Goblin Town & The Effort Chad
Seasons of digital commons, the paradox of platforms, & rationalist gruel
An entry for the Archetypes section. Enjoy.
This essay performs an autopsy on the archetypes and seasons of online discourse. With a touch of levity and dash of razzle dazzle, we’ll review how algorithmic incentives alchemize human attention, and in the process produce digital demons and internet invasive species. We’ll then dissect the behavioral DNA of these timeline urchins and chart a path to identify, resist, repel, and navigate the digital commons. An outline:
I. The Slop Goblin: Attention vampires who turn controversy into currency
II. The Sophisticate's Slop: Rationalist gruel with a bowtie. Know the signs, stop the spread.
III. The Reply Gremlin: An impotent, curmudgeonly Kool-Aid Man who bursts forth into your comments
IV. The Effort Chad: The noble evergreen gardener tending to timeless content in a world of ephemeral weeds
V. Algo Ghettos: A digital frontier taxonomy
VI. The Paradox of Virality: How social algorithms give us what we love to hate and mint Goblins
VII. The Paradox of the Goblin: Goblin Town isn’t a place we visit, but something that visits us.
VIII. Concluding: The Twelve-Step Digital Detox
Each archetype represents a different relationship with the platform, prominent at different phases of its lifecycle: the Effort Chad builds it, the Goblin exploits it, and the Gremlin enslaved by it. We’ll review them all in a colorful way and have some fun in the process.
The Algorithmic Womb
Online personas and archetypes aren’t born, but algorithmically manufactured. Every platform begins with noble intentions: "connect the world," "democratize information," "build community”, etc.. Once you attain critical mass towards these virtuous motivations, the advertising KPIs take hold and begin their lobotomization of your once-regal forum.
The transformation follows a rough cycle:
Stage 1: The Garden - Early adopters share genuine interests. A community is formed. Effort Chads are ascendant.
Stage 2: The Metric Machine - Growth begets engagement. Metrics that previously indicated quality become goals rather than measurements. Normies begin to enter, lowering the common denominator of discourse while elevating its popularity. However, the substance remains strong. (Substack is currently here)
Stage 3: The Optimization Factory - An algorithmic impetus to keep users online reshapes the nature of what’s promoted. Content degrades and becomes increasingly perishable; the average post isn’t relevant two weeks after it’s published. The Goblins and Gremlins begin to hatch. The common denominator lowers further.
Stage 4: Goblin Town - Your garden is now a bickering Chernobyl where engagement-mutated creatures roam about throwing rocks at each other. The Effort Chads depart for virgin soil, leaving behind their ancient monuments: thoughtful threads from 2018 that now seem like hieroglyphics from a more civilized age. (Twitter is currently here)
Twitter's 2015 shift from "favorite" (a personal bookmark) to "like" (a public performance) marked its Optimization Factory transition. It maintained a sustainable, low-growth-but-stable steady state until Elon came in and added rocket fuel to a public-validation colosseum.
The Slop Goblin
The Goblin Strategy: Shock. Antagonize. Maximum surface area with minimal depth. Post 30 times a day about whatever's trending. A human RSS feed with opinions.
Man-made horrors beyond comprehension, this video is the soul of the Slop Goblin laid bare. This display earned him 2M impressions and 2.5k likes (tweet here).
Nothing honorable associates with this creature. Nothing pure comes in contact with it. A varmint that escaped his squalid confinement, he protests God by walking among us.
In a more-just world, these gnomes would reside under a bridge, pestering pedestrians to answer three riddles before they’re allowed to pass through. Nature did her best to quarantine these ignoble shrews out of sight, but they’ve been given new life behind a screen. The comments section of their posts carries the wit and charm of gas-station bathroom graffiti. Their spirit animal is an airport pigeon, subsisting on crumbs of controversy and leaving stools of discourse.
The Slop Goblin exists as a pure distillation of platform incentives: he is not a person, but a performance. A dopamine-dealing degenerate.
To harvest his engagement trinkets, he impishly scatters timeline turds. His strident bellows for attention pester that which is healthy and good. He sustains his cyber presence on a steady diet of dopamine: each retweet a snack, each quote-tweet a feast. Like a virtual raccoon pawing through garbage bins of dialogue, he finds sustenance in the decomposing remains of nuanced thought.
These abominable ankle-biters bear a blighted aesthetic that the heavens have long since forsaken, startling the gentle and those unprepared for their debasing displays. Algorithmically enabled network demons who seek to consume your precious mindshare and convert it into engagement excrement. Angels weep at their sight while advertisers calculate cost per impression. Haunting.
11.2 million impressions and 6.6k likes for not knowing how order of operations works. Welcome to Goblin Town.
These boorish bridge trolls, petulant bog hobbits, are most wretched critters. Possessing bodies built for keyboards, they’re too doughy and ill-shaped for use anywhere but facing a computer. Transported about in the atoms-based realm by a supple, soupy meat-vehicle fueled by frozen waffles and shameful behaviors.
The Goblin is an internet pollutant who fills the digital air with low-effort exhaust. Each day he logs on with the same thought: "What bait shall I serve and what nerves must I press to get noticed today?". To encounter his tweets is to step on a wet spot while wearing socks; a squelching squishing noise and slow creep of damp moisture surrounds your toes, confirming he has extracted yet another dopaminergic jewel.
Acutely aware that flamboyantly foul mannerisms and contemporary rageslop are the only ways he garners any notice, he emerges from his bridge, demanding you answer another timeline riddle if you wish to be left in peace. The riddle is always the same: "Will you partake in my transparent attempt to farm interactions?" The answer should always be no. But here we are.
Human popup ads that learned to type, these impression urchins are an odious scourge to the mental faculties, a noxious fume for the eyes, a ghastly burden to the touch, and a sinister menace of the spirit. Their essence is corrosive to the informational aesthetics man needs to flourish. A presence that reminds you to be grateful for God's warmth.
The Sophisticate's Slop
Political ragebait is straightforward and needs no explanation or examples. What does warrant highlighting is one of the more mendacious kinds of slop that masquerades otherwise.
A uniquely effective Goblin dropping dons a veneer of ‘logic and facts,’ presenting as intellectual endeavor while peddling the same attention-seeking drugs. There’s a canyon-wide difference between genuine scientific inquiry (which questions assumptions, follows evidence, and comprehends its limits) and the performative pseudo-rationalism underpinned by “What inflammatory bizarre position can I dress up in Bayesian drag today?”
This cunning variant weaponizes reasoned discourse into engagement bait through guileful argumentation. When the Goblin appears scholarly and measured, blending into the cognitively inclined crowd, it takes on a nefarious form: the rationalist Goblin.
The rationalist Goblin asks “What quirky logic-manipulating position will make people argue in my mentions for three days straight?”. They’re readily identified by their ostentatious controversy whoring smuggled in through numerical subterfuge.
Quantifying the unquantifiable and trafficking in opinionated beliefs hiding behind numbers, they post fiction cosplaying otherwise, following a predictable formula:
Take universal human experience or sacred concept (love, sex, disgust, morality, family, nation, etc.)
Create a sci-fi situation or quixotic scenario to untether you from reality and entangle you in nonsensical hypotheticals. Add spurious precision and fantasy extrapolations under the banner of reasoning (stacking opinions and guesses on top of each other).
Convert opinions to numerical values to mimic objectivity, then reduce the analysis to utilitarian-style, expected-value arithmetic and dismiss instinctive repudiation or common-sense rejection as ‘irrational’.
Take a political/social topic predicated on subjective notions of competing goods and value judgments (aka morality, I write about this a lot) and fallaciously present it as a quantifiable, objective right/wrong exercise. Assert unwarranted moral superiority.
Rationalist gruel is a sort of pseudo-intellectual gentrification: they move into spaces of human meaning, declare them inferior or incorrect, and renovate them into soulless calculation chambers. They are the private equity of human cognition.
The rationalist Goblin represents a peculiar strain of academic psychosis: confusing decoupled contrarianism with insight, they've discovered that appending numbers to nonsense yields a potent engagement cocktail. It's not that they're wrong about everything; it's that they've weaponized being technically correct about trivial, first-order things while being catastrophically wrong about Nth-order matters of consequence. They know not their limits, and boy does it show.
Spreadsheet Sociopaths: Rationalist Goblin Case Studies
While the common Goblin throws simple feces, the rationalist Goblin hurls Microsoft Excel at human nature, then prances around pretending it’s turbo autism.
Some harrowing examples:
This particular gruel peddler has also likened monogamous relationships to "monopolistic anti-competitive behavior"; the rhetorical equivalent of comparing a mother's love to regulatory capture, demonstrating a special kind of idiocy that requires an advanced degree to achieve. Oriented by a hedonistic, sterile perception of humanity, this should be understood as misanthropy hiding behind a word salad. A pathological technique for engagement, the method of an apex Goblin.
The “logical argument for monogamy”, how adorable! Leaving polygamy and the historical, empirical evidence of violence and instability aside I suppose? Seems like quite the logical rejoinder. Or is this just a childish rationalist shit soup served up to justify how you want to sleep with a bunch of people and it “only makes sense” that the rest of society live the way you do?
Update those priors!
Next how about a “logical” argument against emotional pain or the “non-sequitur folly of the human condition”. Maybe the “logical” stance for avoiding the laughter of small children? "The evidence-based case for why puppies lack sufficient facial symmetry requisite for cuteness, and the utility-maximizing stance is adopting as many turtles as you can."
Goblinism: know the signs, stop the spread.
This phenomenon reflects a broader impression-seeking pathology within certain overwrought intellectualized circles where “look how decoupled and calculative I am” contrarian positioning on sacred values and human universals (love, family, loyalty, jealousy, respect, relationships) becomes a reliable workflow for generating provocations. Vacuous slop wearing a bow tie.
Important question for the reader: If you, your sister, and your brother were put under a spell and when you woke up you were erect and penetrating your sister and she was in front of you, and your brother was penetrating you from behind, would you move backwards or forwards? Oh garsh, I’m just asking questions!
I’ll spare you any more examples. You get it.
Rationalists: if you think monogamy is misguided (basically all of them are polyamorous), just wait until you learn about your left arm!
Presenting: The rationalist proposition for removing one of your limbs
The Economic Inefficiency of Bilateral Symmetry
If you consult the data, you'll see you actually don't use your left arm enough to justify its existence. Your left arm represents a case of economic deadweight loss: it consumes resources (blood, oxygen, calories) while producing suboptimal returns compared to your dominant appendage. The marginal utility curve for left arm usage drops precipitously after basic balance maintenance, yet it extracts rents from your metabolic economy at a constant rate!
This creates a highly inefficient welfare dynamic between the delta of what your left arm contributes to its productivity (7.4% for knowledge workers, assuming in the future we control the computer with our brains by blinking at it) and what it costs to maintain (approximately 10% of your basal metabolic rate). That's thousands of calories per year squandered with no corresponding economic output! A textbook example of market failure caused by evolutionary path dependence!
Removing it lets you reduce daily caloric needs by 10% while only reducing bodily functionality by 7.4%! You’re leaving a 2.6% efficiency boost on the table by lugging around leftie all day. It’s entirely emotional and irrational to oppose such net-efficiency gains!
Furthermore, the opportunity costs are staggering. Those wasted calories could be:
Converted to productive brain glucose for improving your Python scripts
Sold on the international calorie market at premium prices
Invested in a diversified portfolio of nutrient futures
Additional potential benefits:
Donate your left arm to a person with no arms, increasing the net joy in the world caused by armlessness (similar to a kidney)
You’ll weigh about 10% less and will increase your speed correspondingly!
Leveraging an Effective Altruism framework, we also could take the saved calories and package them into tiny cubes and feed them to five-year-olds in Papua New Guinea (my preferred charity here is Cubes For Cubs). Keeping your left arm is actively starving children in Papua New Guinea. It’s manifestly evil and unethical to keep this appendage when nature has so clearly gotten it wrong now that we have computers!
My friends in logic and comrades in reason, there's no need to valorize traditional 'two-limbed' adaptations! The penalty for one arm has been eliminated by technology! By maintaining this vestigial limb, you’re imposing a permanent tax on your body’s metabolic GDP with negative public benefit through externalized opportunity costs. If you disagree and prefer both your arms (intellectually dubious), please explain the ethical stance justifying such anachronistic morality?
If Aella, Yud, or one of the rationalist grandmasters posted this, people would angrily debate it (framed under a banner of ‘trans-humanism’). San Francisco corners of the internet would have a 'discourse' regarding the merits of voluntary amputation to enhance efficient calorie distribution in a “post-scarcity” world so we can feed more hedgehogs in Botswana. Variations of things this breathlessly inane occur in spaces where IQ becomes a substitute for wisdom. Effective Amputation: new Substack coming in November!
Lest you think I’m being too hyperbolic (any hyperbole is for artistic illustrative effect and remains functionally representative of how their minds operate), there have been many depressingly popular posts as of late quantifying the morality of shrimp lives and humans.
I won’t link to them, because it’s beneath your dignity to provide them views. I simply want you to know that topics this utterly dopey are earnestly discussed by indulgent minds luxuriously devoid of any real-life problems. What’s particularly entertaining about this brand of pseudo-intellectual pageantry is how haughty and moralizing it can be. You are evil if you disagree!
This post on Twitter does a hilarious job mocking deeply unserious rationalist imagination theater.
In other rationalist shrimp Goblin inquiry, you’ll find statements such as (and I quote):
“I think insect suffering is the worst thing in the world by far.”
“Shrimp suffer about 3.1% as intensely as humans”
Comment: How absolutely precious in its pretend specificity, not just 3%… 3 point 1!
“If we multiply 1,500—the number of painful deaths averted per dollar—by 3.1%, then a dollar given to the shrimp welfare project prevents as much agony as anesthetizing 46.5 humans.”
Comment: These types assign made-up numbers to absurd claims in an attempt to make them appear non-absurd. 46 point 5 humans! (one of them is a midget). Quantifying the unquantifiable, now it’s rigorous and clever and you should take it seriously.
Do you stop and debate with “The End is Near” guy screaming at you on the subway? Do you read his pamphlets making the case Monster Energy drinks are a satanic cult plotting to murder all the baby ducks in Michigan? Apply that dismissiveness consistently when confronting the web version of this guy; he’s every bit as unmoored from reality. Adding fictionalized data guesses to subjective moral stances and speaking calmly does not make the message any less insane.
You need not provide any rigorously reasoned response as to why the baby ducks in Michigan are safe from Monster Energy. Just keep scrolling. Starve the Goblins.
“Why are you responding negatively to my provocatively agitating word molestation??”
This emphasis on rationalist goblinism isn’t a tangent: it represents the summit of sneaky algorithmic capture.
Peak Goblin isn't incentivized by the algorithm; it IS algorithm. An online person reduced to optimization functions becomes a paperclip maximizer but for impressions and goofy-ass conclusions. Rationalists love to reduce the human condition to a measurable value and pretend they are computer. They romanticize a formulaic existence to life and now have become algo, destroyer of timelines. Beep boop.
The goblinification of digital space represents the commodification of conflict, the standardization of silliness, the gamification of discourse, and the reduction of human interaction to a series of calculated provocations designed to maximize metrics.
Goblins are what emerge when one calibrates their existence to trend. A series of hot-take grotesqueries follows suit. A sordid cautionary tale of the soul-draining tax of fleeting internet controversy.
The Reply Gremlin
The Gremlin Strategy: Parasitic attachment to bigger accounts. Never create, only react. Feed off others' energy like a tick on a dog.
Where the Slop Goblin pursues eyeballs through ragebait, the Reply Gremlin procures them through belligerent bleating. Goblins gorge on impressions, Gremlins hydrate with instigation.
Unless you perpetually reside in a polarizing current-thing conflict zone (e.g. low-grade political commentary), you won’t meet Reply Gremlins with much frequency. They’re either an apparition of virality that vanishes as soon as your post loses popularity, or an indicator you’re playing in the tribalistic mud more than is healthy. Thankfully I don’t encounter them regularly.
Should you have a tweet or essay go viral, you’ll likely see the piss-stained aggression of the Gremlin lurking in your replies. When you stumble across his comment, without even looking at his profile you’ll know this is someone with 117 followers and 65.4k tweets to his good name. We shall refer to this as the Gremlin Ratio: when you talk a whole lot, yet few are listening.
Impotent screeching defines their existence. They are online tantrum children, only briefly heard as they lash out. Adults who were never spanked as kids, they used to throw fits at the toy store and now throw them in the comments.
The Gremlin bursts forth into your replies like a cantankerous Kool-Aid man storming through a wall, obtusely advising that you suck and should strongly consider deleting your account.
The Reply Gremlin operates with the stale predictability of an old lady who walks the mall for exercise each morning:
Opening Salvo: *insert smug insult* *vibes-based disagreement that ignores/strawmans things you said*
Follow-up (pick 3): Ratio + L + ur dumb + cope + crying wojak meme + more strawman + smugness intensifies
Death Rattle: Vomits everywhere in a fit of rage, more wojak memes, and smugly smugs at you in the smuggliest of ways.
With a rapid recall of every “u mad?”-tier Twitter comeback since 2019, he deploys them like a mopey LLM trained exclusively on sassy clapbacks 👏👏.
Those who are relevant tend to speak methodically and intentionally. Their words carry weight and you're willing to lift them; just as hoisting dumbbells develops muscle, a thoughtful reply can develop your ideas. A substantive speaker needs minimal incendiary flare, and it informs his sedate rhythm. His demeanor and stature shine through in deliberate cadence.
The Reply Gremlin is its antithesis. He exposes his lack of substance by speaking with the style of someone who must pinch you to get noticed. Years of unrequited dialogue packaged into those grumpy replies. He loiters in the mentions of those with actual followers and possesses a unique ability to frame statements in the most uncharitable way possible. Smugdiferously.
The Effort Chad
The Chad Strategy: Ignore the game entirely. Post 4,000+ word esoteric essays and long-form tweet threads. Let the low-time-preference compound interest accrue. Get 18 likes from 18 people who matter.
Standing dignified in the cyber wastelands, the Effort Chad crafts content with patience, intent, and everlasting quality. He nurtures ideas meant to survive beyond next week's outrage cycle, posting not for evanescent dopamine gratification but for sustained impact, as well as himself.
His motivation is fundamentally intrinsic; it comes from within. Not extrinsic, done for the approval of others.
The above is partially right. However people still have followers; in fact, I believe it’s all they have.
What few have anymore is a following.
Someone with a following: writes and posts for the love of the game, because he has something to say. His output is informed by his insights. While the audience provides valuable, reciprocative feedback, they fundamentally don’t dictate to him. He dances to his own tune.
Intrinsic motivation.
Someone with followers: is tantamount to a court jester, doing a shabby song and dance asking “is this to your liking?” while trying to harvest whatever engagement scraps he can. His output is guided by trending topics and impression metrics. He dances to what he’s told to shimmy to. If the audience wishes for jazz hands, he will give you jazz hands.
Extrinsic motivation.
Live footage of a Goblin providing whatever his promiscuous audience demand:
The algo’s decision to place you in content ghettos notwithstanding, someone with a following is listened to because of their credibility and differentiated, individual, non-current-thing commentary.
If the breezes of ‘today in the news’ determine the output and low-resolution bickering follows wherever you go, that’s an account catering to followers, not a following. Purveyors of Type 1 and Type 2 posts have followers, Type 3s have followings.
Elaborated on in a previous essay:
“There are 3 kinds of non-fiction writing. The LLM can only do 2.
TYPE 1 Writing: “Here’s what happened” (LLM great)
Reporting on an event, summarization, and providing information. Tell me the news, find me data, etc. and report it. This one is common and has the most competition, because it requires no creativity. Little to no analysis or thinking is needed here. Anyone can do it.
Done by: reporters, junior analysts, news writers, and “here’s what you need to know” types of commentators.
TYPE 2 Writing: “Here’s an opinion about what happened” (LLM good)
This is editorializing about an event or idea, or distillation of information. You didn’t create the idea, event, or research, but you have opinions on it. “Here’s why INSERT is good/bad.” ChatGPT is obviously politicized, but if you can get around this it does pretty well here.
Junior analysts are information gatherers (Type 1). Senior analysts are information extrapolators (Type 2): requiring analysis, educated assessment, and thoughtful opinions. There’s critical thinking, but not much abstraction or creativity.
Done by: pundits, researchers, senior analysts, commentators, etc.
TYPE 3 Writing: “Here’s a novel framework to think about things” (LLM bad)
This is the sphere of creativity and first-principles thinking. You’re generating differentiated, fresh ideas for how to assess or interpret something, and it often requires abstraction. This is where unconventional insights live.
This writing is the least common because it’s the hardest to create. It’s also the highest risk and highest reward. You’re sticking your neck out with something new. This exposes you to critique, insults, compliments, admiration, and everything in between.
Type 3 writing is difficult because you’re being intellectually vulnerable and often unorthodox. New things disrupt priors, and the vast majority of people find consensus assumptions comforting. No one likes being punched in the axioms. The LLM is pretty kind to axioms, and true Type 3 writing should at least nudge them a little.”
Most are Type 1 posting with hints of Type 2 sprinkled in (if sufficiently controversial).
Rationalists are often a shallow, poor attempt at Type 3 that should have stuck to Type 2.
The goblinification of the feed means the overwhelming majority passively and aimlessly chase whoever’s loudest and spiciest regarding contemporary events that won’t matter two weeks later.
An investor has low time preference and assesses fundamentals. A trader has high time preference and is concerned with fleeting sentiments and in-the-moment trendy oscillations. Essentially everyone is a news trader these days; there are few information investors. In markets, alpha is rarely found where everyone clusters…
Even those who seek substance are algorithmically tugged from the nourishing output of the Effort Chad toward the nutritionally barren, inflammatory Skittles of the platform critters. Attention spans incrementally erode from persistent dopamine flushes. The collective’s executive function diminishes.
Chad must post in the shade.
The Effort Chad thanklessly toils in the timeless fields. Immune and indifferent to the Current-ness of the Thing at hand, he resides in the engagement shadows while slovenly slime merchants and their perishable posts vacuum up the attention sunlight. The Effortful will ultimately inherit the digital earth; as durable excellence, like compound interest, accrues quietly as the soiled casuals come and go.
When the Gremlin ratios fade and the dopamine mines are silent, the Effort Chad’s long‑form shines like a lighthouse: boring to moths, indispensable to ships. He doesn’t leave sandcastles for the algorithmic tide but hiking trails for future travelers who stumble upon his path. His posts remain relevant years after they’re published. It ain't much, but it's honest work.
He doesn’t post for the timeline, but to withstand the test of time.
Algo Ghettos and Digital Taxonomies
It’s apparent why those who act as avatars for the consensus that surrounds them often have such large audiences. The more conventional and rapidly digestible the content, the higher the appeal.
Valuable insight is found in arenas gatekept by intellectual payload, whereas a big audience is gatekept by an algorithm. That astute payload initially builds the audience, but there’s an intellectualized Laffer Curve where, after a certain point, you must stop serving fresh pan-seared cognitive cuisine and start slinging off-the-shelf processed dopamine desserts if you want it to keep expanding for the sake of expanding.
The algo encourages and magnifies lowest-common-denominator clutter, grooming us into preferring consensus Slim Jims over Omega-3-rich salmon content. We slowly transform into internet pandas who chew timeline bamboo all day that we dislike, get little nutrients from, yet can’t stop nibbling! Eww, I hate it, may I have some more?!
The Slop Goblin and Reply Gremlin dominate these dysfunctional algo ghettos. The Goblin drops his breadcrumbs and the Gremlin slurps them up; an unholy dopamine duality, where they need each other like a parasite does a host. However, it's unclear who's the parasite… can two parasites feed off each other?
It's an advertiser-inspired perpetual motion machine powered by mutual contempt: where the way to get seen is to be sillier, the way to get boosted is to be bombastic. The secret tenth level of Dante’s digital inferno, there is no depth to which the unrelenting retardation will not go.
This is a real headline. If you posted this five years ago as a fictional story, it’d be too outlandish even for a fake world. Such a preposterous plot would be considered bad writing. And yet, here we are.
A Digital Frontier Taxonomy
Digital homelands aren’t created equally and sort accordingly:
Substack: Thoughtful frontier (where ideas develop and mature)
Twitter: Slop frontier (where ideas go to be passed around in a circle and die)
4chan: Chud frontier (where ideas mutate and metastasize)
Instagram: Woman frontier (no ideas, just pictures)
LinkedIn: Human resources striver frontier (where ideas humble-brag in platitudinous suits and signal things they don’t believe to people they don’t like)
Facebook: Boomer frontier (here’s a photo of my dog and the worst memes you’ve ever seen, how does this place still exist?)
Reddit: Soy frontier (where ideas go to feel morally superior and agree with whatever John Oliver and Bill Nye are putting out these days)
Bluesky:
TikTok: Retard frontier (goddamn I wish I could read)
WeChat: Asian frontier (where ideas are monitored)
Tumblr: Mental-disorder frontier (that’s not funny and I’m sharing this with your employer)
Imagine a grocery store that sells canned goods, fresh bread, processed foods, and filet mignon: that's Substack. You want perishable Current Thing salami? We gotchu. Prefer a finely prepared Michelin meal (hi)? We have that too.
Envision a grocery store that used to have decent deli sandwiches but now only dispenses Pop Tarts and Diet Coke: that's Twitter. Substack has a menu with dine-in or take-out. Twitter has a vending machine. TikTok sells chemically flavored paint chips. LinkedIn offers meal replacement shakes that taste like corporate Stockholm Syndrome.
Twitter has lost a great deal of its previously edifying and enlightening content. If you want to transiently discuss the vibescape surrounding the Topic Of The Day, it's fine. It’s still worth being on there, but lately instead of posting on Twitter then cross-posting to Substack, I post to Substack then cross-post to Twitter.
As someone who routinely cracks the Top 100 on Substack in technology and philosophy, I’m delighted to see the ‘Stackhouse winning. While Twitter eschews depth and stagnates, Substack has embraced merit and is ascendant. The Effort Chad is moisturized, in his lane, flourishing. For now.
The Paradox of Virality
The paradox of virality: contagious content is habitually disliked. A real phenomenon (source and source).
The digital sphere rewards high-arousal negativity. We’re neurologically compelled towards hostile, controversial, and sensationalist content due to primal threat-detection circuitry. Like a car crash, we can't help but gawk and gossip even if we loathe it.
We're wired to notice and discuss disaster and oddities as an evolutionary trait. Those who take heed of warnings, including false positives, live to pass on their genes. That same threat-detection system is now drawn to every alarmist, absurdist take like worried moths to a BREAKING NEWS flame.
We don't like negative content (surveys show we hate it), yet we engage with it like lab rats hitting a cocaine lever. It’s encoded programming rather than preference. The algorithm hijacks survival instincts, converting them into profit center.
Every successful platform eventually becomes a threat-simulation machine, as that's what our Stone Age brains pay attention to most. More alarm bells = more time on website = more advertiser dollars. The timeline is designed to antagonize you; there’s no money in peace.
Evolved to scan the savannah for dangers, we now scan timelines for scandal and disgust. Every notification a potential e-predator, every controversial take a tribal boundary marker. Optimization algorithms exploit this bug in our firmware, serving up synthetic scares that trigger real responses.
Thus virality thrives in paradox: content spreads not because it’s beloved, but because it startles and upsets. A flywheel of fear and resentment is effective for a reason: you’re hardwired to notice it above all else. The more you imbibe trendy doomposts, the more you’re led by your lizard brain.
Engage with content that elevates your mind rather than promotes angst. Easier said than done.
The Paradox of the Goblin
Every platform tweak that prioritizes impressions gestates another Goblin, meaning all advertiser-based social media trends toward Goblin Town. Algorithms get modified for high-time-preference circuitry as advertiser wants and user time-spent-on-platform converge in a black-hole cauldron that tries to ensnare you in endless tactical doomscrolling.
The inevitable endgame of turning human interaction into a numbers game means Goblin Town is not a place we visit but something that eventually visits us. Goblins and Gremlins are not a cause but an effect of a platform’s popularity. They are an inexorable byproduct of your lowest common denominator getting even lower. The seeds of your eventual demise are planted as your daily active users figure expands.
Despite claims otherwise, the unwashed masses’ revealed preference for slop is insatiable. As your site grows, those who buy tickets to watch The Fast and The Furious Part 28: Gotta Go Quickly start logging on. They are questionably sentient, and the content flows accordingly.
The nature of platform popularity creates a poetic double-edged sword, where success breeds further impression prioritization. The company focuses on extracting every. last. penny. it. can. to stay competitive.
The more you expand, the more the baseline of your average user reverts to the mean of society (mathematically this is just how averages work), and the more your lowest-common-denominator declines… the caliber of substance follows suit. Your previously gatekept garden is now overrun with third-worlders from foreign digital nations. The gruel begins to flow, and the Goblins and Gremlins congeal.
Should it succeed, Substack will one day succumb to this fate. The only way it avoids the Goblin Plantation is if it doesn’t dominate the online arena. However if it triumphs, then it becomes a Goblin Villa, and begins its decline…
Perhaps this should be called the Goblin Paradox: if the Goblins never arrive, you did not prevail as a platform. If the Goblins arrive, it signifies your slow descent into mediocrity.
Each platform's descent follows its own trajectory. The Effort Chad then moves on to make the next thing cool, and the whole cycle starts again.
Until that fateful grimy day comes for the ‘Stackhouse: don't feed the Goblins. Don't nurse the Gremlins. The only winning move is not to play. Let them shriek into the void, just keep walking. Mute, block, move on. Starve them.
To ignore and keep scrolling is to provide the ultimate punishment to attention vampires. Consigning them to dance for an audience that never liked them and now doesn’t even notice them. Like a digital Sisyphus pushing his boulder of bad takes up the mountain of public discourse, only to wake up tomorrow and do it all again with no one watching.
When you exist digitally and your worth is measured in likes and your relevance in replies, our inner Goblin pokes its head out. Gnawing at you, it mutters “I must have a take about all matters Current and all Things topical. I must countersignal and be intentionally contrarian and weird”. As your commentary correlates with the winds of The Ongoing Current Event Of Note, you submit to the soul-stultifying allure of Goblin Town. The internet’s Faustian bargain of fleeting relevance.
If you find yourself becoming one of Them, exhibiting the symptoms of goblinification or gremlinesque mannerisms, there's hope. Log off. Mute words/phrases you only started caring about last week. Pet your cat. Unfollow slop merchants. Remember that the real world exists and many people are reasonably pleasant when they're not being deliberately encouraged to be terrible.
Goblins calibrate their existence for a scoreboard that measures nothing worth winning, playing a pyrrhic game where the only prize is more game. An infinite recursion of hollow metrics, dressed up as relevance. The Goblin's tweets have the half-life of an insulin shot. The Gremlin's replies disappear into the void faster than a LinkedIn cold outreach that leads with “Hope this finds you well..”. But the Effort Chad's 7,000-word analysis of maritime trade routes in the Bronze Age is eternal.
The moment the Goblin and Gremlin stop posting, they are forgotten. On a day they don’t tweet, they cease to exist: like farts in the cyber winds, leaving a vacuum immediately filled by other fungible compost vendors in the endless assembly line of artificial urgency. The people care not where their gruel comes from, only that the bowl is full.
The Effort Chad tends his fields in shade or sun, knowing that in two weeks, two months, two years, his fruit will still nourish while the Goblin’s sugar water has long since evaporated. In a world addicted to the candy of synthetic controversy, he offers slabs of soothing beef. His nominal numbers aren’t as high, but the standard of interaction is supreme.
He saunters along the road less traveled as a frenetic verbal battlefield buzzes around him. When the rage-farmers move on to their new weekly hysteria, what they said three days ago becoming distant memory, his effortful words endure. The Goblins and Gremlins will always outnumber the Effort Chad, but they'll never outlast him. This Current Thing too shall pass. Evergreen work, by its nature, does not expire like milk but ages like wine.
NOTE: The author has Goblin tendencies himself, of course. A truism in a way, because we all do. The question is whether you'll recognize your own predilections gazing back when you look in the mirror. Every Effort Chad was once a potential Goblin who chose differently.
The critical reader might conclude an essay cataloging attention parasites, written with such invective, may itself be guilty of the very sins it condemns. However, there's a difference between the street dealer and a DEA agent holding a bag of fentanyl; occasionally you must speak the language of the devil to map his borders.
He’s just like me:
The evergreen test doesn’t lie: will this work be relevant months from now? Years? Will you revisit it? If yes, it’s probably worth your time. If not, keep scrolling.
This essay will still be germane long after it’s published. A Goblin could never.
Concluding: The Twelve-Step Digital Detox
We Have Met the Goblin, and He Is Us
What should keep every Effort Chad and Allies Of Chad on their toes is the awareness they’re only a couple viral posts away from Goblinhood and Gremlinification. The algo is actively trying to groom us into unsavory monsters. Remain vigilant!
If something you post gets unexpected traction… feel that little thrill to double down? That's your inner Goblin whispering… "Maybe I should post again about this topic, I could be the *guy who posts about this topic* guy".
You must resist. Do not become a lowly court jester of the internet realm!
Are you displaying slop-ish symptoms? Have you experienced Gremlin-like outbursts in the last 72 hours? Did you Goblin post recently and are now filled with shame and in need of a good detox? Here’s a nifty Chad protocol to aid your healing journey:
Did you check your notifications during the roughly 25-minute reading experience of this essay? When you’re in Effort Mode, no more notifs!
If you want to drop a hot take: write it down and wait until the next day. Then read it again and see if you still want to post it.
Write a tweet or essay about something that happened 2-5 years ago that’s still relevant.
Bonus challenge: try not to write about anything that happened within the last month until two months after the event. Be intentional about exceptions.
Respond to Gremlins and Goblins with links to bird photography or freshly baked goods. Kill them with kindness of the confusing variety. Or completely ignore them. Then mercilessly block: the moment you do so, they cease to exist. Send them to the abyss.
Be cognizant of your words-per-engagement ratio, both in your post’s comments and when you’re a replyguy (higher is generally a better sign).
Fast from current events for 72 hours minimum. Do this once every two weeks.
Ideally, do only a weekly high-level spot check of news and do away with anything daily. Quasi-important things can happen weekly. Basically nothing worthwhile happens daily but effeminate gossip.
For every reaction, create something original. Aim for a ~1:1 ratio of responses vs output. Watch how the energy parasites fade when you're too busy building to bicker.
Write something only twenty people will understand, but those twenty will love
Mute every trending topic for a month. See what it does for your timeline and the vibes.
Judge your work by how well it ages, not how fast it spreads (critical)
Prioritize an audience that would take interest in your personal developments and accomplishments.
Followers don’t care about your trip to Europe or that your fiancé said “yes”, but a following does.
DM a mutual and tell them you love them. Or tell them what you loved about one of their recent posts. Quality of connections > quantity of impressions.
Content sorts along three axes:
Temporal orientation (ephemeral vs evergreen)
Reward structure (viral vs quality)
Discourse depth (reaction vs reflection)
When you reply or post ask yourself… where does this fall?
Do you post for the timeline, or to withstand the test of time? Do you seek to trend, or endure? Send tweet.
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Oh my God that was so good. Bravo. My sins would veer towards comment goblinery, (though not on big accounts just my pet tropics) as the discipline and routine to finish essays is not yet in place. Onward and upwards! The dopamine/attention span drain of using notes is real.
Given my ancestry (4chan), I do feel like there is a difference between the slop-goblin reply fag and the warrior-poet shitposter. Glorious trolls riding out from the electronic stepps to burn and pillage the normie internet.
I don’t think the shitposter cares for how viral his posts are per say, rather the response they elicit. I don’t quite want to say that there is a difference in that the shitposter is only in it for the love of the game while the goblin is not, but I feel thats in the right direction. I also don’t want to romanticize it and say there’s a greater purpose, man.
Collectively coming together to shit up tumblr or summon a frog god and then meme trump into office was magical. Its not something that can be replicated by goblin town. Nor, sadly, by 4chan itself anymore.