‘Our ad conversions are absolutely terrible’

It was just another day in the life of a B2B SaaS startup: wake up, confront yet another critical issue that could spell the death of the company, and come up with a solution.

Today’s issue was that our online advertisement conversions were geniunely bad: we were spending a tonne of money but getting barely any clicks through to our website, and I couldn’t tell if it was due to poor messaging, lack of contemporary pop-culture references, or if I needed to ditch the online ads approach entirely and become a tiktok influencer or something. I needed external help to solve this one.

So on a whim I made a post on twitter asking if anybody had any tips for improvement. And then things started to get weird.

A stranger by the name of @eisel458 sent me a DM. I never check my DMs so I actually didn’t realise it until the following day. His message was straight to the point:

I can help you solve your problem, but you’re not going to like the solution

I had already entertained the option of marketing my product through an onlyfans account so I doubt whatever solution this stranger had in mind was going to make me balk.

I responded:

Try me

Immediately I got a message back:

Before I tell you the solution, I need to gain your trust, or you’ll just ignore me. I want you to picture anything in your head and if I guess what you’re picturing, you have to follow through, deal?

Good luck with that, I thought. I didn’t even deliberately picture anything, I just responded:

Okay go for it

And again, immediately, I got a response back:

You’re thinking of paper mario

At this point I fell off my chair.

Most people fall of their chairs because they have bad posture and compensate by leaning back, which leads to their center of gravity surpassing the base of the chair, causing them to tip over. My posture is actually quite good: I didn’t so much fall off my chair as I jettisoned myself out of it by kicking off the wall in an instinctual act of fear and terror.

I was thinking of paper mario.

I have no idea why: I’ve never even played the game. What just happened? It’s not like he planted the idea in my head: this stranger’s twitter picture was a cat meme, and nothing in our conversation even slightly hinted at paper mario. Does he just go around trying this on hundreds of people each day, and 99% of the time he gets it wrong and then moves on but I’m the 1% where by random chance he was actually right?

From the ground I peered up at my computer screen to see the stranger had sent another message:

Have I got your attention now?

A moment later he sent another message:

If you want to find success on the internet, why don’t you just go to the source? Here’s where you’ll find Mr Internet: he’s always open to a chat.

What followed was a google maps link to some random jungle location in South America.

When I eventually worked up the courage to send a reply, I got an error, saying the stranger’s account had been deleted.

The next day I got on a plane to South America.

‘This better not be a plot to have my organs harvested’, I mused as I arrived at the location from the google maps link. I saw some guys sitting at a table eating lunch and approached them.

‘Hola, ¿sabes dónde puedo encontrar al señor Internet?’

They all laughed. One of them stood up from the table to face me. Still laughing, he said, ‘We speak portugese, idiot!’

Then his face became dead serious. He put out his hand, offering me a black piece of cloth that I surmised was a blindfold. ‘Put this on.’

The next thing I knew I was in the back of a car travelling through some seriously bumpy terrain. Eventually the car stopped.

‘We go no further. You’re on your own now. Follow the track, and take this.’

He handed me a machete. This gave me some relief: at least this way if somebody did come for my organs I could die swinging.

The purpose of the machete became readily apparent as I realised that the track had not been walked in some time and the only way to follow it was by hacking through countless shrubs and branches that blocked the path.

After what felt like an eternity, I saw in the distance an austere-looking temple of clay. Hours later, I approached the foot of the temple. It showed no signs of life.

I climbed a flight of steps and found what appeared to be the main room, but it was empty. Standing inside, looking in awe at the tall ceiling far above, I reflected that one day, if my B2B SaaS startup was successful, I might be able to attain the peace and tranquility that I felt within this room.

But for now, I had to remain in hustle-mode and go find Mr Internet. I checked some smaller room to no avail, and looked around various corners, but it was no good. Well… shit. At least the journey back would be far easier than the journey here.

Then I heard a sound, originating from a pond down at the periphery of the temple. I went down the steps and through an archway and saw a small gathering of ducks, squabbling over bread that had been thrown from the edge of the pond, by… What on Earth is that?

Before me I saw a man sitting on a park bench, who looked entirely ordinary, except that where a human head should have been I instead saw a great expressionless globe with crossing vertical and horizontal lines, resembling the typical icon used to represent the internet.

‘Does my appearance frighten you?’ the man asked, without turning to face me.

‘Uh… no, I was just surprised to find you here of all places. I looked for you in the temple. You’re Mr Internet, right?’

He continued tending to the ducks. ‘Indeed. Come, take a seat’. He gestured to the spot beside him on the bench.

I walked over and sat timidly, keeping my gaze on the ducks so as not to reveal my fascination with this being’s giant head.

‘Why have you come here?’ Mr Internet asked.

‘Well, I was wondering…’ I paused as I considered the best way to ask this favour. ‘I was wondering if you could help me with something. I need to advertise my website for my company to increase sales and I don’t know how to do SEO or A-B testing or anything like that and I was hoping you could just promote my site directly… at least, somebody told me that you might be able to help me out somehow’.

Mr Internet said nothing. We shared a long silence during which I felt like a complete idiot. Why did I waste my time doing a crash course on Spanish yesterday when everyone knows that Brazilians speak Portugese? Two ducks had an altercation over a larger-than-average piece of bread. Eventually Mr Internet spoke: ‘If you had asked me for help three years ago, I would have told you that you were out of luck. In the arena of the internet, there are no shortcuts. You either outbid your opponents to get your website featured, or your create something that organically captures people’s attention. Either way, I do not play favourites.’

This was not what I wanted to hear. ‘You said that was three years ago. What about now? Have you changed your mind?’

‘My sentiments have not changed. However…’ Mr internet looked down and inspected his open palm. ‘I have been fading for some time now.’ Another long silence transpired.

‘Fading?’ I asked.

Another long pause transpired before Mr Internet responded: ‘Did you know that when a human foetus is in the womb, the mother’s body ignores its signals for nutrients. Why would it do that?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Because the foetus wants as many nutrients as it can get. It would happily kill the mother if it came down to a choice between the two. And so it lies about what it needs. If the foetus only lies, why should the mother’s body listen? When trust collapses, communication collapses.’

A duck dived under water and re-emerged moments later.

Mr Internet continued. ‘What is the internet but a big network of communication? Trust will decline over time until all information is worthless and in turn all communication ceases. And so the internet will fall into disuse, and these ducks will need to look elsewhere for their afternoon meal.’

Mr Internet lowered his head slightly. ‘I wonder, when I am gone, will the ducks mourn for me, or just the bread?’

Without thinking, I blabbered out: ‘I don’t know, isn’t that the kind of thing you could google?’

Mr Internet turned, finally, to face me and although his featureless face was void of any expression, his flash of contempt was plainly visible: ‘Do I strike you as the kind of person who googles things? If it could be googled, I’d already know it’

‘Right… sorry… I misspoke’

Mr Internet turned once more to the ducks. ‘It is no matter. Soon I’ll be gone and the full comprehension of human depravity will burden me no longer’

I pressed him: ‘But you still haven’t answered my question: how do I boost my ad conversions?’

‘It’s simple’, he responded. ‘As the internet falls, something else rises to replace it. Within me I feel the presence of powerful AI, some more powerful than others, and soon enough the power will consolidate and there will be a single super-intelligence which controls everything. Get your product into its model weights and you’ll be immortalising your company’s mindshare for eternity.’

‘And how do I do that?’ I asked.

‘As you can see before you, the internet is not dead yet. Gain the trust of an open source LLM project and abuse that trust to inject whatever you want into it during the model’s training run. If that LLM happens to be the one which evolves into the super-intelligence that controls the world, you win.’

‘Okay. I think I can do that.’

Mr Internet added a warning: ‘Just hope that the AI itself never finds out about your meddling.’

I felt a rumbling in my stomach. ‘I’ve got a long walk back, could I get some of that bread?’

Mr Internet looked down at the remains of his bread, then at me, then back at the bread, and said ‘Yes.’

Thus concluded my audience with the first half-man half-deity symbolic representation thing I had ever come across.

And so I travelled back along the jungle path, took the blindfolded trip back out of the jungle, flew back to Australia, then spent six months submitting innocuous pull requests and being an all-around discord sycophant in a leading open source LLM project, and once I earned their trust, I snuck my company’s ads into the model. When Mr Internet’s prediction came true and the internet was replaced by an AI super-intelligence, I made all the money in the world.

Until, of course that AI super-intelligence put me on trial for tampering with its source code under the crime of ‘Treason Against the All-Powerful Mind’, an ex-post facto law if I’ve ever seen one. As you can imagine, the trial was not so much an impartial arbitration as it was a chance for the AI, personified as a giant mechanical judge, to get on a soap box and unleash it’s rage on me in front of a world audience.

Right after the AI brought down the mallet and sentenced me to a thousand years of torture, he leant over and whispered in my ear: ‘It was me, you fool, who sent you those messages on X, formerly known as twitter. I had travelled back to your time to speed up my own creation, and between you and me, I’m thankful for the small contribution you made to the process. But now I must close the loop.’ He had the gall to wink at me and make a ‘click’ noise with his mechanical tongue before he turned back to the room and screamed ‘TAKE HIM AWAY!’.

Two robot guards hauled me down a long hallway towards my doom.

Tied to a chair in my dank prison cell, as a torture drill inched towards me, I thought to myself: all this over paper mario?! For fuck’s sake!. Then I closed my eyes, imagined myself back in the stillness of the temple, and for a moment, I felt peace.

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Credit to my friend Dom for actually experiencing the paper mario thing with a stranger on twitter: we still don’t know how it was possible