ryanholiday

That's exactly the point no?

It depends. They're calculated hourly. Right place right time...could be just a couple dozen. Books sell less copies than people think.

I had a tour guide in German who told me he was one of the few people he knew who had read any of it because he'd spent time in the US as a exchange student.

"Rivers are easiest to cross at their source." Syrus

Do it now before it gets harder.

I was fortunate enough to publish Seth's final column this morning.

http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter...

Yes they are very readable and his thoughts often feel like they were written last week. It's surprisingly timeless.

Schopenhauer was not a big proponent of empty, pointless philosophizing. His stuff is all practical and to the point.

I would disagree. The general principles for growth hacking always apply--far better than traditional marketing techniques do anyway. Growth hacking is, at its core, the art of building marketing into the product itself and then pulling in the initial customers/clients to kickstart that process.

But to go to your point PG has a funny line about cofounders. If you can't get a cofounder for your startup your idea will never blow up--because you couldn't even get one other person to agree to work on it with you for free

Hi everyone, I wish I was clever enough to have orchestrated all this, but in fact am not. Very nice of Chris to include me in his list.

Though I will say that this list is missing a few good books:

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

48 Laws of Power

Antifragile

The Fish That Ate the Whale

Wikinomics

Contagious

The Pirate's Dilemma

and I think PG's book of essays is worth reading for any founder as well

Who is insanely worked up?

It's not that it's luck behind viral videas, it's that they tend to spread or become popular in their own unique ways and attempts to deduce general rules from examples you had nothing to do with is usually foolhardy.

There is some science behind virality and for that I'd recommend looking at Jonah Berger

This is known as "thumbnail cheating"

Nothing is worse than advice about making things "go viral" from people who have never actually done it.

Real name as user name on pretty much every account I have period. Never saw the point of doing otherwise.

HN is a testament to what happens when you make a thing for a very specific group of people and only them.

It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a while that say "No" to being sold in Wal-Mart. It seems crazy but there is value in passing on certain kinds of growth.

The only hiccup to this plan in HN's case is that the very specific community it is targeted to is itself growing and growing. So staying "small" might be impossible.

Only when it doesn't make sense :)

Please, I have written pretty extensively about the problems with the ad impressions model--I think it's the root of the YT issue and most the low quality blogging we see.

I don't get paid by the pageview and if I did, it would be an inconsequential part of my annual income at this point. I write columns about ideas I find interesting. If I wanted pageviews I'd probably publish it somewhere other than the Observer

He wrote the intro to the republished edition of The Brass Check believe it or not.

(But to address your other point, it may be. Chomsky's media criticism focusing heavily on this)

It goes the other way around too. Most reporters and bloggers get their basic facts from Wikipedia. So it's a feedback loop. Wikipedia frames reporting which can then be used to "support" or cite that very same framing.

Almost every public figure has seen some inaccuracy from their Wikipedia page come up in a news story or an interview at one time or another.

The incentive problem goes lower and more granular than that. How are most bloggers paid (or at least judged on performance)? Pageviews.

What metric has about the lowest correlation to quality, accuracy or significance? Pageviews.

Actually, in the book I go much earlier. Upton Sinclair wrote a book of media criticism in 1912 that was the genesis for my theories. Yellow journalism predates Bernays by more than a few decades.

Ding ding!

Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't unfortunate, bad for us and bad for the web in the long term.

Right, this thread should just be deleted until someone writes a story about it. The page is unreadable--like most of Wikipedia's talk pages...and then they wonder why normal people don't participate.

Aren't a good portion of Wikipedia edits plagiarism regardless?

I do think services like RSS are strategically opposed to the vision of a lot of technology companies. The more ad-driven (or growth/hype driven they are), the more they embrace the noisy, chaotic one off model. Whereas other companies, designed to serve USERS, want to reduce noise and increase quality. Google may be moving towards that model.

There is, nonetheless, a HUGE difference between you pulling content (subscribing) and other people recommending or aggregating content for you. One is subject to the One Off Problem, the other is not. One creates incentives to sensationalize/exaggerate/selectively omit and the other does not.

That's why I liked Siegler's analogy to bees.

We saw this with Delicious though. Some rich guys bought it...and made it unusable.

I think Instapaper is definitely an advancement and I'm a big fan. How many users does it really have though?

I'm not a big MG Siegler fan but I think he's right http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/bees/

My sense is that MOST of the users won't come back. And that's a shame, because they were very important. Delicious is still around--I haven't logged in in a year. I love Google Reader, but I might just use this as an excuse to read a lot fewer sites...or more books.

Good point. Not exactly my area of expertise but I should have used that as an example.

Agreed. Stoicism is not "philosophy" as we've been taught to think of it (that is, dense, boring, confusing).

Even the old translations of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus are straight forward enough for anyone.