you’re not supposed to fall in love with Yoda.

(quick definition because i made this term up a “Yoda” is someone a few steps ahead of you.)

someone who can point to their own tangle of mess, separated only by time and hindsight, and say “yes, that isn’t attached to me anymore”.

maybe they are a mentor, a guide, a friend. maybe they’re a sexy older woman who kinda intimidates you. i won’t judge. whoever, they’re a person who helps you learn and grow while you’re still in the middle of your shit.

so you’re building, or healing and they’re helping, and you finally do whatever it is you’ve strived for.

it is so very easy to look at the person who got you through your darkest time and decide this must be the one.

the people who come into our lives to help us heal are not always the people we spend forever with. sometimes they’re just there for a season. they get us back on our feet, teach us what we need to know, push us to become the best versions of ourselves.

here’s a shitty venn diagram.

there’s more than one way to heal, grow and learn. not everything rests on a romantic partner. i don’t care what you’ve been conditioned to believe.

skimming this? here’s the highlights

• the world isn’t neatly divided into “romantic” and “other”.

• not everything rests on a romantic partner.

• more collective discernment is needed in forming relationships, partnerships, attachments.

• sometimes, you are your OWN Yoda. you need to be able to step in and out of this role.

OPINION TIME

we need to be letting way more people into our internal worlds. the people reserved for “romantic” partnerships cannot possibly be the only ones helping us grow. that’s too much to ask of one relationship.

we all need mentors, friends, family members, co-workers, all sorts of people, to fill in the spaces in our lives, to offer support and guidance. we need connection on every level we can get.

“but Renée if this person isn’t impacted by your daily decisions, they shouldn’t get a say in them”. that’s a great point friend! use context in your filtering of opinions, for sure.

HOWEVER

what could more cross pollination look like?

• posting more “what do we think of this?” call and response stuff online

• talking openly about the impact of things like limerence. “since he started dating, he doesn’t seem to give a shit about work. is that really a moral failing, when as humans we are primed to seek out a mate? discuss.”

• more overt contracts. a covert contract is the silent one, “hey, we don’t talk about this, it’s too painful”. an overt one is more like operating principle between people. we operate from our highest good, in good faith, always

I see a movement brewing on X and Threads, an uprising of “date in public” feedback loops. people are sharing their crazy vulnerable stories, their desire. and it’s beautiful. it’s a collective act of trying to connect.

it’s (hopefully) changing the way we think about love.

i’m of the belief that finding a partner is one part of something bigger. connecting with people on a deeper level. building a community, a network of support. understanding ourselves and the world around us, which we can only do through call and response, like sexy little dolphins.

Love you,

hope you win

Renée

you pay for this newsletter (thank you!) so you get the stuff i usually leave in a messy folder.

Read more

there’s two time options to choose from.

a seat is US$104, paid at the form to lock it in. if you’re a yearly paid subscriber to Unsupervised, this session is free for you. keep an eye on your inbox or dm me if you decide to join yearly.

bring an idea you've been too scared or too busy to post. i'll take an idea from the room and write it live, badly first, then less badly, then well. you'll work on yours alongside me, so you can see what i'm changing and try it without having to guess what i meant from a slide.

we'll also do a voice exercise and work out where your next ideas could come from. i don't want you to spend two hours writing one post and then be back in your notes app avoiding the next one. you'll leave with an idea bank and a plan for what to post over the following two weeks.

grab a seat here

https://tally.so/r/LZAZd1

Renée

this is a post about what to do with the feeling of jealousy that can turn you into a bitter little rat person who hates going online.

my thinking is that jealousy can tell you what you want, if you know what questions to ask yourself.

i wouldn’t judge the feeling by the way.

jealousy means you’ve spotted something you want and haven’t gone after yet.

yeah it can be hard to admit you want something another person has.

“good for them” sounds nicer than “i wish someone had asked me”.

before you decide you want their whole career, try and figure out what exactly caught your eye/ gave you the initial pang of comparison.

say someone has been invited to speak at a conference.

the audience to warrant such an invite ≠ the confidence to speak.

what i’m saying is you may be closer to your goal than you think.

how to work out what you feel

i’m a big fan of the Socratic method. you feel jealous of someone online/ at work.

Why?
Okay but why?

hmm, why?

you weren’t loved enough as a child?

STOP RIGHT THERE

which part do you want?

think about what this person has or what you perceive them to have.

it might be one of these things

• you might want the result they have

• you might envy the time they have

• you might desire the confidence they have

• you might be jealous of the freedom of creative choice

• you may feel jealous of the attention they receive

you can want more than one, you can want to wear their skin idk man.

you don’t need to decide what kind of jealous person you are.

it also isn’t only about the work they produce.

sometimes you’re jealous of how someone is.

what they care about, what they stand for, how much they back themselves, their amazing hair.. etc

those are harder to copy than a post, but wanting them still tells you something

talk (good) shit about yourself

this is how i used my rage to see what i was good at.

i wrote down the things i can do and the things i enjoy and plotted them on a chart.

green means energising, purple means can do but draining, orange means avoids. the top right corner is where to spend more time.

it’s a quick way to see what you want to do more of.

write down what you noticed

1. open a note and describe the part that bothered you

keep it about the work or the opportunity, not everything you know about the person.

“they made a deep dive video about something they care about” gives you something to work with.

“their life is better than mine” will take a lot more research to disprove.

think about the busy work too. a promotion or “big thing” means months of unseen work.

you can want the end result and still not be sure you want all that.

2. next, pick something small you could try.

   say you wanted to start a youtube channel. try recording a video and you can watch it before you decide whether to share it.

i started a whole friendship group by deciding i wanted one. all it took was one post. i wrote about it in you can just do things.

if you admire how someone shares work you’d keep private, ask what you’re worried would happen if you did the same.

you can choose which details you’re comfortable sharing without copying them.

examples of jealousy

say a friend has an essay in a magazine you like and you’re jealous. when you read it again, you realise you mainly like how much attention and curiosity they afforded to a particular topic.

in Time magazine! JEALOUS

you could ask whether you want to write a story yourself.

what would you write about, and which details would you be okay including? try a few hundred words before you worry about where they’d go, then see if you want to keep working on them.

you might still want the magazine to publish you.

if so, look at its submission guidelines and what it has run recently.

you might also find that writing the story was the part you wanted, and then you can keep it private or find somewhere else for it.

buy feet pics for the cost of a coffee!

i’ve been jealous of lots of people, including friends!
with her youtube
for his insane consistency
with making reaching out the thing she’s known for
with his ability to make shit from nothing (over and over)

once you name exactly what you’re jealous of, it gets easier to plan and reconcile.

okay what if i’m still a rat?

3. make a short note each time you notice it. after a while you might see you keep looking at people who have time to write, people getting paid for work you’d like to do, or people trying something you’ve put off.

pick one of those and look at what you could do about it.

experiments usually require either/or time, money or opportunity

you can do this with jobs too.

companies i wanted to work at weren’t hiring, so i tried weirder routes and wrote about them in the weirdest ways people actually get jobs.
that’s how i ended up at tl;dv :)

Love you,
hope you win
xoxo
Renée

PS: leave any kind of comment i’m very lonely.

also keep an eye out, doing a linkedin workshop with in the next few weeks heres a link!

i’m back in Perth after my firstever™ proper holiday.

if you work in social or make creative things on the internet, i hope this post is interesting to you and not just a shit public diary.

what i did for burnout

during my 2 week London-Paris trip (from Australia) there was karaoke, a trip to BBC studios to see a finale filming of TaskMaster, improv at an underground bar, two musicals, some dates 👀 ,a fuck tonne of walking and plenty of dinners.

i realised that despite working remotely and being a certified loner, i really really like hanging out.

i went on leave partly because i was tired and angry. my love of my life coworker, Ian Evans, resigned (but no hard feelings nothing exciting or toxic happened it was just time)

buy feet pics for the cost of a coffee!

but his leaving made it very clear how my life was feeling like a treadmill. and i fkn hate the gym.

i wrote about that treadmill in April, in content has become our medicine AND our illness:

the gap between finishing one thing and starting another has collapsed to nothing. there’s no pause where you sit with what you made and think about whether it was good.

like many people who get a gold star in therapy, i’m self aware. that doesn’t stop the issues from happening though.

when i first started in my role, Ian had made a series about his own burnout that i watched and listened to with a curious misunderstanding. “how could he feel burnt out from making silly little skit videos?” i had thought to myself.

my time would come.

what actually helped my burnout

• getting out of my industry for a bit/ not reading “tech news”

• purposefully not engaging on LinkedIn

• spending time on a different platform, (which for me was X)

• watching old SNL-style ensemble cast movies and old Seinfeld episodes

• venting to my friends in person

• really slowing down, and letting myself get “bored”

what i’m doing next

i want to go back to Europe, and i want to fund it with sponsored content that isn’t scripted ads and me being a sell out.

i like chasing sponsorships. i like proving that i belong in places i don’t belong in.

i recently spoke on a panel at a tech conference which is my literal nightmare. i found that even during the hour long talk, i wasn’t nervous. i kind of liked that the audience seemed disappointed with my lack of professionalism. i liked the friction of being misunderstood. i know this is “edgy” and perhaps a teenage sensibility but it’s my truth.

i’ve spoken about liking the hustle here before

i think i’m supposed to find that degrading. i don’t. i actually like it??

i’m not sure that enjoying selling means i should enjoy every format it leads to.

meaning i don’t know how much i love full-stack, end to end video production right now.

i make videos for tl;dv, i don’t know that i want to make videos for every SaaS tool under the sun. i want to upgrade. i’d love a videographer. i’d love to do more in person content.

which is where my chats with friends have been instrumental to me working out my shit.

is an angel sent from Ian heaven who has such a wealth and breadth of experience in creator marketing that i feel so touched to call her my friend. she’s genuinely funny and is probably all over your linkedin, tiktok and socials already.

she is the person who encouraged me to go for what i actually want.
which isn’t more videos, its more MCing at tech events, more standup, more panels and podcasts.

my goal(s)
to attend a live event/ be on a panel
to meet up and collab with friends
and to start filming a pilot webseries for founders.

i’m looking for interesting brand partnerships for organic social content.

none of it is funded (at the time of writing this, i secured two opportunities worth 5k) or booked yet but here’s how i’m gonna do it.

how i’m doing it

i found Instinct on X.

it’s a personal AI assistant i text through WhatsApp (i don’t use Meta and Muse isn’t avail in Aus so that’s why).

this isn’t sponsored. i’m just being honest about my ai usage.

i use it for outreach and admin researching brands, building prospect sheets, and finding who to email.

i told it my goals, i told it that i need a roadmap to make my goal reality and asked it for a spreadsheet.

some tips on using ai for reaching goals

1/ give it an outcome with a number or a date, not “help me grow”.

2/ ask for things you can check like a list with sources, a draft, a calendar entry.

3/ use people for introductions.

i use Boardy for that, and Carly Valancy is an inspiration in how she writes and reaches out.

ps: i’d tell anyone to do the same thing by hand in a spreadsheet if they prefer.

becoming a stehaufmännchen

a Stehaufmännchen is the German wobble toy that stands back up however many times you knock it over.

this is an affectionate nickname given to me by my boss.

i’ve always known i’m resilient, but i’m learning you don’t have to burn everything down to change something.

i used to treat change as demolition. quit the thing, delete the thing, start again from nothing. what’s worked better is the tech-bro habit of iterating.

i don’t need to quit my job or audience to find out what i want next. i can keep what works, change one thing, and see what happens.

in you can just do things i asked strangers on Reddit to a picnic and people came. if you want to do weird stuff in Europe, ask me. the answer is probably yes.

love you,

hope you win

xxox Renée

when i turned 19 i had been working at th

e casino in sydney (formally known as “Star city”. I decided i didn’t want to be a croupier anymore and i wanted a BigGirl job.

i answered an ad from gumtree of all places for “an open invitation for entrepreneurs”. i couldn’t pronounce entrepreneur (I still can’t spell it first go around) but i was interested in the fact that i didn’t need a degree or much in the way of experience other than being willing.

this open call out for recruitment has been running since 2006 at the agency.
i met with the Director/Co-founder and we had one of the most laid back mutual interviews i’d ever had. after two interviews, i was hired as an EA.

the people that worked there were largely in their mid-20’s, they dressed well and listened to triple j. a lot of plants filled the converted warehouse office and they ha a program where you could rent business books from a communal library.
in that job, i learnt the difference between a “content” and “copy writer”.
i learnt about technical SEO and how people really care about their coffee orders, and you can’t just get them “the one with chocolate on top”.

if you have read anything i’ve ever written, heard me talk in person or just generally looked in my direction, you’ll know that i would make a famously lousy assistant. we’ll get to this part a bit later.

buy feet pics for the cost of a coffee!

now this was back when instagram was used for photos, and brands were realising they could send people free things in exchange for them being posted about. WHAT JOY?!

i had spent my teen years on livejournal and tumblr and considered myself somewhat of a poet (shutup). so the next natural step in marrying my love of taking dumb ~ arty ~ pics and showcasing my writing to the world was of course Instagram.

i wrote awful short horror fiction on reddit (r/nosleep) and crossposted it to my old account (the username of which shall be withheld, fuck you) with accompanying photos that were of me “modelling”.

i gained 12k followers in about 3 months and the combination of my BigGirl job at the agency and my new wlw relationship made me feel invincible.

this is when i started receiving clothes in exchange for posts and a few hundred dollars my way. the internet loved me and i WAS GOING TO MAKE IT TO BUZZFEED AS THE PROPHECY FORETOLD.

that’s when i decided to purchase 100,000 instagram bot followers.

my brain let me know that this was what everyone did, it wasn’t cheating, it was just helping reality move along.

Cate* the head of content at the agency came up to me one morning in the printer room and congratulated me on my viral success. i smugly thanked her, oblivious to her skepticism. i truly believed my new coworkers, people around me and brands really thought i had 100k+ followers.

i didn’t know much about the follower audit websites that could disprove the validity of my audience. i didn’t realise that 30 fire emojis in a row would look suspect. i didn’t think about reputation or the economic impact of purchasing comments and likes daily.

remember the “i’m a bad assistant” part? one day, i taxi’d across town (uber didn’t exist yet in Australia) to take my bosses bright orange external hard drive to a video editor. on the ride over, i got my first “troll” comment (which on reflection was simply someone stating the obvious). my heart in my stomach, my face flushed, i paid the taxi driver with cash and forgot to get a receipt for expenses. i also forgot the hard drive. i arrived at the editors studio with no hard drive, and no idea how to trace the driver.

instead of calling the taxi service, i went back to the office and packed up my things carefully into a tote, smiled at the receptionist and turned my phone off.
when the “people and culture” woman called me to ask if i was okay/ why hadn’t i been into work, i let her know i moved states (i hadn’t).

i deleted my instagram.

so why tell you this? aside from it being an achingly embarrassing snapshot of the time?

because it’s happening now, to a lessor degree.

a study from 2025 was recently published in March of this year related to the emotional response to ai usage. a 9 item psychometric tool was developed to see how participants view their feelings related to ai usage and places them in categories from climate impact, societal pressure/shame and more.

i’ve been on substack a lot more lately. i’ve spoken briefly of hypergraphia and prolific creating. i don’t think i touched enough on how the ai part of my workflow impacts me, and importantly you.
i have always considered my ideas not to be precious. i’ve always said this.
so then why, does my essay writing process begin with dumping connected ideas into Claude, asking it to source from my obsidian notes and then pulling references and research that i haven’t done with my own cursor clicking and furrowed brow?

i figured it out. because i am afraid of being beaten to the punch. i’m afraid of not being fast enough, so the trade off is i’m not thorough. i have so much to say to you. i’m so afraid of looking stupid and you not having all the context of every thought in my head and all my connections that were hard earned via a life of ridiculousness.

my ideas felt like they were going off in the fridge, destined for a big guilty clean out.

so i published the longest most dense essays on topics that genuinely excite me.
but every week i waited for the instagram comment calling me out. i waited for “this is Claudish writing” and it never came.

that felt almost worse because i know that you can tell. and the feeling i have figured out is a feeling of guilt and shame because i shouldn’t make you read that.

you deserve to read things that have had time put into them. on the AI debate, i’m not anti AI, i know that is upsetting for some people to hear, and is considered a moral failing.

there is something so addictive about being able to efficiently express my thoughts, to write some garbled nonsense and have the machine make sense of what i’m trying to get at. i’m not going to stop using AI, this in fact is the first post i’ve written on substack without AI since 2024. my commitment is to be slower, more mindful and more honest.

Love you,

hope you win.

xoxo Renée

ps: I’m going to london and paris in a few weeks, would love to know what i should see.
also, i’m posting on x as an experiement, if that’s your thing

*name not changed at all but i came to learn months later that she actually was an influencer on IG with a modest 60k and the engagement rate to match. she must have thought i was such an idiot ;(

this is a post about ragebait content. if that interests you, read on.

do you like to fight on the internet??

the whole promise of media literacy was that once we understood how content worked, how the algorithms push things, how influencers are salespeople with ring lights, we’d get more discerning.

and we DID learn it.

a whole generation can spot a sponsored post and figure out even the most deceptive of ads.

my hypothesis is that all that beautiful critical thinking didn’t make us harder to farm for engagement from. it made us better crops.

the urge to correct people is a currency, every deliberately wrong thing you see online is a machine built to collect it.

there are (in my mind) five places you can end up after commenting on ragebait content.

destination one- you arrive at a right answer

Cunningham’s Law says the best way to get the right answer on the internet isn’t to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.

Ward Cunningham is the programmer who invented the wiki, the editable web page that Wikipedia was later built on. according to Steven McGeady, an ex-Intel executive, Cunningham said the line to him offhand sometime in the early eighties. McGeady named it after him and put it in a New York Times comment in 2010, and off it went.

Cunningham has since called it “a misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet”. he says he never said it.

what??

the law about wrong answers travelling further than right ones is a wrong answer that travelled further than the right one??
get fucked??

Cunningham keeps correcting it and every correction carries it further, the poor man is trapped in his own law like one of those mosqitos in amber in jurassic park.

the law was describing Usenet

(talked about that here before).

the internet’s discussion system from before the web had a front page.

thousands of text-only groups, one per topic, populated by people who knew an enormous amount about one thing and had never once been told “let it go”.

ask a question there and it might sit for a week. post a confidently incorrect statement and four people would arrive within the hour to explain precisely how wrong you were, with citations, at length, and then start correcting each other.

this is where pedantary became a kind of infrastructure. (and it worked for Reddit and StackOverflow too)

destination two- you feed the numbers

Oxford made “rage bait” its word of the year for 2025. usage tripled in twelve months and thirty thousand people voted for it over “aura farming”.

Hannah Alonzo, a YouTuber who makes long careful videos about influencer behaviour, spent 39 minutes cataloguing the food version.

Alonzo’s read is that a lot of influencer ragebait content doesn’t start off with that intention. what usually happens is a post goes viral unintentionally and sometimes the creator runs with that format/ behaviours because they see engagement as “profit”.

a creator got called out for slicing potatoes without washing them and replied “they’re washed, it’s just a content trigger to prompt engagement”.

Meredith Duxbury with 17mil TikTok followers, has a signature ragebait move of pouring a palmful of liquid foundation onto the back of her hand before chucking it on her face.

every person who has ever owned foundation looks at that and thinks THAT IS TOO MUCH FOUNDATION. the correction requires no expertise, no nerve, and no risk. it’s five words that are found THOUSANDS of times across her vids.

so where does your correction to ragebait go?

into a comment counter. the platform can’t tell “this saved my life” from “this is an affront to God”, it can only count*, and comments weigh more than likes.

your comments’ entire economic life is being a number that convinces an algorithm to show the video to more people.

*keyword sentiment is def part of some algorithms and i’ll write about that in the future.

and before i get too smug, this is one of my favourite little shitty techniques for my job.

LinkedIn’s 2026 algorithm throttles obvious engagement bait, “comment YES if you agree” gets flagged now, so B2B moved to the contrarian take.

“SEO is dead.” “your ICP doesn’t exist”. the same town crier bullshit.

the sorting question

not all bait pays, and working out which bait pays is weirdly systematic. two questions sort everything.

can the reader name exactly what you got wrong? and does saying it cost them anything?

the job, if you want this job, is to be wrong in a way somebody can fix in one smug sentence.

destination three- a cover story for some weirder shit

okay hear me out.

the quadrant image assumes the angry commenter is the customer.

for a tiny portion of ragebait/ food waste content, the audience is an alibi.

there’s a genre of food ragebait that overlaps with feederism, a fetish organised around feeding, excess and weight gain.

TikTok has a whole ecosystem of it, sitting next to mukbang, the Korean format where somebody eats an enormous amount of food on camera.

the BBC looked at the adjacent “life hack” genre in 2023 and listed the recurring themes.

things like: exaggeration, body parts held in frame, food and mess, anticipation, humiliation.

now reread Alonzo’s list of things engineered to annoy you. the gallon-sized iced coffee. portions no human could finish. bare hands in the food. the spillage, the acrylic nails, the deliberate slowness.

that’s the same list.

so where does your correction go here? it goes to work as a disguise. you think you’re punishing someone for tipping a pan of custard wastefully over their body and your comment is out there earning its living making the video look like ordinary ragebait.

i’m not pointing at any specific creator, i don’t know and it isn’t my business.

the point is that you can be completely correct that something is ragebait and completely wrong about who it’s for.

destination four- lining someones pockets

there’s a guy on TikTok called Jay who runs a snack brand called Daadi, and he doesn’t really promote the snacks. when i started writing this, it was originally just about this guy. because he pisses me off.

what he mostly does is call out influencers for acting entitled.

the person making $350k a month who still wants free meals from small restaurants in NYC.

influencers have tried to sue him, they’ve blocked him, their friends have blocked him, and his audience loves it more every single time.

his videos work because he says things you are already thinking or wish you could say.

the correction economy now has middlemen. professional correctors who harvest your “someone should say something” and convert it into an audience, and the audience into revenue.

the forty-five minute YouTube “expose” is the same thing, an intellectual structure, emotional appeal, you get to feel smart while feeling superior.

so, at industrial scale, is snark Reddit. r/blogsnark started in 2015 as a place to talk about influencers, membership more than doubled during covid, and there are now over 200 snark subreddits where tens of thousands of people show up daily to dissect the outfits and relationships and CHEWING of people they claim not to care about.

Jennifer Bosson, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, found that two strangers sharing a negative opinion about a third person predicts closeness MORE strongly than sharing a positive one.

hating the same influencer makes people feel like they already know each other. one snark user described it as “like catching a friend’s eye when someone around you has said something stupid”.

destination five- to nowhere land

one more, and it’s the happy one,.

HowToBasic is an Australian YouTube channel (nice) , running since 2011 with 17mil subs.

every video is titled like a tutorial, “How To Make a Sandwich”, opens as one, hands only, no face, no voice, and then partway through becomes a man destroying his kitchen and throwing several hundred eggs at things.

he has never revealed his identity. his 2018 “face reveal” was eighty other YouTubers claiming to be him, including Vsauce, Casey Neistat and even Post Malone.

the title is bait, the framing is bait, the thumbnail is bait but the simple consistency of the “bit” somehow changed the content to “entertainment” rather than “ragebait”. HowToBasic isn’t trying to make us angry, he’s sharing his anger with us. *

*there are large communities suggesting he is indulging in fetish content but I don’t believe that is his goal.

Bobbi Brown found a way to ragebait the ragebaiter.

in May 2022 Duxbury applied her palmful technique to Jones Road’s What The Foundation, which is a sheer tinted balm and wants about a fingertip’s worth. it slid around, came off in patches, “it’s gonna be a no from me”, thirteen million views, the brand took a beating. Brown made a video response, using Duxbury’s same shitty technique and mused “hmm, didn’t really work”.

it went everywhere and sales went UP.

a wrong answer posted on purpose, to answer a wrong answer posted on purpose, except this time the correction carried actual information.

people came out knowing what a sheer balm is.

the literacy nobody teaches

so media literacy was supposed to make us harder to fool, and it worked to a degree.
we can identify performed authenticity, we know about parasocial relationships, we know about secret accounts that are “plants”

these concepts are getting deployed as prosecution though rather than self refection.

our new found vocabulary and insight was meant to protect us from manipulation and instead, gave us precision tools for dismantling strangers.

conspiracy theorists work the same way btw.
1) question the sources
2) look for the hidden agenda
3) do your own research

it’s structurally identical critical thinking pointed at wildly different targets.

teaching people to question everything doesn’t automatically produce better thinking.

the platforms are not neutral about this. NYU researchers found content with moral-emotional language gets roughly a 20% algorithmic boost. *

* this is from 2017 so may be time for another study

snark communities almost always get more negative over time, the bar drops, and eventually nobody’s holding anyone accountable, you’re just watching a stranger live their life and finding it insufferable.

after animal rescuer Mikayla Raines died by suicide in 2025, the snark subreddit about her went private, and the others found new targets.

before you type, follow the correction to it’s destination.

does it land in a thread and help the next person?
does it become a number on a stranger’s dashboard?
does it buy a professional hater a bigger audience?
does it go to work as somebody’s alibi?

you can’t always tell, which is rather the point.

where i’ve gotten to with this

we used to build identity out of what we liked, the music, the clothes, the brands. now we build it out of what we reject, the influencers we see through, the trends we’re above, the content we can deconstruct.

your taste is defined by what you refuse to fall for, and the smarter you are, the more things you can refuse.

i do a line of this myself sometimes. what do you build when your foundation is rejection?

where does all that intelligence go when there’s nothing left to take apart?

Love you,

hope you win

xx Renée

this is about the connection between marketing campaigns, ARGs, early internet and “worldbuilding”. read on if interested in that.

in june 2006 i was a 14 yr old girl was watching a 16yr old called “Bree” post videos from her bedroom. she talked about homeschool and her strict religious parents, and within weeks she was the most subscribed channel on youtube.

by september it was kinda over. fans messaged her on myspace and traced the reply’s IP address to the offices of creative artists agency in beverly hills.

“Bree” was actually a 19yo Jessica Rose, from New Zealand, cast through a craigslist ad codenamed “the children of anchor cove”, performing scripts written by two filmmakers and randomly, a lawyer.

what’s crazy to me is viewership grew after they revealed it was scripted.

the series ran two more years as open fiction and had its biggest numbers in 2007.

the first movie launch of its kind

lonelygirl15, to my mind, was copying a movie the marketing of a movie.

in 1999 the blair witch project seeded a website about the “disappearance” of three student filmmakers months before the film reached the public. flyers went up at sundance asking if anyone had seen them. imdb listed the actors as missing, presumed dead (their poor mums).

the shoot cost roughly the price of a used car and the film made a quarter of a billion dollars, (partly because a real chunk of the audience walked in unsure whether they were watching footage of dead kids)

why internet hoaxes stopped working

so, could it happen today? i think the answer is maybe, and i don’t think it’s because people got more media literate, discerning or skeptical.

my hypothesis is a hoax like this only works on an audience that has never seen one before on the specific platform it’s hosted on.

youtube in june 2006 was only sixteen months old. the platform’s whole premise was unmediated.

we didn’t have the antibodies yet for something viral.

a girl talking to a webcam was believed by default because why would anyone lie?

i think that type of thing only works once.

more worldbuilding online examples

horse_ebooks, the beloved twitter spam bot people quoted like poetry, was revealed in 2013 to have been run for two years by a buzzfeed creative director as an art project.

the ‘belief’ lasted ages, but in reverse. people really believed a human was a machine, and grieved when it turned out to be a person (esp a creative director.. ew) (just kidding love you Jacob Bakkila)

the new yorker basically ran a eulogy.

lil miquela, the CGI instagram influencer, got “hacked” in 2018 by a rival CGI influencer who forced her to “confess” she wasn’t human.

both characters belonged to the same LA startup (brud, aqquired by dapper labs fyi) her audience had known she was CGI from day one.

tilly norwood, the AI “actress” that caused the linkedin (and everywhere else) meltdown in 2025, never claimed to be a person at all.

each time, the time between launch of thing and getting clocked for “thing” shrunk.

months, then weeks, then zero, then negative.

we now clock things that aren’t tricks. real photographers get accused of prompting. the ai use witchhunt is in full swing in 2026.

imo, the next lonelygirl15 can’t exist because the audience defaults to disbelief before the first upload.

the hardest thing now is proving you’re REAL.

args and analog horror

there’s a complication to my own theory, and it comes from the early 00’s.

let’s talk about args (alternate reality games) (args are interactive multiplayer games that are narrative driven and use the real world a a platform)

(side note: i think this is the “past future” of b2b marketing. sorry to be lame)

in 2001 microsoft built a marketing campaign for spielberg’s movie A.I. that started with a fake name buried in the film’s trailer credits “Jeanine Salla, sentient machine therapist”.

people googled her and fell into a network of fake websites, working phone numbers, emails from characters. it’s now called the beast, and it invented the alternate reality game. its design bible had one rule, written down like doctrine

the 7000 people solving it, who called themselves the “cloudmakers” and chewed through three months of planned puzzles in roughly a day (to the designers’ horror), knew from the first afternoon that it was an ad campaign.

the game pretended to be real, the players pretended to believe it, both sides knew about it but it still went viral.

three years later i love bees, (the arg for halo 2), published gps coordinates for payphones across america.

the phones rang at the scheduled minute and players were standing there to answer them. in florida, someone kept their assigned payphone appointment with a hurricane coming in. for a video game ad -_-

then youtube got its own lineage. in june 2009 a something awful forum thread invented slender man in public, timestamped, with an attributed author.

ten days later marble hornets started uploading found footage that treated him as real.

everymanHYBRID, the next year, ran the full lonelygirl15 bait-and-switch (ordinary channel with weird shit in the background).

the creators planted slendie in the backgrounds of early videos and let people believe they’d spotted something the editors hadn’t noticed.

the current generation of this doesn’t even use faces. local 58 is a haunted public-access tv station.

the word every one of these communities uses for what they’re doing is lore. (go read ’s post on lore later!)

and addition while editing- the Nine Inch Nails ARG “Year Zero"

what makes a cult classic?

blair witch and lonelygirl15 both fibbed to their audiences and both got “exposed” .

blair witch became a cult classic. lonelygirl15 became a wednesday night trivia answer for bored millennials (sorry).

blair witch still works after you know it’s fake, because the film is a genuinely scary movie with or without the posters.

and lonelygirl15’s growth after the reveal is interesting to me.

the audience wanted the fiction, they just wanted to be in on the bit. i think participation was the real reward here.

easter eggs as marketing

making it about me (because everything has to be).

i make marketing content and i spend a suspicious amount of time on details i guarantee almost nobody will see. like references that only pay off if you’ve been following for months.

this looks excessive, because an easter egg might reach twelve people.

but the person who finds one turns into a little detective for a second, they spotted it!, they were paying closer attention than everyone else, and the brand winked back at them.

everymanHYBRID showed you can plant discovery on purpose and it still feels like discovery to the person doing the discovering. (say discover again)

blair witch printed missing posters.

the beast hid a fake therapist in movie credits.

lonelygirl15 answered myspace messages in character.

i hide jokes in comment sections. (wow, revolutionary) but that’s the ideology of it at four different budgets

next essay “teaser”? on b2b args and brand lore

little thread i’m pulling on for next time.

in 2009 zendesk invented a fake grunge band called zendesk alternative, with member bios, tour dates and a bandcamp page, purely to own the search term “zendesk alternative”.

in 2015 GE made a sci-fi podcast about decoding an alien signal, and it hit number one on itunes and grew its own fan subreddit.

i’m wanting to find b2b tech companies that have built a persistent version and not a stunt. that post will come later.

Love you,

hope you win!

xx Renée


ps: I like digging into topics, i do NOT know how to format things for reader retention. i’m curious about this, if charts, images etc are appealing or what i should be doing here. if you have thoughts or feedback please let me know!

a note on what this is so you can ignore it if not relevant.
i believe viral posts (specifically on Linkedin/tiktok and IG) have a mathematical formula attached. I’ll be using the instagram brand trend and some other data points to prove my meaning.

so instagram changed its font. (i don’t have instagram but i know it happened)

by thursday afternoon people were reading the new wordmark as Instagzam, by friday, brands were posting their own logos in the same cursive with the same caption energy. KitKat. Wendy’s India. Manforce Condoms, gloriously.

by sunday Creative Bloq had a roundup. press coverage of a trend is the trend’s obituary.

could you have called all of it on thursday morning, before a single brand posted?

i think yes. the best research we have says no. let’s fight about it.

the case for no

in 2006 the Music Lab experiment released the same songs into parallel artificial markets, thousands of listeners each, and then sat back.

every world produced different hits. a song that topped one world flopped in the next. the quality was largely controlled so social influence decided everything else. and nobody (including the researchers) could predict which world would make which song a hit.

a few years later Duncan Watts and his co-authors measured a billion cascades on twitter. over 99% of posts die without being passed on even once. a true viral hit is roughly a one in a million event.

so when someone tells you virality is a lottery, they’re mostly right.

the numbers under the lottery

BUT as my grandma says, A LOTTERY STILL HAS ODDS, and yours are sitting in your own posting history. (she doesn’t say that last bit)

every account has a hit rate. call a hit ten times your normal reach, not global fame lel.

for an account with no proven formats, the working assumption creators use is around 2%. one post in fifty takes off. you don’t get to pick this number. you inherit it from your posting history, and you improve it slowly.

the other number is how many swings (ie posts) you make.

that second number kills every “go viral this month” dm your boss might send you.

twelve posts in a month at a 2% hit rate gives you about a 1/5 chance of a hit. the brief fails 4/5, and it’s nobody’s fault.

keep swinging for a year at three a week and the odds climb to 95%.

Saas founders have lived this. category creation runs on the same maths. most bets die, the winner takes 3/4 of the market, everyone calls it “overnight success” the play bigger data puts the overnight at six to ten years.

deciding what takes off

so what decides whether one specific post takes off? every platform runs the same audition.

your new post gets shown to a small test batch first.

on tiktok, creators have measured it at a couple hundred cold viewers. on linkedin it’s your closest connections.

the platform is sampling you before it spends anything on you.

then it counts what the test batch does. the behaviour it trusts most is sharing, because a share costs the viewer something, their own reputation, in front of their own friends.

Mosseri said this in 2024, “one of the most important signals we use in ranking is sends per reach.”

perform well in the audition and the platform funds a bigger audience.

clear the line again and each round of viewers buys a bigger round. miss it and the rounds shrink until nobody’s left, same as the 99%.

(the rough creator rule is 3 shares per 100 views. the average post manages about 1.) (i hope you’re okay with the analogy im using here)

checking it against my own boxes

theory is CHEAP though! so i pulled the impression numbers for every linkedin post i’ve made since november 2025 til now. that’s 169 posts over nine months.

17 of them went past 100k.

that’s a 10% hit rate, five times the generic one.

i paid for it with months of misses at the wrong formats before this chart even starts.

the gaps match my theory too (flex)

(at 10% you’d expect about ten posts between hits, and that’s roughly how far apart the greens land.)

the middle of the chart is a wall of yellow, posts doing a modest 10 to 30k.

the product posts and the earnest advice live around there. every ”hit” i’ve had came from the shitpost end.

what thursday morning looked like

back to instagram, because i wanna test the theory.

normally the inputs to that audition are private guesses. will people feel something and then they will they share it.

the sentiment was already there. some people never forgave the 2016 rebrand, and the ambient feeling about instagram was already “this app got worse and now it’s fiddling with fonts”.

a decade of grudge, sitting there, on the record.

the product marketing/ asset WAS the joke.

Instagzam needs zero explanation.

TechCrunch pointed out the new s reads as a little sailboat. under-25s were never taught cursive so the joke kinda wrote itself.

and credibility didn’t matter. Manforce Condoms sits in the same roundup as McDonald’s. the trend carried the reach, so small accounts cleared the same bar as the giants. (more, better discourse from on this trendjackking).

for about a day and a half, the maths stopped being a model and became a simple little template.

what stayed unpredictable?

the winner of the trend.
on Thursday morning i could have told you brands would jack the font.

i could not have told you which one would do it best.

(that’s the Music Lab experiment again).

so my claim is this.

NOBODY (sane) can promise a specific post will go viral.

i can't, you can't, no agency can.

what you CAN predict is how likely a hit post is over a quarter, because that follows from your hit rate and how often you post.

so what about the marketer?

if you make content for a living, commit to inputs, not outcomes. a number of swings per quarter. a share rate you’re trying to move. a baseline that rises. a month of posting lands a hit about 3/4 times at my rate (flex), and 1/5 on an unproven account, so anyone promising the outcome on a deadline is guessing.

and keep templates* warm. windows announce themselves. platform news, a visible product change, a decade of pre-loaded sentiment.

*based on your OWN data of what has worked. linkedin content performance/ export to Claude, run an analysis.

Love you,

hope you win

xx Renée

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you have a notes app full of ideas you haven’t done anything with. maybe 40. maybe 140. one of them just says a single word but you know exactly what it means and in three weeks you won’t but that’s fine because you’ll have written more by then.

you posted an hour ago. you’ve checked it twice since. you closed your laptop, opened your phone, opened the app, looked at the number, felt nothing, put the phone down. then picked it up again.

you went for a walk. you came back with four new ideas noted down and no memory of the trees or path you took.

the internet taught you how to get likes. how to write a hook that “stops the scroll”

how to structure an observation so it lands in under 90 words. you’re good at this. you can do it fast and you can do it while tired, sick, sad, or standing in a queue at Woolworths.

buy feet pics for the cost of a coffee!

what nobody taught you is how to stop.

there’s a somatic therapy concept called pendulation. it means moving between activation and rest. doing the hard thing, then settling back into safety. your nervous system needs both. the pendulum has to swing back.

maybe yours doesn’t swing back.

you post something. you feel the brief relief of “done.” and then immediately the pull of “ok next.”

the gap between finishing one thing and starting another has collapsed to nothing. there’s no pause where you sit with what you made and think about whether it was good. there’s just output, output, output, and a vague sense that if you stop, you’ll fall behind.

behind what? behind WHOM? you don’t know. but the feeling is fucking visceral and it runs your schedule.

you have a note somewhere that says something like “go outside” or “look for birds in the morning” or “write a letter to yourself.” you wrote it weeks ago. you haven’t done it.

but you’ve thought about posting about it.

Read more

people sometimes ask me how why i post so often. the answer is unsexy and pretty stupid.

but since “just write things down” isn’t a substack essay, i thought i’d actually show you.

right now, in my go…

Read more

Read more

the messages come through LinkedIn DMs, email, sometimes instagram.
and they say some version of “i love what you post. it makes me feel less insane at work.”

Read more

i’ve been noticing something in myself that i don’t like.

when i see a meme format that was funny six months ago still being used by a brand account, i feel something in my chest, a small tightening,…

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i think i’m supposed to hate this part.

the part where you make something and then you have to... sell it. post it. share it in a slack channel with a message that says “hey, made a thing, would love …

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i wrote this about information cascades and corporate performance theatre and the idea that nothing is working, the appearance of working is working.

this is the follow-up where i try to figure out WHY the game works this way

the midwit problem

there’s this meme called the Midwit. you’ve probably seen it (look up its right there).

on the left is the low IQ guy (the brainlet). on the right is the high IQ guy (the monk). in the middle is the midwit, a crying Wojak, representing the average-intelligence person who overthinks everything.

the joke is that the brainlet and the monk always agree with each other.

the brainlet says something simple because he doesn’t know any better.

the monk says the same simple thing because he’s transcended the complexity.

the midwit in the middle is furious because he’s done all this analysis and arrived at a completely different, much more complicated answer that nobody cares about.

and i think this is LinkedIn.

the best content on LinkedIn comes from two types of people. the person who just says something honest and unfiltered because they don’t know or care about the rules. and the person who’s so established they can say whatever they want because the rules don’t apply to them anymore.

the midwit zone on LinkedIn isn’t about intelligence. it’s about social risk.

the people in the middle have enough to lose that they can’t afford to be interesting, but not enough status to be protected if they are. so they optimise for safety. they write posts about “learnings” and “the power of vulnerability” and “here’s what i told my team on Monday morning” and it’s all the same shit.

the brainlet equivalent is the person who posts a meme because they don’t know that’s supposed to be a risky take.

the monk equivalent is harder to name because the whole point is they're not performing, which means you might not have noticed them. if pressed, i’d go with CEO of Buffer or the Ghost CEO

the resume shield

my boss and i had this conversation recently.

their resume is a shield and you’re not endorsing the idea, you’re endorsing the career.

which means the actual quality of the content becomes almost irrelevant past a certain point. someone with a strong enough title can post “don’t fire ur employees on christmas” and get 2,000 likes. someone with no title can post something genuinely sharp and insightful and get 40 likes because engaging with it is a gamble.

you don’t know this person. what if they’re weird. what if your boss sees you liked something from someone with no checkmark on their profile.

i keep thinking about this with people like Greg Isenberg. like, he’ll post stuff like “there will be 10,000 AI millionaires printed by building agencies for clawdbot bugs” or whatever and you’re like... mate. but it performs because the resume validates the take.

the take doesn’t have to survive on its own merits.

game theory, but make it LinkedIn

there are a few frameworks that explain why bullshit thrives on LinkedIn, and they all reinforce each other in a way that’s actually pretty elegant

start with the basic problem. posting honestly is risky. if you post something real and nobody engages, or worse, your boss sees it and it’s awkward, you’ve defected against yourself.

so you don’t. and neither does anyone else. and the feed becomes a wasteland of “love this take” and “needed to hear this today.” this is the prisoner’s dilemma but for attention. the shared resource is the quality of the feed. everyone benefits from it being good. nobody wants to be the one who takes the risk to make it good.

so what do people default to instead? Thomas Schelling had this idea that when people need to coordinate without communicating, they gravitate towards whatever feels most obvious.

his example was “if you had to meet a stranger in New York City with no way to contact them, where would you go?”

most people said Grand Central Station at noon. not because it’s the best spot. because it’s the most default.

on LinkedIn, the default is corporate optimism.

if you don’t know what to post, you post something positive, professional, and vaguely inspirational because that’s what you assume everyone else is doing. and because everyone assumes everyone else is doing it, everyone does it. the thing about Schelling focal points is they work even when nobody actually prefers the outcome. you don’t have to like Grand Central Station. you just have to assume everyone else will go there.

and then the spiral kicks in.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described this in 1974. people constantly scan their environment to figure out what the majority opinion is. if they think they’re in the minority, they stay quiet. which makes the perceived majority seem even bigger. which makes even more people stay quiet.

on LinkedIn this is devastating. the vocal minority is the thought leadership crowd posting safe, corporate-approved takes. the silent majority is everyone who thinks this is all a bit ridiculous but won’t say so because they assume they’re the only one who thinks that.

they’re not. almost nobody thinks the content is good. but almost nobody says so because almost nobody else is saying so. everyone privately disagrees (enter r/linkedinlunatics) with the norm but publicly conforms to it because they think everyone else genuinely believes it.

i lied when i said 5 frameworks. i was going to add the “mere exposure affect” and “social currency” but you’re smart, you can imagine i wrote about that.
let’s MOVE ON.

engagement pods

okay so i have to talk about engagement pods because they’re the most honest version of everything i’ve been describing. like, corporate performance theatre pretends it isn’t a game. engagement pods just admit it.

(quick history for anyone who doesn’t know but probably know)

skip this if you know what a pod is

engagement pods are private groups where members agree to like and comment on each other’s posts to game the algorithm. you post, you share the link in the pod, 10-20 people immediately engage, and the algorithm goes “oh this is popular” and shows it to more people.

okay, resume reading here please

by 2023 LinkedIn started catching on. Linkedin shifted the algorithm to prioritise “knowledge sharing” and closer connections. reach and engagement dropped. research by someone i think is a total grifter found views and engagement down roughly 50% across the board.

then in 2024 they went further and basically replaced their entire ranking system with a foundation model called 360Brew.

look, here’s an infograph i made!

late last year, LinkedIn’s VP of Product Gyanda Sachdeva publicly said their goal was to “make engagement pods entirely ineffective.” they started rate-limiting comments, flagging automated activity, and reducing the reach of anything that looked coordinated.

i don’t think they ever actually worked. not in the way people thought they did.

the whole premise of a pod is that early engagement triggers the algorithm to show your post to more people. and that’s true, technically.

but what the pod people never accounted for is WHO those early engagers are and what their networks look like.

my coworker Ian said something about this that i think is the cleanest take anyone’s had

and he’s right. if the only way your post gets traction is by having your team like it, the content isn’t doing the work. you’re just using social obligation as a distribution hack (and don’t i know it, i do it often).

back to funding announcements (i have a chip on my shoulder idgaf) a funding announcement is the same thing but nobody calls it a pod.

anyway.. like my shit on Linkedin

let’s wrap it up i have some soup to eat

i still haven’t done the “nothing” post. the one i said i’d do. the “this gets deleted at 5,000 likes”.

i think the reason i haven’t done it is because i keep trying to figure out the game theory of why it would work and that’s exactly the midwit trap.

the brainlet would just do it. the monk would just do it.

i’m sitting here writing essays about it.

this is a follow-up to nothing is working if you liked that one you’ll probably like this one.

Love you,

hope you win.

Renée xx


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