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Comment by sfpotter | Hacker News Reader

What do people get out of reading Seth Godin's blog posts? Genuinely curious. It's a blog post with 9 "paragraphs". The number of "sentences" in each "paragraph": 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 5, 2, 3, 2. Many of the "sentences" aren't actually sentences but are just sentence fragments. The post consists purely of vague assertions and observations, which aren't researched, aren't argued meaningfully, and don't seem very insightful. Do people just enjoy the nostalgia of reading a popular blog from way back and the feeling it gave them when this kind of thing was novel and exciting?

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Seth has delivered the daily food for thought for decades — this in itself is already the message; regardless of swings of superficiality. I'll take that over the twenty-something business hustler who drops rehashed 'value bombs' on Twitter any day. Now let's talk about pop. I for one welcome that KK's 100(0) true friends finally materializes, but I also miss widespread collective cultural (pop) experiences. Can't have it all.

My less charitable interpretation is that Seth is one of the first "business hustler" personas, and used the power of the internet, blogging, and eventually social media to promote that persona and turn it into a business in and of itself.

When he started out, he was a twenty-something business hustler dropping value bombs, written in Palahniuk-style blog posts. But he was very unique at the time, and certainly a pioneer in pushing how valuable you can make your own personal brand just through blogging and social media.

Unfortunately for him, he was so successful he inspired an enormous amount of copycats, diluting the value of his once-unique style.

Why are you both referring to him by his first name? Do you know him personally?

The name of his blog is "Seth's Blog"...

Just seems kind of weird to refer to someone you don't know by their first name. I don't ever do it, personally. I'm not that familiar with this blog or the group of people who follow it closely. But if it's common to refer to the author by their first name, it seems like their marketing and branding is very effective.

There's been a lot of talk about podcast listeners having parasocial relationships with the hosts of the podcasts they listen to. I wonder if blogs like this were a forerunner of developing a brand by drawing people into a proto parasocial relationship.

Everyone talking about the end of pop but nobody is talking about the end of wannabe chuck palahniuk blog spammers

wait until you read the 100 sentences the "book" linked in the post-scriptum has*

* https://paigespage.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/DRF_book-f...

Check out Page 11.

dramatic! pulitzer subito!

It's a natural progression of his writing style. It's reductive romantic style, tuned for virality in a sea of endless info. Of course, its shallow, but this one invites conversion of an observation that is quite impactful. I thought it was well done for a general audience, and probably some target to an aging generation. No one around me listens to McCarthy, and if they do its all regression.

Even without any knowledge about the author and without having read TFA, the comment exchange of you both makes for a satisfying and interesting read.

I'm not sure if this can be shoehorned as "curiosity", but it dangerously touches on a meta level that HN has historically been keen to avoid (as opposed to other, more common social media platforms)

This is not meant as a critique of our comments, just a self-observation.

What I got out of this one:

1. scarcity is a forcing function for pop culture (true!)

2. AI will make new creations ubiquitous; bye, bye, scarcity (maybe true?)

3. without the forcing function, there's no more pop culture (doesn't seem so true at all)

While Godin is curt, he's not so succinct. And there's a lot of conjecture asserted as true. There's still some kernel of something interesting there, but honestly, it feels like I put more work into reading Godin than he put into writing.

It's reading candy in the purest form. I got to the end and wondered what the point was? Things change? Okay, where's the marketing insight Seth?

Here it is:

> PS my friend Paige has a new book out.

Wow, they are putting out a blog series called "SEO for rookies" in 2023...

Also, it reminds me very much of this post of about two weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588329

Gotta love that globohomo convergence in the age of average.

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

Personally, I like the small paragraphs of a couple sentences— that's how I was taught to format an article in journalism school.

It's far easier to read and generally keeps the writing less flowery.

It's a bit like software developers reading Martin Fowler's blog posts. Nothing new or exciting, but the cult is following blindly.

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