> the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland

Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.

One can have even broader appeal by offending everyone

True!

On that …

- It's generally easier for people to know what they _don't_ like than what they _do_. Preferences are defined by process of elimination.

- The commonality is: get lots of people on the same page about you, and you've got a big audience / broad appeal. But the most engaged audience is the one who has strong emotions attached, so being an offender guarantees a ravenous audience … and is generally easier.

> Careful.

I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer responded to a VP and started by saying “careful.” Had it been another engineer, it would have been ignored as authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it well.

I would have loved to seen their expression …

That's like an actor breaking character during a play and it pops the bubble of reality the audience has been living in.

Do you mind explaining why this was problematic? I'm working to track down things that I say that might be interpreted in ways other than I intend, and this sounds like a mistake I would make. What's the problematic message that's being sent here from the engineer to the VP?

I suspect that the issue here is that either the VP was insecure or that the engineer said it in an accusatory way (or both).

In all likelihood, the engineer meant "that approach/idea/decision has risks we should consider." The VP likely heard "you are suggesting something wrong/dangerous/ignorant."

A nuance here is that the engineer probably implied that "(We should be) careful (in our consideration)" and the VP perceived "(You need to be) careful (and you don't seem to be)"

You say careful, and their ego probably hears you calling them careless. Careless is typically an avoided behavior so this hurts them. They view themselves as careful and wise. You think they're dumb. (Not necessarily a syllogism, but the ego is weird)

I'm possibly paraphrasing and simplifying too much but "How to Win Friends and influence People" mentions being very cautious about correcting people, more so correcting them publically, even when you are correct.

> How to Win Friends and influence People

Such a good book, I'm about due for a re-read I think.

As stated by another response, it says the speaker thinks the listener is careless.

It also places the speaker in a position of authority, admonishing someone who is still learning. "Careful!" is what we say to children. A high-status person may be particularly sensitive to this, but nobody likes to be talked down to. As I alluded, I hear this amongst engineers and filter it out as verbal fluff, so there are cases where it is ok.

An easy alternative to "careful" is "I'm not sure about that" or even "I disagree." Both are what peers would say to each other. In scenarios where a high-status person is not receptive to being talked to as a peer, well, you get to add all the deference and qualification you need to, but it comes down to stating disagreement in a non-disagreeable way.

When people give advice to content creators in the form of "when you do interesting things" my brain immediately jumps to one question; how do you know what other people consider interesting?

Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.

I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.

I know people here don't like site analytics, but for this one it's pretty good.

Setup Matomo or similar analytics software, write about a bunch of topics and review after a year which topics your readers are most interested in, for which they search on your site etc.

Don’t evaluate your audience; it’s a losing game. Write things so you can find them later, and leave the rest to chance. Worked quite well for me.

It primarily refers to what you consider interesting.

When you have a decent number of posts and some visitors you can see which sub set they find the most interesting.

You can also make a blog about things that don't interest you at all. This is the shortest route to success and you will hate your new job :)

>> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.

> This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.

Both of those are promoting your work so it is your experience. Your experience just has been that you haven't had to put much work into promoting your work so it doesn't feel like promoting your work to you.