In 2021, I published “Characteristics of Good and Bad Opinions”. And in 2019, “On Having Good Opinions (deconstructing Joe Rogan’s success)“. I updated the first post significantly for 2025. It’s one of the longest posts here—at over 7,200 words—owing to the broad nature of the topic: What separates good opinions from bad opinions in the context of online content? How does one have better-received opinions? What are some mistakes to having opinions?
Having good opinions is deceptively hard. Someone who is sufficiently determined can punch holes in almost any argument. Often, someone will come up with objections that never occurred to the writer, and no amount of intellectual humility or foresight will suffice at anticipating them. A second theme is organic success or virality versus astroturfed success, the latter which although appears viral owing to visible inflated metrics of engagement (e.g. share/retweet counts and ‘likes’) is not organic, but rather astroturfed.
Organic success generally requires correctness and credentials that lend credibility for a skeptical audience. But on the other extreme, others are successful by pandering to less intellectually discriminating audiences. Organic success, without branding or the backing of a large media corporation, generally requires credentials or other signifiers of high IQ or credibility, by appealing to ‘gatekeepers’ (this word has negative connotations but I’m not sure what else to call it) who have the power to make content go viral in its own right at no cost and without branding.
Content for a less intellectually discerning audience requires advertising or other artificial promotion to be successful, as consumers of said content are less intelligent and thus have smaller social networks, as there is a positive correlation between the size of one’s personal network and IQ (e.g. Steven Pinker vs. some no-name person on Twitter), precluding organic virality by not meeting the necessary threshold effects mathematically for virality to take hold.
See, for example, politics podcasts for a mainstream audience (e.g. Breaking Points, The Ben Shapiro Show, or The Matt Walsh Show) vs ‘niche Substack bloggers’ (e.g. Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania, among many others here). The latter’s success is organic and has a smarter audience, whereas the former is the opposite and regurgitates stale pro-Israel talking points or stale populist talking points for a more ‘normie’ audience, versus the high-IQ readers of those aforenoted Substack blogs.
Without a generous helping branding, luck, connections or promotion, normie or mainstream content ‘dies on the vine’ or is ‘strangled in the crib’, so to speak, as it cannot go viral on the fruits of its own intellectual merits. From the post, “The IQ cliff and the lottery of success: Substack vs. YouTube”:
The only way for average-IQ people to succeed at the podcasting or YouTube game is with a generous serving of connections and or luck, not merit, which is why the top podcasters tend to interview each other or the same guests. This also explains how Lex Friedman was so successful so quickly, because being smart gave him a huge head start even without much networking or self-promotion on his part. Same for those hugely popular math and physics channels I am constantly seeing on my recommendations (the videos have easily between 100k-1 million views, so it’s not like I am the only one being recommended them).
Normie or mainstream content appears more successful due to higher absolute viewership or listener counts (or on Twitter, retweets and ‘likes’), but it’s not organic. The right-wing ‘media machine’ (e.g. Newsmax, World Net Daily, Fox News, and Daily Wire) collectively spends billions on advertising to promote its stale content. Below is a Twitter ad from Newsmax with over 3 million impressions for this single ad, signifying a considerable budget and astroturfing:
This is also why trying to copy or emulate the conspiratorial or populist style of Tucker, Candace, or Breaking Points wouldn’t work, because it’s saturated and doesn’t organically go viral, as it rightfully appears dumb to those necessary smart influencers/gatekeepers. It’s not so much that the content is dumb or otherwise bad, but that it never crosses the radar of those people. Can you imagine Steven Pinker listening to Breaking Points or Tucker? Me neither.
Few would voluntarily share this content out of genuine interest, and those who do have small social networks as mentioned above, hence the need for constant advertising. This advertising is profitable by preying on these less intelligent audiences, with ads for dubious services such as overpriced gold coins or various risky investment schemes. Or profitable advertising niches, like ‘financial services for high-networth investors.’
Conversely, on Twitter, ‘smart’ content (e.g. ‘yung macro’ (@apralky) or ‘roon’ (@tszzl) ) is self-propagating and goes viral effortlessly. Around 2023, roon began tweeting about LLMs and AI, having established his credibility as an ‘AI expert’, and his account blew up without outside help. Same for Dwarkesh Patel, who in 2024-2025 also exploded in popularity without promotion. I see this so many times, even on smaller scales on Twitter, where someone will establish his or her own credibility as an intellectual expert and ‘blow up’ organically.