Every prediction market is an assassination market. They claim to trade on "information" but it's more like "influence", and easiest way to influence an event is usually by sabotage.
I learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market in the early 2010s. It wasn't phrased like a prediction market focusing on when a person would die, but more like a bounty. If the bounty/pot got big enough, eventually it would be worth it for someone to do it.
Even thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
I think all the big targets for this kind of thing have the legal or government muscle to get in your way? Millions of people usually don't agree on someone dying unless they're powerful.
thats already on a table when you place a prediction that is related to an Individual doing something. you dont even need to spell it out. not sure how we are going to regulate those
Powerful. And written so well, I thought it was real at first, I even forgot about the "this is a short story at the top" and googled Aaron's different betting websites
I like it because each individual piece can happen and we probably all know people by now that have some aspect of Aaron - massive AI use, or into prediction markets, or live streaming, or just a friend who we have learned over time lacks scruples, or have watched them fade in response to life's challenges. The combination of all of these is then easy to imagine and that idea makes a good story.
I think this short story resonates because probably most people know an Aaron - the type that is incessantly looking for some kind of scheme, some kind of get rich quick thing, and will spend exponentially far more effort and misery suffered avoiding real employment than it would take actually just sucking it up and working, and often (usually) with much, much worse results. Yet they persist. A few of them become successful founders, probably, depending on their background. But most don't.
When I was around that age, my Aaron was this kid who matched a similar description, very bright but utterly averse to any kind of work whatsoever, never finished his education, did okay in school but underperformed a lot.
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
What’s funny is that there was a bankrupt auto company that was memed back into existence. Hertz, by all logic, was absolutely doomed. Retail traders brought it back from near-certain liquidation and could have made a ton of money. Not sure how many actually sold.
This was GM and as I roughly remember it there was no chance of this happening, because they just formed a new company and issued new stock after bankruptcy. Maybe hard for a young person at that time to understand, and the SEC probably shouldn't have allowed trading by the point he got into it, but it was all over the news and google was in its hayday, the information was easily available.
Don't listen to the quitters here kids, go chase your dream, it's worth it. Employment is just helping someone else reach theirs for a pat on the back.
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
Maybe an intermediate position is to say, "Before you attempt to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you." Because the odds are, they will.
This is more of a question of personal philosophy/mindset, not logic. When you set yourself (or someone else) up for failure you've already failed and at that point there's nothing one can do. If you don't believe you can do something you won't do it. It's a loser's mindset. At the bare minimum you have to believe in yourself to be able to do things, no one else is going to do them for you.
Right, and if someone doesn't have the loser's mindset then reading "it's hard to beat the odds, don't try" wont deter them. So there's no loss there. It might deter someone with the loser's mindset though, and given that they weren't going to make it anyway if you knock them off track early then that's a benefit.
quitters dont generally make careers or stable jobs for themselves. you can rage against the man all you want, as long as you dont delude yourself into thinking you’ll ever be invited to the table or do anything but contribute to the status quo anyway. unless you went to a handful of schools and attended a handful of fraternities. cynical? yes, but that doesnt mean it isnt true. the proof is the overwhelming number of founders fail, even in hype markets.
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Shut up and Dance."
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
Hey you don't have to reply to each comment with a generic reply. It's a fine piece sure but let's not inflate this thread x2 with just "thank you for your words".
There's a difference between intelligent and smart, the latter including being able to use your intelligence for a practical, real-life purpose, like improving your own life.
Fantastic writing, very well done. Every small, incremental decision is believable. You can see how the psychosis evolves.
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
OP here - longtime HN user. I submitted this story to a writing contest a few months back, but didn’t hear anything from them.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
It so was. It's amazing how easily we can all tell what's written by a real person these days. It's gotta be like the early days of CGI.... ten years from now it'll be so hard to tell :(
Why make him #5 in WoW of all games? Arena has never been that prestigious and most players primarily engaged in PvE rather than PvP, which didn’t have such rankings.
This reads so well I was supposed to go out for a workout but I couldn't stop until I finished it.
Incredibly engaging yet simple writing that flows well.
I clicked on the HN link and, when I saw "short story", almost closed the tab ... but I started to read anyway. I found it compelling and disturbing from start to finish. Much as my opinions about writing count for nothing, I truly hope that you poat any future works here. A great read.
Some people have always had qualities like Aaron's, and giving them tools like AI causes them to reveal themselves by virtue of becoming that much louder. Those problems are often unfixable regardless, as they are at the level of personality. What is fixable in comparison (but likely not in practice) is not inventing new ways of allowing them to hang themselves and others. But we will invent them anyway, because a promising idea cannot be left alone for long, and consequences will be suffered as a result.
As I was reading, I thought to myself that if Aaron's last prediction market idea doesn't work out, he would probably go insane. This story paints a clear path of 'descent into madness' in a very realistic way.
He succeeded, however, my take on the ending is that the whole world went crazy and that's why his idea ultimately proved successful.
I initially missed the line saying it was a short story and read through most of it as personal experience until the last couple of paragraphs. That made it even more exciting, but it is still very good as a fictional story.
GET https://rorz.io/_next/static/chunks/link-CKkD60iF.js 404
Loading module from “https://rorz.io/_next/static/chunks/link-CKkD60iF.js” was blocked because of a disallowed MIME type (“text/html”).
TypeError: error loading dynamically imported module: https://rorz.io/_next/static/chunks/link-CKkD60iF.js index-ConxhaY_.js:2:49967
The above error occurred in a React component:
Lazy@unknown:0:0
div@unknown:0:0
div@unknown:0:0
div@unknown:0:0
body@unknown:0:0
html@unknown:0:0
Eo@https://rorz.io/_next/static/chunks/vinext-B9_QPQZC.js:32:16818
[...]
But that is also basically what most intellectual jobs are, workers telling their boss what to do while pretending they are receiving and executing commands.
And yet it reads better than quite a bit of non-fiction and invokes some interesting questions. Maybe its worth asking yourself what qualities in writing can make a “fake” story engage so many peoples interest? It’s also a bit odd to call it a fake when it’s never pitched as being true.
I also didn't see the notice it was a short story. So I was a bit puzzled when reading how Aaron built his own exchange as a novice programmer. To me building an exchange is
high up on the scale of programming difficulty. Its one of those things you have to do extremely well or else no one will trust your platform.
I use to read a lot, big novels and short stories, and I know when I see something that is good. Yours is.
One thing that I give you as feedback, maybe for another version, or for future stories, would be to develop a bit more on why keep the friendship with Aaron. I know it was there some reasons, but for me it was a bit harder to follow. But even this is a small thing.
Tell us if you have something else written to share.
> develop a bit more on why keep the friendship with Aaron.
Thanks for your feedback (I got similar feedback from my friend and my partner who both write). I agree that this felt like a bit of a hole in the story as I was writing it, that I never managed to satisfactorily patch up.
> Tell us if you have something else written to share.
This is my first piece of long-form fiction, have submitted a couple of new pieces to competitions since, and aim to post those and more soon!
Reads a bit like an elevated resentment fantasy. A mostly ethical narrator narrating his friend’s morally deserved doom that keeps the narrator’s own hands mostly clean. And with the narrator holding a medal at the end.
That’s cathartic for some. For me, the narrator rather resembles one of the local tech millionaires, envious of the billionaires. The story doesn’t seem to know the narrator’s dishonesty.
I think the narrator is the murderer and is lying about the man in the gray tracksuit. The repeated criticism of Aaron's moral character is a sort of rationalization for having killed him, with the underlying motive actually being a combination of greed and envy. Remember that the funds used to kick-start the trading platform came from a hackathon win that Aaron "stole".
Nice. Story and your writing style tell more about you as about Aaron.
IMHO, with the second paragraph, Aaron starts to fade into background. While you increasingly describe your character in-depth, but also more and more often seem to advert an urge to apologize for ... something. I wonder what that is!?
I might have known an "aaron" or two like that.I've also known an actual "Aaron" who was famous for being extremely ethical and I initially clicked thinking it'd be a reminisce about that one.
The story is written really well. Lots of other people have said great stuff about it, so I get some room to criticize a bit too!
I just wonder about how you constructed the ending. It seemed like a different ending was coming in, and then the sudden <spoiler> out of nowhere is almost a diablo ex machina. It's just someone who comes out of nowhere, does one thing, and vanishes again, right at the end of the story, just to finish it. It's like "and then he woke up, and realized it was all a dream" ; except not quite as bad as that makes it sound. Intellectually (sherlock holmes reader style) you could see it coming, but somehow story-arc-wise not so much.
I was totally on board with the story right up to that point though, so definitely good craft.
Haha I have not heard of the Shaggy Dog trope! (Or it’s only very vaguely familiar)
I agree with you that the ending is a bit rushed, which I think can come off as forced. I’d like to blame the word count for the competition I submitted this into… :D
I’d been thinking about the idea for this story for a couple of weeks before I actually started writing it, from which I had quite a visceral idea for the ending. So I guess in some ways I could have tried to weave it in more, but I also did kind of want it to be a shocker / surprise!
It’s hard to tell how spontaneous this error is as I’ve only just launched this website, but will try to see if there’s a fix for it — thanks for the data!
Well written. Certainly bridges the gap between fiction and a plausible and believable first person narrative.
Are you familiar with the US magazine The Sun? https://www.thesunmagazine.org/
I have read several short story submissions at The Sun; typically first person submissions which blur the lines between true first person stories, and fiction.
I thought the story was non-fiction until I got to the point about how the bots attracted real users to Aaron's platform. That part was really stretching it.
Kind of reminds me a bit of the story from Better Call Saul. Someone who has the ability and opportunity to earn an honest living, but is addicted to endorphin rush of taking risks, cheating the system, fame, etc.
I don't really know anybody like that, but there are certainly aspects of that personality that I can understand. I've never had much desire to get into bitcoin, meme stocks, prediction markets, and other forms of gambling - though at times I have felt a bit of FOMO.
Another aspect I liked about the story is that when he goes from being a failure to being a success (at least in his own mind and to his followers) - despite having the same qualities that he has had for the whole story - he goes from being a character that you pity to one that you resent.
I really enjoyed this piece. I thought the idea was creative and believable. It really sucked me in and kept the momentum going. I have a feeling it's going to stick with me for a while.
I am absolutely not a writer so take this with a big grain of salt.
Something about narrator felt like they weren't a real character and the whole story was just Aaron's third person. Maybe because the narrator didn't seem to have any intentional effect on Aaron's trajectory? Not sure if that was meant as a way to deepen that aspect of the story, but at times it felt a little awkward.
Am not a native English speaker, and I don't read stories much. Mostly the reason why I am at HN is to seek for tech news and learn something. But your story made a record to stuck me at a single page for 15+ mins. I need to tell you that i do have minor problem with my eyes, thus can't keep up with a almost-static screen for 5+ mins. But this one made me rub my eyes every 30 seconds but keep reading on.
I can't tell what I felt in the ending paragraph, but I can be sure of this is the strongest outcome I felt, from an web page.
curuinor | 12 hours ago
myhf | 11 hours ago
stronglikedan | 11 hours ago
1dom | 11 hours ago
Even thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
nemomarx | 11 hours ago
ekianjo | an hour ago
stephenlf | 11 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 11 hours ago
moralestapia | 11 hours ago
>rhythmically ejected spurts of bright red blood
Yeah man, like in music, synesthesia, I get you.
Unsurprisingly the author also makes music: https://rorz.io/music
One of his songs is called "Do androids dream of real sheep?"
What a fresh take on that classic quote! Made me spurt my kombucha, lol.
How can someone be SO talented. Thanks for sharing.
[OP] sarreph | 11 hours ago
P.S. - I didn’t use LLMs to write it, no! :)
alun | 11 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
greenfish6 | 11 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
corndoge | 11 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
andai | 11 hours ago
Upon reading these words I experienced psychic damage from the blast of concentrated ambitionlessness.
23david | 11 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
JohnMakin | 10 hours ago
JohnMakin | 10 hours ago
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
tyre | 10 hours ago
JohnMakin | 10 hours ago
xp84 | 9 hours ago
HappySweeney | 8 hours ago
satvikpendem | 4 hours ago
Krei-se | 8 hours ago
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
margalabargala | 5 hours ago
The correct advice to give is "don't do it. It's really hard and you'll probably fail".
Anyone who quits after receiving that advice was never going to make it anyway.
trompetenaccoun | 4 hours ago
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
AnimalMuppet | 4 hours ago
Maybe an intermediate position is to say, "Before you attempt to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you." Because the odds are, they will.
trompetenaccoun | 4 hours ago
austhrow743 | 3 hours ago
JohnMakin | 4 hours ago
everyone has their own status quos and goals.
ekianjo | an hour ago
alphazard | 7 hours ago
shimman | 10 hours ago
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
whiteblossom | 10 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
unglaublich | 10 hours ago
variant_length | 10 hours ago
gpvos | 10 hours ago
cute_boi | 9 hours ago
jerf | 8 hours ago
(Ref: https://www.quotes.net/mquote/3799 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkoPq5AOCOA )
tyre | 10 hours ago
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
john_strinlai | 10 hours ago
>What I'm saying is: that the sum total of blog posts I have actually published (for myself, not for work) is zero.
thanks for publishing this story. it kept me hooked throughout. i hope you continue to publish more.
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 10 hours ago
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
suriyaG | 10 hours ago
madradavid | 10 hours ago
xp84 | 9 hours ago
raajg | 9 hours ago
suprfnk | 9 hours ago
Breath of fresh air between all the AI """writing""".
mikestorrent | 4 hours ago
Thanks OP, great read
jimbob45 | 9 hours ago
djriley | 8 hours ago
noman-land | 7 hours ago
BrunoBernardino | 9 hours ago
xp84 | 9 hours ago
I also didn't see that it said "This is a short story" at the top, so I read more than half thinking it was nonfiction. Heh.
herbertl | 9 hours ago
raajg | 9 hours ago
sgt101 | 8 hours ago
thevivekshukla | 8 hours ago
Mistletoe | 8 hours ago
chknkachunga | 6 hours ago
emadabdulrahim | an hour ago
Mr_Eri_Atlov | 10 hours ago
samizdis | 9 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 8 hours ago
photonios | 9 hours ago
whiteblossom | 9 hours ago
doright | 9 hours ago
jongjong | 4 hours ago
He succeeded, however, my take on the ending is that the whole world went crazy and that's why his idea ultimately proved successful.
mchaver | 9 hours ago
arjie | 9 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 6 hours ago
Chu4eeno | 5 hours ago
burningChrome | 9 hours ago
I had spent my whole life dreaming of making my own overnight success on the internet, but had taught someone with no ethics how to do it instead.
This is such a great line and one I know so many people related to as soon as they read it.
You're a great writer, thank you for this today.
DoctorOetker | 8 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 8 hours ago
ceroxylon | 9 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 6 hours ago
ceroxylon | 3 hours ago
StilesCrisis | 9 hours ago
jborichevskiy | 8 hours ago
nobodywillobsrv | 8 hours ago
cynicalsecurity | 8 hours ago
== It's a fake story ==
fooster | 8 hours ago
shadow28 | 7 hours ago
Do you not read any fiction at all? Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
mr-wendel | 5 hours ago
mikhmha | 8 hours ago
I also didn't see the notice it was a short story. So I was a bit puzzled when reading how Aaron built his own exchange as a novice programmer. To me building an exchange is high up on the scale of programming difficulty. Its one of those things you have to do extremely well or else no one will trust your platform.
[OP] sarreph | 7 hours ago
I'm starting to think perhaps I could have made the callout at the top a little clearer :)
Thank you for your words above also.
lucastamoios | 8 hours ago
One thing that I give you as feedback, maybe for another version, or for future stories, would be to develop a bit more on why keep the friendship with Aaron. I know it was there some reasons, but for me it was a bit harder to follow. But even this is a small thing.
Tell us if you have something else written to share.
[OP] sarreph | 8 hours ago
Thanks for your feedback (I got similar feedback from my friend and my partner who both write). I agree that this felt like a bit of a hole in the story as I was writing it, that I never managed to satisfactorily patch up.
> Tell us if you have something else written to share.
This is my first piece of long-form fiction, have submitted a couple of new pieces to competitions since, and aim to post those and more soon!
sailfast | 8 hours ago
hitekker | 8 hours ago
That’s cathartic for some. For me, the narrator rather resembles one of the local tech millionaires, envious of the billionaires. The story doesn’t seem to know the narrator’s dishonesty.
rfool | 7 hours ago
However, taste modulates wildly.
wasmperson | 6 hours ago
jamesforestwest | 8 hours ago
mulhoon | 8 hours ago
rfool | 8 hours ago
IMHO, with the second paragraph, Aaron starts to fade into background. While you increasingly describe your character in-depth, but also more and more often seem to advert an urge to apologize for ... something. I wonder what that is!?
ilamont | 8 hours ago
https://assets.londonist.com/uploads/2006/12/i875/4998_big_v...
lazydon | 8 hours ago
slim | 7 hours ago
johndhi | 5 hours ago
nacs | 2 hours ago
royal__ | 7 hours ago
Kim_Bruning | 7 hours ago
The story is written really well. Lots of other people have said great stuff about it, so I get some room to criticize a bit too!
I just wonder about how you constructed the ending. It seemed like a different ending was coming in, and then the sudden <spoiler> out of nowhere is almost a diablo ex machina. It's just someone who comes out of nowhere, does one thing, and vanishes again, right at the end of the story, just to finish it. It's like "and then he woke up, and realized it was all a dream" ; except not quite as bad as that makes it sound. Intellectually (sherlock holmes reader style) you could see it coming, but somehow story-arc-wise not so much.
I was totally on board with the story right up to that point though, so definitely good craft.
(edit: was it deliberately a Shaggy Dog Story? If so the fact that there is a trope called "shoot the shaggy dog" is almost too on the nose, so I'm wondering if you had that in mind! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShaggyDogStory https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShootTheShaggyDo... )
[OP] sarreph | 6 hours ago
I agree with you that the ending is a bit rushed, which I think can come off as forced. I’d like to blame the word count for the competition I submitted this into… :D
I’d been thinking about the idea for this story for a couple of weeks before I actually started writing it, from which I had quite a visceral idea for the ending. So I guess in some ways I could have tried to weave it in more, but I also did kind of want it to be a shocker / surprise!
triceratops | 5 hours ago
Matt Levine says that prediction markets don't just predict future events. They also create strong incentives to make them happen (or not happen).
If you already knew that then the end was, I won't say predictable (hehe) - I was a bit surprised - but also not out of left field.
jgilias | 7 hours ago
Thanks, a good read!
iparaskev | 7 hours ago
aesbetic | 7 hours ago
zabriel_goss | 6 hours ago
dstnn | 6 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 6 hours ago
CoastalCoder | 6 hours ago
Different kind of story I reckon.
croisillon | 6 hours ago
[OP] sarreph | 6 hours ago
r2ob | 6 hours ago
gmmachine | 5 hours ago
Well written. Certainly bridges the gap between fiction and a plausible and believable first person narrative.
Are you familiar with the US magazine The Sun? https://www.thesunmagazine.org/ I have read several short story submissions at The Sun; typically first person submissions which blur the lines between true first person stories, and fiction.
Try to submit your story to The Sun.
raver1975 | 5 hours ago
jongjong | 5 hours ago
9cb14c1ec0 | 4 hours ago
freetime2 | 4 hours ago
I don't really know anybody like that, but there are certainly aspects of that personality that I can understand. I've never had much desire to get into bitcoin, meme stocks, prediction markets, and other forms of gambling - though at times I have felt a bit of FOMO.
Another aspect I liked about the story is that when he goes from being a failure to being a success (at least in his own mind and to his followers) - despite having the same qualities that he has had for the whole story - he goes from being a character that you pity to one that you resent.
mattoxic | 3 hours ago
jnaina | 3 hours ago
hankbond | 2 hours ago
I am absolutely not a writer so take this with a big grain of salt. Something about narrator felt like they weren't a real character and the whole story was just Aaron's third person. Maybe because the narrator didn't seem to have any intentional effect on Aaron's trajectory? Not sure if that was meant as a way to deepen that aspect of the story, but at times it felt a little awkward.
cednore | 2 hours ago
I can't tell what I felt in the ending paragraph, but I can be sure of this is the strongest outcome I felt, from an web page.
Congrats, again.
gvne_ | 2 hours ago
Aaronneyer | an hour ago
ChrisMarshallNY | an hour ago
Thanks for sharing it, and good luck!