You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts.

This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.

A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew up!

I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book is that you know the punch line before you even pick up a copy. A boy is stuck with a bengal tiger in a boat. Now that the punch line is out of the way, the story has time to unfold and be interesting in its own merit. That's what I was trying to recreate with my own story.

Content for acquisition, the reader’s relationship is to the topic, they have to be convinced the topic is relevant to their life goals but it’s valuable despite who the topic.

Content for retention, the readers relationship is to you as the writer and the topic is merely there as a MacGuffin to help illuminate some aspect of you that is unique.

Business Insider had this down to a science over a decade ago. They started a series called “So Expensive”, detailing why various things were expensive, the first 4 videos in the series were: Caviar, Saffron, Rolexes and Horseshoe Crab Blood. Statistically, some tens of millions of people have organically had the thought of why the first 3 were expensive but zero people have even wondered why horseshoe crab blood was expensive. The 4th video was a way to test, of all the people who were willing to click on the first three, how many were willing to follow along to the 4th because of a trust in BI? The next 4 in the series was Vanilla, Silk, Louboutins & Scorpion Venom.

Creating all content for acquisition is both too exhausting and also sub optimal for the reader because they want deeper stuff to follow as well. I suggest up to 1 in 3 acquisition articles if you can manage when starting out but then ramping down to no more than 1 in 10 fairly quickly or you burn out.

- They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult

- They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply

- Fish

- They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats

(note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)

I’m reminded of a remark made by David Foster Wallace (on KCRW? Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with the purpose of writing not being to show off how smart you are to the reader. Instead your writing has to evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue.

A lot of writers are tainted by the expectations set in grade school. Write for a grade and good writing is what yields a good grade according to the standards set by the subject which often is not ‘Composition’ but more like ‘Prove to me that you remember everything we mentioned in class about the French Revolution’.

I’ve never felt drawn into an article by Gwern at least not in the way that I have been by some writing by Maciej Cegłowski, for example. Reading Gwern I am both overwhelmed by the adornments to the text (hyperlinks, pop-ups, margin notes; other hypertext doodads and portals) and underwhelmed by the substance of the text itself. I don’t consider Paul Graham a literary griot either. But I find that his own prose is bolstered by a kind of clarity and asceticism that is informative and not entirely void of good style and form.

Lawrence McEnery of the University of the Chicago contributed a lot of good thinking to this kind of stuff though.

This wasn’t meant to be a criticism of the author of this post’s own work. But here that’s how it’s left. I haven’t come across any writing of his that’s as intriguing as "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” seems. If anyone has any recommendations, do share.

Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing. This artificial goal pollutes the connection between writer and reader. It makes them buyer and seller and rewards sales tactics. You don't write for the reader. You write for yourself first. Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it about as much you do.

There is also a writing where people are looking for the information, and they are showing up at your door because they already care. Presumably you wrote, because you saw the open question, and want to try answering it. History books, encyclopedias, classic literature by dead people, falls under this. Ironically, so does the example of Venice - you would read about Venice if you were already curious; there is little profit in "making someone care" about Venice otherwise. An attention grabby style would be forced and counterproductive in this.

"You won't believe the weird trick that the city of Venice did to feed itself"

I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a project inside their personal website was not working. I told him my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and it was working on his local machine.

A few hours after the interview, the project was online.

The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing, and yes, software engineering.

That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such that I don't feel I was just scammed.

It's all the same. Lack of care.

I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.

This seems to suggest that a human needs to be in the creative loop, but that could be short sighted. LLM training has humans in the loop which optimize for not being bored. That's a reason for LLM texts typically being recognizeable because at the current stage they are a little too simplistically flashy. But give it a few iterations and the machine will excel humans at catching their attention, i.e., making them care.

As others wrote: Tiktok is already excellent at that. While the content in there still has humans in the loop, the choice what to show to whom and when is already entirely mechanical.

And what would happen if everyone followed it? Clickbait titles like "the third one will surprise you" and TikTok.

Whenever I see this, I immediately turn to cmd-a + cmd-c + `pbpaste | llm 'summarize this'`

People our so tired of sensational intros and baiting questions which bury the actual lede up to the point where you discover it requires an annual subscription to find out the actual answer, that now it's actually counterproductive to start with an interesting "question".

It's facts first or gtfo. Prove to me that I'm not going to waste my time until you deliver what you promised, by delivering enough of that relevant background up front, otherwise I don't have time for your shenanigans.

I love ancient history and would read a good book about the Venetian empire, but the sentence answers the final question. Venice was a maritime empire (it's capital on an island), that's why its enemies could not starve it out. All in on finding out who fed it.

So 'first make me care' to me is a manifest of Gen Z - tiktok - brainrot approach. From my perspective you miss most of the really good stuff by cultivating this approach. I.e. my favorite books - Tai Pan, Noble House; tv series - Better Call Saul! - require you to go through so much of initial boredom. It's also the same discussion as 'learn to code vs only do AI Slop' or 'learn math and algos vs only import functions from libs and never check what's inside'.

*Exceptions apply, ofc. There are things that hook you and progressively ad depth, but it's really rare. I.e. Arcane tv show is both easy to access and quite deep.

Edit: ...so I can imagine math teacher that first tell you what are some amazing uses of derivatives and integrals - PIDs, SGD, better estimation, wave functions, generalized description of problems, accessing interesting physics etc. And after that they make you grind. I think it would be quite great. But it is so rare, that you have to make a leap of faith and assume most of the good stuff is boring initially.

Best example: the walking dead season tv shows.

I came away not having a resolution to the hook - violating the articles second principle.

The book makes for a fine read IMO: https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern...

ps. this book came out as a response to Michael Sandell's "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" which was a best seller at the time.

If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...

1. First, make me care.

2. Then provide an indication (e.g. in the video description) giving the time in the video where the question starts to be answered.

If you make me somewhat care, but I have to binary search through your video to skip the rambling, I'm likely to back button out.

It really depends on who the audience is...

I assume you'd get a mess, but it might be an interesting mess.

If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post.

Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead...

Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment.

Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...

A wise person should be able to read text that is flavored like cardboard. In general, one thing I dislike about this moment, is the incredible emphasis we place on the first five seconds of everything because everyone is thinking about all the other things we could be doing.

But many things are great because of how they feel 20 years later. The first five seconds of playing a musical instrument is horrible, but 20 years later and it is sublime. Emacs, Vim, are both notoriously forbidding, and yet, they are wonderful tools. Some things can be massaged to meet both criteria (I can imagine some emacs configuration that made it less painful and surfaced its true power in the first five seconds maybe), but other things are hard by nature and derive their value from how we have to adapt to them instead of how well they are adapted to us. I feel like the AI era is going to just accelerate this trend where everything we interact with is a slick surface and many people will never experience depth.

Read boring shit.

1)

Using brave on iPhone.

Firefox and Safari works…

It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you?

A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.

Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.

Thesis statements are not a new techniques, and these days they are needed much more because there is so much to read. Many articles don't state their thesis at all or not for a long time.

I don't have time to read that far to find out if it's worthwhile to me. Unless you are Satoshi Nakamoto, I'm not going to read far to find out.

Always found them interesting.

Increasingly, readers don’t have time for this shit. Be direct, and if the reader doesn’t care, they were never meant to be your reader anyway. Someone will care, write for them.

prepending a one-liner-about-some-feat that might interest that particular company, before the usual cv afterthat?

hmm. made me think..