#36 Reset
This isn't my style of writing. It stops now.
My last post did surprisingly well on Hacker News, and it killed all my motivation to write.
It served as a powerful reminder of everything I was doing wrong with my newsletter, finally helping me pinpoint why I haven’t been able to stay consistent.
By education, I am a mathematician. I learned to write much later in my life, during my master’s studies in the UK. The kind of writing I fell in love with was 'academic writing'. It's a style where opinions are formed through research in credible journals, layered with data, and concluded by acknowledging the gaps in one's own thought process.
I miss the intellectual stimulation of writing those 2,000-word assignments. This involved spending weeks reading about a topic, allowing my own opinion to change in the process, and presenting a neutral, fact-backed stance.
I don't think that's what successful online writing is about anymore.
My colleague Elizabeth (also a dear friend and co-ranter) and I often discuss what kind of writing works these days, mainly because it's part of our job. We were going through a bunch of write-ups on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Hacker News. Purely as observers, a clear pattern emerged:
Misinformation leads to engagement, which feeds the algorithm and makes a write-up "successful".
Strong, misleading opinions (rage-bait) do exceptionally well.
Posts with ‘fu*k’, ‘bit*ch’, and ‘*ss’ perform better (still can’t figure out the purpose of the ‘*’).
No publicity is bad publicity. One just needs the stomach to get dragged through the mud and still write on similar lines the next day.
My last post on dopamine was intentionally curated to hit all of the above points. I even broke my pattern of one-word titles just to force ‘fuck’ in there.
We decided to see what would happen. A part of me wanted that Hacker News post to tank, oh so badly. Instead, it proved our hypothesis correct.
When I started this newsletter, the pressure to 'use AI' was immense. So, I have used AI in some capacity for every post until now. Since I work in the Product Growth domain, I felt the need to make my newsletter popular, giving in to the trends of current writing styles.
Well, I do that in my job. I don't need to do it here.
In hindsight, those were bad decisions. I'm choosing to change it, starting with this post. My understanding of AI and its place in my life is much clearer than it was a year ago. For this newsletter, its role will be simple: to act as a better Google search.
I will do the extensive reading. I will write the posts myself. Grammarly can handle the grammar and spelling checks. That’s it. That's enough for me.
So yes, next week I will write about dopamine again. But this time, in a way that does justice to the topic and my efforts to make my life better.