What happened is fairly straightforward: someone struck oil, which was widely reported in the nation\u2019s newspapers in January 1865. Houses, hotels, and businesses were quickly built in the town (previously a humble cornfield). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
More wells were struck, and drillers, speculators, gamblers, and business owners flocked to the opportunity, with 15,000 people living in the area by that fall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In anticipation of fortune and scale, innovation flourished. In October 1865, Samuel Van Syckel completed what many historians regard<\/a> as the first successful U.S. oil pipeline: roughly five miles of two-inch pipe, driven by steam pumps, that moved crude from Pithole to the Oil Creek railhead, cutting transport costs. It was described as a<\/a> \u201crevolutionary means of transporting oil.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n But boom turned to bust<\/a>. By mid-1866, production waned, fresh strikes nearby diverted capital and labor, and a series of fires accelerated the exodus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Businesses folded, hotels shuttered, and property values collapsed; within a few years Pithole was functionally abandoned, and in 1877 the borough was dissolved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, the site is preserved by the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission<\/a> with a visitor center – a reminder of the speed with which hype metastasized into infrastructure and then ash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pithole City today (<\/em>source<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, your author is very interested in history and the industrial revolution. He\u2019s also clearly very pleased that he was able to take a small story from the book he is reading, Titan<\/a>, and to employ it as a cautionary tale to those wondering how to invest in organic growth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you read the rest of the book, it\u2019s apparent that oil, generally, was a transformative trend that turned John D. Rockefeller into the richest man<\/a> in the world. It also resulted in astonishing and useful technological innovation (e.g. Van Syckels’ pipeline<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, many people who flocked to Pithole City (and the many other boom and bust examples – gold, oil, tulips, crypto, whatever) went broke, unable to recover. They lost their shirts, so to speak. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It may not be prudent to put all of one\u2019s chips into a single speculative venture, especially if one has no way to recover from total loss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a particular kind of dizziness that comes from staring too closely at the wrong kind of data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I call it marketing whiplash. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It happens when you check the dashboard too often, when you confuse volatility for insight, when you mistake the noise of the moment for the long arc of signal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s an affliction that seems especially common in the age of AI search. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One week, Reddit appears to be the golden goose. The next, Wikipedia. Then YouTube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Studies emerge breathlessly declaring the primacy of these platforms in the citation patterns of language models, and suddenly you see otherwise sensible leaders lurching toward \u201cReddit strategy decks,\u201d as if posting in a thread were the next great frontier of brand building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this is (aggregate) data (that is often misinterpreted) masquerading as strategy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To take it at face value is to miss the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wikipedia is cited because it is enormous and spans into millions of topics, offering definitional and comprehensive pages on those topics, not because it holds the keys to your growth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reddit brims with brand mentions, yes, but most of them are downstream of product quality, customer experience, and word of mouth \u2014 not the consequence of a marketer cleverly dropping links into a thread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaetano DiNardi<\/a> wrote a wonderful essay on this<\/a>: \u201cPosting on Reddit isn\u2019t an SEO strategy\u2014it\u2019s shouting through a bus window, hoping to join the conversation. At best, it\u2019s a short-term hack; at worst, it wastes time and risks backlash.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Look, I\u2019m a data-driven guy. I ran experimentation teams and have rebuilt more analytics setups than I can count. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But we have to come to realize that sometimes the medicine can also be the poison. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my favorite Nassim Taleb quotes speaks to this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. and there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sale of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal) – this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, I recently saw a LinkedIn post claiming that Reddit<\/a> has all but disappeared as a citation source in ChatGPT. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s true. I spent less than three minutes thinking about it, because it will not affect my work or my team’s work. If it is true, I don\u2019t know if the trend has sustained itself or if Reddit has reclaimed its throne. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In times of uncertainty, we latch onto narratives, patterns, and signals (even if they are illusory). This is natural, as many marketers are pressured to have answers when asked \u201cwhat is our AEO playbook?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n But what happens \u2013 especially in noisy social media environments that do not and will not ever encourage nuanced capital T Truth \u2013 is that we look too frequently, too closely, and we bite on patterns that are merely random – or perhaps not random, but are simply not useful to us, specifically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are redirected through these patterns, investing in new initiatives that may or may not pay off, which results in opportunity costs. Every decision, by definition, comes with an opportunity cost. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The roots of the word “decide” are the<\/a> Latin prefix de- (“off,” “away”) and the Latin verb caedere (“to cut,” “to strike,” “to fell”). The word’s original literal meaning was “to cut off,” which evolved to signify the act of cutting away or eliminating other options to settle on one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Choosing Reddit to invest somewhere is also choosing not to invest elsewhere<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you decide that Reddit is the shiny new object and pour resources into manufacturing conversations there, what are you cutting away? <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve spoken with friends at Profound, Search Party, and elsewhere about the volatility in this new ecosystem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They describe a landscape where the rules shift monthly, sometimes weekly. One moment, being indexed on Bing meant you were discoverable in ChatGPT. Then ChatGPT decoupled from Bing, and the model\u2019s data sources became opaque again. In our podcast conversation, Nick Lafferty compared the release<\/a> of GPT-5 to a Google algorithm update \u2014 sudden, sweeping, and destabilizing for those caught unprepared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Josh Blyskal put it even more directly: \u201cAgility is a moat in this channel.\u201d The companies who can accept change, pivot quickly, and embrace the uncertainty \u2014 without succumbing to whiplash \u2014 are the ones who will endure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The distinction matters. Agility is not the same as thrashing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thrashing is chasing every new spike in a chart, every whisper of a new tactic, every blog post about citation patterns. Agility is steadiness with flex: the ability to absorb volatility without being consumed by it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thrashing, as a jiu jitsu practitioner, is what white belts do. It\u2019s a chaotic waste of energy that allows a more mature practitioner to wait for the right moment and submit them easily. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I do think that agility, and even a sense of openness and alacrity in trying new things and experimenting, is a powerful trait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it must be coupled with disciplined focus, as Frank Slootman noted in his famous essay, Amp It Up<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cQuickening the pace also drives a narrower focus. You simply can’t move very fast when you are pushing on too many fronts at the same time..\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The way through is portfolio thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all bets are equal, and not all are worth placing. A wise strategy balances them. Some are risky, asymmetric gambles \u2014 they may fail nine times out of ten, but the tenth outcome is transformative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Others are steady, compounding moves that may not look exciting in the moment but build the fortress walls of your brand: your owned content, your customer research, your quiet ubiquity in the sources that matter for your niche.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tim Ferriss once said<\/a> he chooses projects that are worth doing even if they fail. His podcast, in its earliest days, was justified not by the prospect of millions of listeners, but by the relationships, skills, and enjoyment it brought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even a \u201cfailure\u201d by external metrics was a personal success. That\u2019s the kind of investment you want in your portfolio: the win that remains a win even if it loses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A heuristic I often ask myself in figuring out AI search is, \u201cif AI were not a thing, would this still be a valuable tactic?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n If the answer is yes, we can assume that it falls into the \u201cwin even if we lose\u201d category. Creating website content that answers your prospects questions is unlikely ever to be a net negative action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If the answer is \u201cno,\u201d it still may warrant experimentation. This is why we allocate some percentage of investments to high upside but low certainty bets (the equivalent of investing in early stage startups versus bonds). <\/p>\n\n\n\n This has, by the way, forever been our operating model. We borrowed the Barbell Strateg<\/a>y and applied it to SEO and organic marketing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same logic applies here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Crafting content that speaks to your customers\u2019 nascent questions is never wasted. Even if a new AI model tomorrow stops citing YouTube, the act of creating thoughtful video content builds skills, artifacts, and a presence that pays dividends in other ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Contrast that with a short-term hack, such that you may hear on the seedy corners of X or LinkedIn: spinning up thousands of highly specific pages based on personas and FAQs. Or the return of PBNs, but this time as a way to seed brand mentions. If the tactic fails \u2014 and it likely will, in time, if you play out just a little bit of game theory \u2014 what remains? Little more than a pile of deleted posts and perhaps a dented reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We live in an era of heightened volatility. AI search will not stabilize tomorrow; it may not stabilize for years. The temptation is to match volatility with volatility, to flail at the noise in hopes of extracting a signal. But the wiser path is patience, discernment, and the discipline of portfolio allocation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cut away the false options. Invest in the bets that compound<\/a>. Choose a few risky swings that are worth swinging. And above all, resist the whiplash (especially when it comes from LinkedIn thought leaders whose incentive is to drive FOMO<\/a> into the hearts of busy marketing leaders). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Oil, and the industrial revolution as a whole, made a lot of people a lot of money. But putting all your chips in a speculative investment is, has been, and always will be a wonderful way to lose it all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n AI search is here to stay.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not a man who ventures out with too many predictions (for reasons I\u2019ve written about ad nauseum<\/a>), but we can clearly see this trend playing out, including long before generative AI went mainstream (featured snippets, delphic costs<\/a>, etc.). <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, we can take a long view and build a portfolio of bets that very likely sets us up for success in that world. In other essays, I\u2019ve talked about these principles, like brand gravity<\/a> and Surround Sound SEO<\/a>, a hyper focus on your ICP and customer research, differentiation and quality moats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the short term, we can remain agile and experiment, which is also very, very fun. But we need not risk our futures on speculative predictions or rapidly shifting data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I lean on him too much, but here\u2019s another Nassim Taleb quote to round it all out: <\/p>\n\n\n\n “An interesting apparent paradox is that, according to these principles, longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan-prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Want more insights like this?\u00a0Subscribe to Field Notes<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you heard of Pithole City? It\u2019s known as the oil…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6712,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[184,25],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6301","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-field-notes","8":"category-seo"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-170-1024x768.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\u201cWhat Are We Doing About Reddit?!\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The More You Look, the Less You See<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Agility Without Thrashing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Portfolio, the Moat, and the Moonshot<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-171-1024x582.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n Long Game Thinking <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n