13 Comments

Great edition. In an economics/markets/finance piece, YOU had me at "Young Thug".......☝🤘👨‍🎤

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Having completed what I now realize perhaps was an unnecessary MBA , I was at loss as to which Gods I need to appease to hit that proverbial "success"...

Now I know it's the god of decimal points

Pray tell what sacrifice does this pagan god accept

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Well formatted excel sheets

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Doing that. Mildly successful and deeply annoyed. I am afraid this god demands much more as every MBA offers this bland sacrifice of excels and ppts

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Great post! Thanks for the eye-opener.

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Cheers!

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Thoughts on pseudonymous fame?

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Hmmm I'm still highly unconvinced that pseudonymous fame is a new special case, that it is increasing in #s, or even a big portion of the famous people. We've always had pseudonymous famous folk - from Banksy to Silence Dogood - and it's always seemed a sideshow.

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Fair. The fact that Snoop and Sia were both running anon NFT accounts makes me really wonder who Punk6529 and some of the other big ones are...:

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Yeah. Once you bank on the knowledge that Punks aren't exactly cheap, the number of possible candidates aren't that large.

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Hot take, I think it’s Balaji. He talks about pseudonymous accounts and having backups in case Twitter shuts him down or he gets cancelled. Plus he has insane domain expertise for this world.

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I think the "follower count" style numbers might be deeply flawed.

In a very quick experiment I was able to spend 10$ (minimum fee on the platform) to get my instagram account to ~12k follower and a friend's to ~35k. This had a 80% dropoff over about a year, still, I expect 100-300$/year to be more than sufficient to maintain oneself at ~1 million instagram follower, I expect the numbers are in a similar ballpark for twitter, tiktok, youtube and the like.

I assume more nish influencer platforms ala linkedin, medium and such are more expensive. Still, it is not a good marker.

Another annecdote: 1k Medium followers yields less reads than just the % I'd adscribe to reads from + reads from sharing by ~15 substack subscribers.

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Yeah it's not 1-1 re reads but the closest I could find, assuming its "organic". And the purchasability doesn't preclude it being a marker to be used for quality followers, which is hard to build.

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