13 Comments
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Nick E.'s avatar

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

Nithin Shekhar R's avatar

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

Rohit Krishnan's avatar

Well formatted excel sheets

Nithin Shekhar R's avatar

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

Anirudh's avatar

Great post! Thanks for the eye-opener.

Jason Levin's avatar

Thoughts on pseudonymous fame?

Rohit Krishnan's avatar

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.

Jason Levin's avatar

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...:

Rohit Krishnan's avatar

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

Jason Levin's avatar

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.

George's avatar

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.

Rohit Krishnan's avatar

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.