Identity

I thought “fake news” was stupid but this is not

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A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about Ozempic, the diabetes drug that celebs are using to lose weight quick and easy. The article appeared in the New Yorker, which is not ashamed of its left-leaning proclivities.

One of the points in the article is that the main harm from obesity is negative perception both by doctors and obese people. In other words, it’s not the fat that’s the real problem.

​​To make its point, the article used the following statistics sleight-of-hand, which put a smile on my face:

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A recent study examined subjects’ B.M.I.s in relation to their blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and insulin resistance. Nearly a third of people with a “normal” B.M.I. had unhealthy metabolic metrics, and nearly half of those who were technically overweight were metabolically healthy. About a quarter of those who were classified as obese were healthy, too.

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A few years ago, there was a lot of fuss over fake news. I always thought that fuss was stupid. Predictably, it has passed now.

I’m not advising anyone to write fake news or to make up stuff.

But you can and in fact you must spin. You must twist facts and figures, cherry pick quotes and stories, and direct and misdirect your readers’ attention at every step.

Not only to make your point, like in that “metabolically unhealthy” quote above.

But also to give people what they want. I mean, I read the New Yorker because I find the articles interesting and horizon-expanding. But I also read it because I enjoy agreeing with the writers’ points of view, and I enjoy even more disagreeing with their point of view.

I hope I’ve managed to get you to disagree with at least some of the points I’ve made in this email.

But if I’ve just managed to make you agree, I’ll have to settle for that today. Tomorrow, I’ll work to do better.

That’s the beauty of writing a daily email. You have a chance to constantly get better at influencing your audience, and to make your case anew, and to get people to agree or disagree with you. If you want to keep agreeing or disagreeing with me, starting tomorrow, you can sign up to my daily email newsletter here.

I bet you already knew what I’ll write about in this email

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Last night I went to see Air, the new Ben Affleck movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan.

Air is a typical rousing Hollywood stuff — a scrappy underdog does what it takes to win. It was fun to watch, but as the movie neared its emotional climax, I started to feel a kind of gnawing in my stomach.

I kept thinking, “This is it? This is what life is all about?”

A bunch of overworked, overweight, aging people in an office, hollering and high-fiving each other and gazing knowingly into each others’ eyes after their one triumph — getting a 21-year-old basketball player to agree to wear one kind of shoe instead of another kind of shoe?

But the movie is set in the 1980s. Maybe it reflects the corporate ideals of that era.

Anyways, let’s get back on track:

At the start of the movie, a convenience store clerk chats with the main character, played by Matt Damon. The clerk obviously knows a lot about basketball, and is sure Jordan won’t turn into anything big. The Matt Damon character is the only one who believes.

By the end of the movie, thanks to Matt Damon’s dogged believing, Nike signs Jordan in spite of impossible odds. Jordan immediately becomes a huge star. Nike goes on to sell a hundred million pairs of Air Jordans in the first year alone.

Matt Damon goes back to the convenience store and chats up the clerk again. The clerk nods his head. “I always knew Jordan would be a big thing,” he says.

“We all knew,” the Matt Damon character chuckles as he walks out the store.

As I’m sure you already knew, human memory is fallible. We forget, misremember, and flat-out make up stuff if it suits us and matches our sense of self.

You might think this only happens over the span of months or years, like it did with that convenience store clerk in Air.

But maybe you saw — and failed to remember — a new scientific study that went viral earlier this month. Scientists managed to show that people misremember stuff that happened as recently as half a second ago. And if the scientists stretched it out just a bit longer before asking — two seconds, three seconds — people’s memory became still worse and more inaccurate.

So my point for you, specifically for how you deal with yourself, is to write stuff down. Because you sure as hell won’t remember it.

And my point for you, specifically for how you deal with your prospects, is to keep reminding them, nudging them, and telling them the same thing you told them a million times before.

You rarely have people’s full attention. And even when you do have their full attention, they forget. Even if you just told them a second ago.

The only way your prospects are sure not to forget, and to maybe do what you want, is if you remind them today, tomorrow, the day after, and so on, hundreds of millions of Air Jordans into the future.

Which brings me to the group coaching I am planning. I first wrote about it yesterday. Now that I mention it, I’m sure you remember.

This planned group coaching is about email copywriting for daily emails — so you can remind your prospects of your offer over and over, in a way that they actually enjoy.

If you’re interested in this coaching, the first step is to get onto my email list. Click here to do that.

My diagnosis is that you’re trying to normalize rather than pathologize

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I first wrote about Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in this newsletter in August 2021. Clance and Imes are the two psychologists who, back in 1978, wrote a paper in which they defined something called imposter phenomenon.

The interesting thing is they called it imposter phenomenon, not imposter syndrome. From a recent article in The New Yorker:

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Every time Imes hears the phrase “impostor syndrome,” she told me, it lodges in her gut. It’s technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is “an experience rather than a pathology,” and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it.

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It might seem like a trivial difference, phenomenon rather than syndrome. It’s not trivial. Like Clance says in that quote, their goal was just to point out, normalize, say, “it’s okay that you feel like a faker, because others do too.”

But that’s not what the public wanted.

The public wanted a concrete disease, a disorder, or at least a syndrome — something unique and special they can point to and explain why they feel uncertain or uncomfortable or why their life is not how they imagine it. The pathological imposter syndrome does that, the wishy-washy, normal, everyday imposter phenomenon does not.

So the public took Clance and Imes’s idea, and they made it their own. Imposter syndrome.

But my real point for you is not the word choice of phenomenon vs syndrome. Sure, it is important, but it’s also the only part that Clance and Imes didn’t get right in their original paper, at least from a persuasion perspective.

My point for you is that difference between concrete vs. wishy washy, unique vs. everyday, pathological vs. normal, all of which Clance and Imes, whether they wanted to or not, definitely did get right in their paper.

People are looking for answers. They want to know to why their life is the way it is, and now the way they want it to be.

If, like Clance and Imes, you give people a satisfying answer to that eternal question, it can literally make you a star in your field, and can have your ideas spread on their own, like fire among dry brush that hasn’t seen water for years.

Maybe this entire email speaks little or not at all to you.

In that case, my diagnosis is that you’re being too nice, and you’re trying to normalize your prospects’ experiences, to give them small incremental improvements and understandings, rather than a total change in perspective in how they view their world.

My prognosis in that case is that you will struggle to be heard, and struggle to make sales. It could even be fatal to your business.

If you want a fix for that unfortunate and dangerous condition, then there’s a pill you can take. I even named it for you above.

But enough of playing doctor.

Back in my own house, the fact remains that I’m still in the process of spring cleaning. I’m throwing out old furniture and old courses, dusting off wardrobes and sales letters, and planning out how to redecorate my living room and my newsletter.

While that’s going on, I will just point you to my only book that’s currently available for sale, and also the only offer I have that doesn’t cost $100 or more. If you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Some facts for you to judge me by

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Here are a few facts about me that might seem entirely irrelevant to a newsletter about marketing and copywriting:

I am unmarried, I have no children, I am straight. My religious orientation can only be described as puzzled.

My nationality is dual — Croatia and US. ​​I grew up in the US, but I was born in what was then Yugoslavia but then became Croatia, in a mixed Croatian/Serbian family. As a result, my entire life I’ve been hostile to feelings of nationalism and even patriotism, because I experienced first-hand how much of a fictional construct my homeland was — both my old one, and my newer one, and my still newer one.

Here are a few more facts, maybe slightly more relevant to this newsletter:

Try as I might, I don’t care about money beyond the Micawber rule: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness.” I also don’t enjoy working for work’s sake, and I am by nature lazy, in fact very lazy.

And yet, for years now, I have been working, and quite a lot, and I have been making money, and more than I spend.

​​The reason is that, while I don’t care about money and I’m lazy to work, I do enjoy the feeling of being disciplined and achieving goals, particularly if I was resistant to getting started towards them. And if that means doing work every day and if money falls out as an end result, then so be it.

And now a few final facts, which are relevant to this newsletter:

I’ve been working as a professional copywriter since 2015. I’ve have had 100+ clients over that time, but the bulk of the money I’ve made came from maybe 5 of those clients, and the bulk of that bulk, the money that’s sitting in my bank account now and that’s allowed me to live life how I choose over the past few years, came from one client only.

I will tell you more about that client in a second. But first, let me tell you the reason for all the facts, relevant and irrelevant, I’ve just given you. The reason is the following passage from a book called Revolt of the Masses, by a writer named José Ortega y Gasset:

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I may be mistaken, but the present day writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads, does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head.

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Ortega was a snob and his entire book was written in a condescending and bossy tone. But the above point is spot on — people more often read to judge you than to learn from you. And what basis do they use to judge you? What they already know and believe.

So you got two options:

Option one is to start with your own beliefs and experiences, and to be transparent about those, even if they are irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Many people will judge you negatively as a result, and will consciously or unconsciously dismiss you from then on.

On the other hand, a few people will align with your own choices and beliefs, and they will judge you favorably, including on the actual on-topic content you might be sharing.

Option two is to start with your reader. To find out what your reader believes, what experiences he or she has, and then to signal that you share those — even if you have to stretch the truth or cover up stuff.

You might think I am passing judgment and saying to do the first but not to do the second. Not at all. I’ve done both myself. The first in this newsletter, the second in my work as copywriter working for clients.

Which brings me back to that client who was responsible for the bulk of the money I’ve made as a copywriter.

Today is the last day I am selling a swipe file of 25 “horror advertorials” I wrote for that client between 2019 and 2021. And if you check each of the advertorials in that swipe file, you will find that in the very first sentence or two of each advertorial, and many times after that, I signal in conscious but subtle ways that I am like the person who is reading, that I share his or her experiences, that I have similar beliefs.

It’s dirty work, but there is satisfaction in accomplishing it. And it does pay well.

Anyways, if you want to get my Horror Advertorial Swipe File, you have to be on my email list. The clock is ticking, and there aren’t many more hours before the deadline. If you like, click here to sign up.

This offer is improper — unless you’re a grown-up

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I checked the fridge this morning and I found I was fresh out of emails ideas. So I ran down to the corner shop and grabbed the latest glossy issue of “On Today’s Date.” I brought it back home, jumped on the couch, and greedily opened it to the first page. That’s how I discovered that the most significant historical event ever to happen on March 9th was:

The first appearance of the Barbie doll. It happened on March 9, 1959, at the American International Toy Fair, in New York City.

I put my head in my hands. “Who cares about Barbie dolls?” I said. “I need email ideas!”

But after a few moments of quiet despair, I happened to glance back at that Barbie article.

And in that brief moment, in the very first paragraph, I spotted something new to me — why we’re still talking about Barbie dolls today, and why you and I and probably all the other 8 billion people on the planet have heard of Barbie.

Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, created Barbie after watching her own daughter. Handler’s little girl kept ignoring her closetful of baby dolls. Instead, she played make-believe with paper dolls of adult women.

Handler put 2 and 3 together, and realized there was an open niche here, a unique position to be filled:

A toy doll with adult features, adult outfits, and enormous adult breasts.

Barbie was an instant hit. Mattel sold around 350,000 Barbies in the very first year of production. They sold almost $1.5 billion worth of Barbie plastic last year.

So what’s my point?

Simple. People want to be grown up, or at least play make-believe at it. If ya don’t believe me, here’s a second example:

Tobacco company Lorillard once put out a covert ad campaign targeted at kids. The ad was supposedly designed to keep kids from smoking. But the devious message in that Lorillard campaign was:

“Tobacco is whacko — if you’re a teen.”

A later statistical study found that each exposure to this ad increased the intention of middleschoolers to try cigarettes by 3%. In other words, if your kid sees this ad 30 times, his or her odds of trying a cigarette double.

You might say this only applies to kids and middle schoolers, but I don’t think so. I think it applies to all of us, just in more subtle ways.

​​In any case, enough history.

Instead, I have an offer for you, which is entirely improper — unless you’re a grown-up copywriter or marketer.

​​The offer is my Most Valuable Email course. That course will only work for you if you already have an email list, or are willing to create one, and write to it regularly. Like I said, grown-ups.

But on second thought, maybe it’s better if you don’t get Most Valuable Email even if you’re a grown up. As one marketer, Kyle Weston, wrote me after going through this course:

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I love how the course is short and to the point, yet still packs in all the powerful info we need. And then the tools you give us at the end are brilliant. The MVE Swipes pdf alone is worth way more than a measly $100. Anyone involved in marketing or copywriting at any level will want to check this out. Then again, maybe its better for me if less people know about this tactic — makes it easier for me to beat out the competition muhuhahaha!

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If that doesn’t deter you, you can get Most Valuable Email here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Bat-John: The Killing Joke

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Last night, Bat-John sat on his couch in shorts and a t-shirt, officially watching the penalty shootouts at the World Cup, but really, keeping an eye on the Bat-Fax for news of criminal activity in Gotham City.

Another slow night.

​​No Scarecrows or Penguins running amuck anywhere.

Instead, all that came through the Bat-Fax were letters from grateful citizens of Gotham:

“Subscribe For ‘LIFE’ please”

“You had me in stitches with this part”

“I was so tempted to reply to this with an off the wall rant — just for fun. But I’d rather remain subscribed…”

“Love your emails. But I must admit I have to read the ones you mentioned about the trolls.”

The background, in case you missed it, is that I wrote an email yesterday, modestly comparing myself to Batman.

​​My point was that it’s good for business if your readers see you scrapping each night with wacky costumed villains who lurk beneath the surface of your email list.

Unfortunately, that email didn’t provoke any of these wacky villains to pipe up.

But based on the replies I did get, my point stands. Create enemies, and people rally around you.

And since the Bat-Fax has been so quiet today, here’s some truly wacky news from outside Gotham City:

Have you heard of the violent coup d’etat attempt in Germany this past Wednesday?

The German police arrested some two dozen far-right terrorists, including a Russian national, who were planning to overthrow the German government and install 71-year-old Prince Heinrich XIII, a member of the royal House of Reuss, on the restored throne.

For months, these 25 terrorists had been making plans about the colors on their future flag… recruiting new members at RPG nights at the local comic-book store… gathering equipment, including thermal socks and cans of corn.

A press release from German’s federal public prosecutor explains what was going on in the heads of these terrorists:

“The accused are united by a deep rejection of the state institutions.”

Hm.

Could it be that the German government is trying to create its own villains out of thin air… as a way to get its citizens rallying around its state institutions?

Maybe you don’t think there’s anything there.

But maybe you are intrigued or at least entertained by the idea, now that I bring it up.

If so, you might want to know what just happened inside your head. It’s one of my 10 Commandments of A-list copywriters, Commandment V:

“Honor thy reader’s skepticism, and structure your ad accordingly.”

This particular commandment is by Gene Schwartz. It’s not about sophistication or awareness, two concepts that Gene is best known for.

Instead, this commandment is real A-list stuff. Few copywriters know it and even fewer follow it.

Ignore this commandment and all your case studies, testimonials, statistics, and other proof will be worthless. Follow it and the power of your proof will be amplified hundredfold.

In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The fallout of my “rape” subject line

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3 days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “Don’t rape your audience.”

That hook came from a quote from screenwriter William Goldman (Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid), who compared gradually seducing your audience (movie screenplays) to raping them (TV writing).

Like I said at the start of that email, rape is a shocking metaphor. In today’s society, it’s borderline impermissible.

So sure enough, when I checked my unsubscribe count for this email, it showed I disappointed, offended, or perhaps triggered a lot of people. ​​My unsubscribes proved it. I had 7 unsubscribes total, which might not sound like a lot, but is 5.8x my norm for the past 90 days.

I did the hard work of checking who all those unsubscribes were.

Some were new — they signed up only a few weeks ago for my “Analysis of Daniel Throssell” presentation.

Others had been on my list for a while.

Either way, none of them had ever bought anything from me… replied to any of my emails… played along with any of the engagement bait I regularly put out… or even opened and read my emails very often.

So there’s that, the hard and toxic fallout.

On the other hand, I also had a dozen thoughtful replies to my email, both about the subject line and the idea in the body. Almost all these replies came from successful marketers and copywriters. For example, copywriter Robert Smith, who runs his own CRO agency, wrote in to say:

Yo.

Yesterday I was on a zoom call with the team.

It was about our marketing emails.

I shared my screen and opened my email app to talk about a thing.

Instead of talking about our email stuff, we spent the next 10 minutes admiring your subject line.

It’s tier-1.

At first, I had a thought like:
“In a non-DR market this would get super-high Opens, but just as many Spam complaints.”

Addendum to original thought after opening:
“…Only if the body doesn’t deliver.”

3rd addendum after reading body:
“And… It delivered.”

Kick ass! And super inspiring to see. Really got me thinking: “my subject lines suck!”

Robert pretty much spelled out everything I wanted to say about this crisis.

Shocking subject lines, and shocking topics in general, will polarize your audience.

But if you can somehow back up your shocking stuff in a congruent way, you will only scrub away the barnacles clinging to the gleaming white hull of your magnificent ship.

At the same time, you will engage and bond more deeply with successful, thoughtful people, the kinds of people you want to associate yourself with, whether as customers, clients, or just readers.

You might say I am not telling you anything new here.

And you’re right. Ben Settle and Dan Kennedy before him have both been preaching this kind of repulsion marketing for years.

But fundamentals like this work. And so they are worth repeating from time to time. Until maybe the right time, when it all clicks for you and you decide to try it out for yourself.

Anyways, if you have a business, and you’re worried your subject lines suck, then you might want to hire me to help with that.

Because as of now, I’m offering consulting. And one of the things I’m highly qualified to consult on is email marketing and copywriting. And not just the shocking and repelling kind. And not just to my own email list.

If case you are interested, fill out the form below, and I’ll be in touch:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting

You are not an introvert

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In my last-ever real job, some 10 years ago, I was a manager at a 100-person IT company.

Well, not really a manager. I was a scrum master, which might sound either like some kind of S&M role or a made-up demon name from Ghostbusters.

So each each week, I the scrum master and our teams “product owner” (another Ghostbusters-themed managerial role) had to meet with the owner of the company to give him an update on how we were progressing.

We had been working for over a year, building a large piece of software that was one day supposed to be sold to big pharma companies like Glaxo Smith Kline.

But it wasn’t ready yet. Or anywhere close to ready. Our team wasn’t making any money. We were just a giant drain on company resources.

So when we sat down with the owner of the company, he gave us a weary look.

“Tell me guys,” he said a little bitterly, “how many sales have you made this week?”

I put on my straight face. And I shrugged my shoulders as if to suggest it’s all relative. “Do you mean the week starting this Monday,” I said, “or starting Sunday?”

The owner of the company locked his eyes on me. He squinted for a second.

​​And then he brightened and started to laugh, the joke being that we had never made any sales and it was doubtful we ever would. “All right all right,” he said with a smile, “at least tell me how the development is going.”

Now I don’t have a life history of joshing and ribbing and joking with people who have authority over me.

But I did it in this case, and it worked out well.

The reason I did it — the reason the joke came naturally, at the right moment, on its own — was that the previous few days, I had started walking around town, approaching girls on the street, complimenting them, and even asking them out.

On the one hand, approaching unfamiliar girls in the middle of the street, often in the middle of a crowd, and starting a conversation — well, it was immensely hard.

But it was also very liberating. Literally. There were parts of my brain that I didn’t even know were there that suddenly became active and alive.

And that’s how I found myself spontaneously teasing my boss, and instantly turning him from a bitter to a good mood.

My point being that over the past few years or the past decade, there’s been a lot of celebrating of introverts, and a lot of proud ownership of being an introvert.

​​Some people even take a holier-than-thou attitude to it, and claim that they alone are the real introverts, while others are just poser-introverts.

Whatever. I’d like to suggest to you that if you think you are an introvert — even a real, natural introvert, the way I thought of myself for years, and which I had very hard evidence for — it’s only one configuration of the person you can be.

Clinging to the idea you are an introvert is little like saying you are a sitting person. Because whenever you see an empty chair, you are tempted to sit in it, and when you do sit, you find it comforting. And then, concluding from that, “Oh no, I’m not a walking type. I just can’t. It drains me. I’m a sitting person.”

And my bigger belief, if you care to know it is this:

You are lots of things. You have different abilities and resources, including those you are not aware of, until you put ourselves into a situation to make use of them.

​​Yes, it might be immensely hard at first. But it can also be liberating. Literally.

Ok, on to business:

If you are looking for more ideas like this, or if you are interested in psychology, marketing, and copywriting, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Coldblooded psychopath persuasion

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The detective sat at the corner of the table, looking the suspect in the face.

The suspect sighed. “What are my options?” he asked.

“Well,” the detective said, “I don’t think you want the coldblooded psychopath option. I might be wrong. Because I’ve met guys who enjoyed the notoriety. Who got off on having that label. I don’t see that in you. If I saw that in you I wouldn’t be back here, talking to you.”

The suspect sighed again. He gave a sad little smile and nodded.

“But maybe I’m wrong,” the detective continued. “Maybe you got me fooled. I don’t know.”

At this, the suspect locked up. He stared at the floor. He didn’t say anything for a while.

“Russell,” the detective said, “what are we gonna do?”

The suspect took a breath. He looked at the detective directly and said, “Call me Russ, please.”

That’s the climax from the 10-hour interrogation of Russell Williams.

Williams was a colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, and an army pilot who had flown Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Prime Minister of Canada.

But away from his picture-perfect military career, Williams had a very, very dark side.

Between 2007 and 2010, he started breaking into homes — 82 in all.

During the early breakins, he would photograph himself wearing women’s underwear and then sneak out. In time, this escalated to sexual assault. And then, it escalated further, to rapes and two murders.

The police had some evidence to tie Williams to one of the crime scenes. They had him come in for questioning.

Over the course of the interrogation, Williams started to realize he was in serious trouble. But really, all the police had on him was circumstantial evidence. He could have called for a lawyer, and who knows how the case would have gone.

And then came that exchange up top. It was the climax of the investigation.

Very soon after that exchange, Williams agreed to tell the police where he had hidden the body of Jessica Lloyd, his final victim. This effectively sealed the case, and led to Williams’s full confession.

It might seem gruesome to look for persuasion tactics in murder investigations. But such is life. Because the same stuff that works to influence a coldblooded psychopath works in general too.

Let me point out what happened in that climactic exchange above:

The detective first paid Williams a compliment (“I don’t see that in you”). Williams smiled and nodded at the compliment.

But then the detective snatched the compliment away (“But maybe I’m wrong”). Williams felt that loss.

If, like me, you know anything about the world of pick up artists, you might recognize this technique. Pick up artists call it the push-pull.

Copywriters use it too. Here’s an example from the start of a Dan Kennedy sales letter:

“Truth is, most people give lip-service to ambition, but secretly are not all that eager or determined. This is only for those very, very serious and determined to create excellent income and steady flow of good clients, for a real freelance business. If you’re content making just a few hundred dollars a month on the side, an occasional assignment now and then, really just having a nice money hobby, there’s nothing wrong with that – but you can stop reading this now.”

Again, it might seem gruesome to compare sales copy to a rape and murder investigation. And maybe I’m just trying to justify my morbid and scattershot interests.

But the truth is, there are powerful persuasion lessons all around.

If you made it to the end of this post, then I imagine you’re probably curious enough and clear-sighted enough to see that.

But maybe I’m wrong. In that case, you can stop reading now. And definitely don’t sign up for my daily email newsletter.

Otherwise, go here to get your spot.

Reddit vs. Hacker News: How to get better customers, clients, readers, and business partners

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Paul Graham is a computer programmer, writer, and early-stage tech investor.

His startup fund, Y Combinator, helped start a bunch of famous companies, like Airbnb, Dropbox, DoorDash, Instacart, Zapier, and Reddit.

The total valuation of all Y Combinator companies is now over $400 billion. Y Combinator owns 7% of that, or roughly $30 billion.

Really, the only reason I know this is because I’ve been a regular reader of Hacker News for the past 14+ years.

Hacker News is a news board. Graham started it in 2006 as a way of sharing interesting ideas and getting connected to tech talent. Today, Hacker News gets over five million readers each month.

I’ve been thinking about creating something similar, just with a different focus. So I was curious to read Graham’s 2009 article, What I Learned From Hacker News, about the early experience of creating and running HN.

This bit stood out to me:

But what happened to Reddit won’t inevitably happen to HN. There are several local maxima. There can be places that are free for alls and places that are more thoughtful, just as there are in the real world; and people will behave differently depending on which they’re in, just as they do in the real world.

I’ve observed this in the wild. I’ve seen people cross-posting on Reddit and Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN.

Maybe this only stood out to me because something I’ve thought and written about before.

Your content, marketing, and offers select a certain type of audience. That much is obvious.

What is less obvious is that your content and marketing and offers also change people. Because none of us is only one type of person all the time.

So if you want an audience that’s smarter, that’s more respectful, that’s more thoughtful and less scatterbrained, then make it clear that’s what you expect. And lead by example.

This can be transformative in your everyday dealings with clients, customers, readers, and prospects. And who knows. It might even become the foundation on which you build a future online community.

If you found this interesting, you might like my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.