on True Fans (2008)

"The internet can also give us tools more narrowly to target specific demographics and to strengthen those assumptions that prevent acceptance of new ideas, nudging people towards algorithmically determined tastes or styles. Companies can use demographic models and track people’s search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons."

Pretty prescient for 2008.

The description of the starving artist reminds me of an article I read during the early 2010s talking about how since all of these rich people were moving to San Francisco, these technologists, it was raising the price of rent and forcing what the article called Bohemians out. These were the starving artists, the sculptors, the the restaurant hopefuls, the people that truly enrich our community and make it more varied and full of life. These people were priced out of the market and had to leave, leaving behind a homogeneous community of technologists. When the technologists left around the pandemic, you ended up with the city full of lots of criminals and the underprivileged and not much of anybody else.

My point is that artists who develop 1,000 true fans, they have a real place in the broader community. We need to be careful to make the broader community more welcoming to them.

One other aspect not mentioned that I see creators struggle with is being just below that threshold & the consequences in an algo driven world.

i.e. You have 60% enough true fans and need the more lukewarm crowd to make ends meet.

The true fans will be there no matter what. The lukewarms can easily disappear just because the black box algo has decided it doesn't like your twitch stream this month and funneled them somewhere else.

Suddenly the creator has an existential career crisis on their hands and might need to drop streaming entirely in favour of full time burger flipping just due to $$$.

When I was barely scraping by on a consulting startup, simultaneously trying to build commercial popularity of a small technical niche, I was working on a unique book for practitioners. (It also required that I write some tooling, to fill in the gaps in a practitioners' story.)

So I asked a published author from that community what I should expect. They said their book paid for a nice bicycle. And they were able to do it on the side, from a comfortable career position.

Although I think my book could've quickly grown a few times the number of commercial adopters in the niche, which then conceivably might've been the critical mass needed to start growing actual significant commercial uptake market share, I couldn't afford to focus full-time on it. So my strategy was to work on it on the side, but then additional speedbumps were thrown in the way, so I abandoned it.

This 1,000 True Fans is a handy idea to keep in mind, and difficult even for an established musician like Robert Rich's story in TFA. "Will I have 1,000 True Fans, paying $100/yr.? Or 10K paying $10/yr.? No? Then this is not going to be sustainable on its own."

It's not that 1k true fans cannot work for at least some people, it's just that the odds are really stacked against you. It fails the most basic test of reproducibility. This is way harder than it sounds.

Seems to be a followup blog post soon after https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ , which was on HN the other day (258 points by Tomte 2 days ago 141 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130726)