[jottinger]

I'm not going to optimize content for SEO - been on the other side of that, and I think it creates content that's bland and ineffective. Humans gonna human, machines gonna machine, and I'm not paying for ads. If humans want the site to succeed, it'll succeed. Otherwise, it won't. Such is life.

[jaredklewis]

I kind of see what you are saying, but it reminds me of “if you build it, they will come.”

They won’t come, because they won’t even know about it. A more accurate aphorism would have been “if you build it and tell everyone about it, some of them might come.”

Humans probably don’t want the site to succeed, because they mostly don’t know it exists.

[watwut]

It is different. If you SEO, you are actively changing content toward worst and less interesting. That is not the same as making the decision between market and not-market.

[ssl-3]

Perhaps.

How much SEO happens here on HN? How much do they spend to tell everyone about it? I'm guessing: Not much; maybe zero.

But people come here, anyway.

(That doesn't mean that it's capable of independently sustaining itself, but people do show up.)

[AlecSchueler]

> How much do they spend to tell everyone about it?

You could see every YCombinator investment as a kind of sidelong marketing for HN.

[TeMPOraL]

If you build it, and it's genuinely, uniquely useful, you won't be able to stop people from coming and inviting others to join.

Telling everyone about it is only necessary if you're indistinguishable from 100 different takes on the same thing, and trying to win a shouting match (this includes hurrying to shout the world down before competitors get a chance).

But as the saying goes, you are not in traffic - you are the traffic. The reason you need to shout is because of people like you shouting.

[eptcyka]

This man will build a product no one uses and then complain about the world not being ready for his genius instead of using the tools that everyone else uses to give himself a chance at success.

[TeMPOraL]

In all honesty and writing it straight: this kind of success you're writing of would best be not achieved at all, as it's poisoning society and civilization.

[eptcyka]

I'm not talking the success of a Facebook or an Amazon. I think to successfully make an impact in terms of helping fellow humans, reach is a multiplier just as important as the quality of the product.

[jottinger]

Hrm. If you're talking about me: I doubt it. I've been a programmer for 30+ years: I've built a LOT of products, some of which got used, some of which ... didn't. If I was going to complain, that'd be new.

And I know how to do SEO and why. And I'm just not interested. "Success" for me... well, I mean, I'd love to retire today based on the brazilians of dollars some mogul hands me for the IP behind the site, but, uh, that's not what it's for. SEO at the service layer? Sure, it has a mode for the bots, it tries to make scanning easy for the machines. But at the content level... nah, I have been watching the world tune information - one aspect of the psyop the OP talked about - for decades, and I can't bring myself to do it.