[jimhi]

I thought like you until about a year ago. Marketing is a skill much like software development and people much less deserving than you are making far more money than you and actively saying things that making our world worse. I don't think you should dismiss getting better at it.

That said, I don't disagree it's a mental illness.

[koch]

> actively saying things that making our world worse. I don't think you should dismiss getting better at it.

Well now that doesn't sound quite right, either, does it? Get better at saying things that make our world worse?

I feel like both you and @todfox here, I hate what it is but I also know that it's absolutely necessary. It seems to be a lesson I keep relearning. But the ickiness of attention-seeking and going for the lowest common denominator really makes it hard for me to keep it up.

[nebulousthree]

> But the ickiness of attention-seeking and going for the lowest common denominator really makes it hard for me to keep it up.

Attention-seeking, fine, but lowest common denominator is a self-defeating assumption. If my thing was making very elaborate high quality chairs, I don't have to make a bunch of crappy generic chairs to bring attention to the elaborate ones. The fear of failure in your niche may drive this though. But by doing so you're just growing the overall demographic you serve which brings in more people, giving you the impression of finally succeeding..but you may not get more sales of the product you actually care about in the first place: the elaborate chair.

My point is: go for the "denominator" you feel you want to address, and be enthusiastically attention-seeking there. Pretending to care about other demographics, building product for them and supporting all that extra infrastructure is soul-crushing

[todfox]

I agree with you, but any time I've attempted it I just feel sick to my stomach.