The Perils of Audience Capture

🔗 / Dense Discovery Issue 205 / Original Post /

“Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.”

The Perfect Hook

Study the start of TED talks for inspiration on how to hook people into a topic or discussion.

Demi Lovato

🔗 / Demi Lovato’s AD Tour /

“You’re never fully dressed without a smile.”

Stressful Problems Mindset Shift

Try reframing your stressful problems as puzzles with a solution that you have yet to find.

Behavioural Confirmation

🔗 / MuchelleB YouTube video /

Behavioural confirmation is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.

Umwelt

The world as it is experienced by a particular organism | Sensory Environment

Making Plans

Life advice: You should be weary of making plans with someone that are further into the future than the amount of time that you’ve known them. 🔗 / Graham Stephan /

Collegial Aspirations

I’m really interested in the idea of sharing my favourite thoughts and explorations in a creative way. Lately, for me that’s meant using my favourite YouTubers as inspiration. There was a quick moment, however, where I started to hold them in too high esteem, to the point where I was feeling insecure about my ability to produce similar quality content. I found a fun mindset that helped to bring back my confidence. I found it helpful to consider myself and my favourite Youtubers as part of the same newspaper company, each of us with our own unique columns for which we’d been uniquely hired to write for.

Instagram post →

We’re not competing against the world

🔗 / Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal/Chat with Chris Sparks /

Ultimate Competitions List

I learned that there’s a competitive world of jumping robots and I also recently learned about the geo guessing community (people who are able to identify geographic locations based on single obscure photos). It makes me wonder what a list of every competition in the world would look like?

Perfume and Pheromones

I wonder if there’s a connection between one’s pheromones and their ideal perfume/cologne choices?

YouTube vs TikTok

🔗 / vlogbrothers Video /

Interesting observation on the difference between YouTube an TikTok: deciding what to watch vs deciding on what to keep watching. And how this impacts creator discoverability.

Metaverse Career Paths

What currently non-existent job can you imagine yourself having in the future metaverse?

Showmanship

Where in your upcoming plans can you add a little showmanship this week?

Being an Empath

Are you really an empath or are you just glorifying your pathological tendency toward psychological projection?

Business idea: spam resilience

How resilient are you to spams and scams? What if there was a platform we could sign up to where they would sporadically surprise us with all the current spams. Since they occur randomly, we wouldn’t have any way of knowing whether or not it was their platform or an actual spam. After every time they send us a spam, they’d send us a follow up letting us know how we did and what you could’ve done better. Could be a good way to stay up to date on the current spams and scams, build resilience and best practices, and it could be particularly useful to people who might be more vulnerable to falling for scams.

Voyager Golden Records & Undiscovered Sounds

This month I learned about the Voyager Golden Records: “two phonograph records that were included aboard the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them.” 🔗 / Wikipedia /

It makes me think that there was a first time that the world was exposed to the sound a soda can opening, or a the sound of weights crashing in a gym, or the sound of a lion roar. I wonder what the frequency of sound invention or novelty is. What would a database of all the sounds in the world look like? How many novel sounds would get added each year? How many sounds on that have we as individuals heard? 90%? 50%? 5%?