One of the early promises of the Internet is that it would allow highly unusual people to find one another. And it’s done that. But that’s allowed people to do a lot more than just chat over rare books with the few other people who’ve read them. For better and for worse, this has enabled people to find highly specialized audiences. Whereas authors, personalities, sellers, and scammers used to have to use techniques with broad appeal, on the Internet finding a large number of extremely rare people has become cheap enough to be viable for things that make sense to only 0.01% of the population.

With things like social media algorithms for posts, videos, and advertisements, highly specialized stuff won’t even be seen by 99.9%¹ of the population, so the fact that it makes no sense to them is irrelevant. Another contributing factor is that a presentation tailored specifically to the oddities of that 0.01% is far more persuasive to them than is one meant to be generally accessible. When you combine these things, it produces something analogous to animals evolving into hyper-specialized ecological niches. Like the hummingbirds who have developed strangely shaped beaks.

These specialized birds only fit one flower, but they fit it extremely well.

Part of why I’m reminded so much of animals in specialized niches is that they evolved to this, and it seems likely that the people targeting specialized niches did too.

Consider a fitness influencer who tells you that deadlifts will give you cancer and instead you need to do dumbbell lateral raises with asymmetric weights and one foot behind you on a swiss ball². To most normal people who lift weights, this just looks like whackadoodle nonsense, much like what a sicklebill hummingbird must look like to a normal hummingbird.

The thing is, this isn’t general lifting advice at all, it just happens to be phrased that way. This is lifting advice for someone who is terrified of deadlifts because they’re intimidating or because he once hurt his back picking up a sneaker or because someone dropped a deadlift bar on his dog as a child, or whatever the real reason is. The person to whom this advice sounds good is not someone who was ever going to do a normal lifting program; it’s somebody who wants to get exercise but the strange combination of their personality and personal history means that this isn’t going to happen, at least not the normal way. When this person looks at the exercise which is the bastard child of a real exercise and someone’s dream about performance art, it’s the very fact that it’s neither physically challenging nor anything like a standard exercise which gives them the psychological permission to actually do it. Will they get much out of it? Probably not. But at the same time, they may get more out of it than sitting on the couch, which was the only other realistic option for them.

Now, does the guy giving the whackadoodle lifting advice know this?

Probably not.

Which is a really big reason that this reminds me of strange bird beaks. He almost certainly didn’t start out trying to be bizarre; he simply lacked any competitive advantage in general fitness advice, so when he tried saying things like “do a 3×8 program in some basic free weights” no one listened to him. But when he started getting weird, some (odd) people paid attention. But it’s not like he had detailed audience demographics complete with detailed psychological profiles. He just noticed it worked. So he kept up, and the weirder he got, the more successful he was. He evolved into his niche.

Too many people were better at drinking from regular flowers, so by the time he showed up, the nectar was already gone. When he looked around, the only flowers he found that still had nectar were weirdly shaped ones. And it turned out that his oddly shaped bill kind of fit into those. So he drank from where there was nectar. Only when it’s a person, you get the weirdly shaped bill after hundreds of generations of attempts, rather than hundreds of generations of descendants.

This is only one example, but you see it all over the place. When people were sending emails claiming to be Nigerian oil princes who needed people to wire them a few thousand dollars in order to transport millions out of Nigeria, they never thought this would work on normal people. They just sent them to everyone because it was so cheap; 99.999% of people just deleted the messages, which was fine. In fact, this probably saved them money over doing the work to enable a more targeted delivery.

When Liver King takes steroids and tells people his muscles are the result of touching the ground, bathing in the sun, and eating pounds of raw liver every day, he wasn’t trying to fool people who were about to go to the gym and start a sensible, periodized 3×8 plan on free weights while avoiding junk food and getting enough protein. He was offering a fairy tale to people who really wanted a fairy tale for some reason.

Scams used to need broad appeal, hence they were relatively normal things like state lotteries and 30 year adjustable rate mortgages with introductory low payments. These days they can be things like Andrew Tate telling his followers that they’re poor if they have fewer sports cars than him and weak if they can’t do 500 push-ups in a row. Does this make any actual sense? Of course not. But for a teenage boy who didn’t grow up with any adult males he respected in his life, being told he’s pathetic for not achieving these things is what he needs to be able to believe he can actually accomplish things (since if you can be blamed for failure, success must have been possible, and he can only believe negative things people say).

The example which motivated me to think this way was when a friend saw someone using an obviously LLM-generated lesson in how to make one’s writing sound like it wasn’t LLM-generated and he remarked that the world is rapidly ceasing to be believable. (LLMs are the text-generating programs people often call “AI”.) But the thing is, this guy wasn’t trying to sell this to people who know how to write. People who know how to write, write much better than LLMs, so they prefer to do their own writing³.

The obviously LLM-written course in how to make your writing sound less like it was written by an LLM is for people who have no clue how to write well and don’t want to try learning. People who want an effect without being willing to put the effort into learning how to achieve it are, by definition, desperate. So they’ll read the tweets (giving the guy the organic impressions necessary to earn TwitterBucks, or whatever exactly it’s called) and probably just paste the stuff into their next prompt without reading it and see if it works. Is that a lot of people? Of course not. But it might be enough to be economically viable, given how little work it takes to ask an LLM to generate a list of 12 things.

When European explorers came to the tropics, they were amazed by the wide variety of strange animals that they found. The constant warmth and frequent rainfall of the tropics meant that there were a great many niches available that didn’t require general capability, unlike Europe, whose cold winters, mountainous terrain, and periodic dry spells meant that everything needed to be adaptable to a wide variety of circumstances to survive. In many ways, the Internet is like the tropics. We’re seeing all sorts of strange things that make no sense elsewhere, but have somehow managed to find a niche here.

But like those hyper-specialized niches in the tropics, they’re often precarious and can disappear in the blink of an eye. But the people who specialize into these niches often think the risk is worth it, because they didn’t know how to succeed in normal environments anyway.

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1. The extra 0.09% accounts for the imperfection of the ad algorithms, so 9 in 10 people shown still aren’t the right people, they’re only close. But when it comes to advertising, showing something to 10 people to find 1 of them is a very bearable expense. ↩︎
2. those giant rubber balls you sometimes see in gyms which are fantastic for doing situps on because they turn situps from an endurance exercise to a strength exercise ↩︎
3. The only exception to that is purely functional writing; if for some reason you’re required to turn in essays with your expense reports, a person who can write might use an LLM to write those essays. But in that case, they won’t care that the LLM produces expense essays that sound like they were written by an LLM. ↩︎