Remember Quibi?

All the money in the world can't actually turn a turd into a market leader.

If you have a good product you have to play the marketing game to avoid getting left behind. If you have a bad product you try to play it and you still don't get picked up. (This last bit is where things usually turn into an argument about "no, obviously [this thing I don't like] is bad and is only popular because of the marketing", which assumes taste is more universal than it is.)

A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly.

Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest.

Also bring back blogrolls.

At a previous company our marketing team had a $50k/mo budget with an agency that got their basically verbatim posts posted by all the tech blogs like TechCrunch, venture beat, Huffington Post etc. I got really aware of the tech media and I read every story as intentional marketing.

> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital

And how do we know that? How do we know Cursor is "withing spitting distance of opus" (whatever it means)?

Let me guess:

> that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been?

But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)

this is why oldschool chat > social media

curating for trust and expertise and diversity of opinion

>I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns.

"The AI talks down to me like Reddit because it's trained on Reddit" has been a running joke/quip/gripe on the "less refined" parts of the internet for awhile now.

> Record labels used to use payola to get their bands played. This is the same but different version of that, only, social media makes it even easier and I'd assume cheaper.

The other difference is that radio payola was outlawed as the scammy practice it was.

But now we live in the late stage capitalism scam economy (brought to you by Citizens United) where there's effectively no chance of laws like that which are against monied interests being passed anymore.

Yeah. It has literally never been easier to find good niche music, and that's been true for over a decade.

Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.

Something I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10.

Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon.

I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually liking.

I’ve had similar experiences. After watching it for a decade I think it’s a mostly over-active pattern recognition combined with a flood of incoming information. I believe I’m careful with the information I consume, but compared with 25 years ago it’s literally orders of magnitude more.

IOW, maybe, it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you have a magnet (brain with pattern recognition) and live in a blizzard of haystacks (online today).

It seems infinitely more likely to me that this is simple coincidence than something nefarious.

Yea... I'm mixed because it feels like something too creative and weird for this sort of marketing, but it's perhaps as weird how they're all over Youtube suddenly.

As long as they keep making that music, wearing those costumes and mumbling those interviews, I could care less. I like it.

When reading this I immediately thought of them. Anyone I know who plays an instrument said their socials are flooded with them.

I only found out about them via word of mouth, but who knows. At least they're good stuff!

I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regulated out of existence.

I had never heard of Geese until all the stories about how Geese bought their popularity. Now I feel I should give them a listen to know what all the fuss is about!

See payolla for the radio era equivalent.

The government is broken. I'm not sure what you are hoping for.