The Problem With Content
Three Things #76: July 9, 2023
I consume tons of content, from articles to books to podcasts, but I tend not to think very much about it or about the act of consumption. I think even less about creating content. Of course this newsletter is content and the act of writing here is the act of creating content. I’ve had other blogs and podcasts over the years but I’ve never identified as a “content creator,” probably because I think of myself first and foremost as a builder. But I reluctantly have to admit that there’s a lot of value in content creation, at least for certain types of content.
While I spend a lot of time both creating and consuming content I feel like I have a somewhat unhealthy relationship with content and I refuse to embrace either role, creator or consumer. I’m not entirely sure why. My best guess is that it has something to do with being conservative about content: I feel that the best content is long form and old school, things like great literature and classic movies, and that 99.99% of all the content created in the past decade or two is utter garbage (to be fair, that’s probably true of every decade). I have no issue with people consuming garbage content in their spare time as long as they’re also producing and consuming meaningful content, content that’s educational and/or promotes building things. Maybe I’m just an old fogie but it seems that people are doing less and less of that these days due to the evolving nature of how we create and consume content.
Here are some random thoughts on what’s going on, and on content today in general, and on what we can do about it.
Thing #1: It’s Highly Subjective
Content is like porn: there’s way too much of it, most of it’s garbage, and preferences vary widely so that the experience of creating and consuming it is highly subjective. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I struggle to think of anything where preferences vary as widely! We have some rough social consensus on which art is the best: the most valuable, widely appreciated or longest lived. The same is true for other subjective things like music, fashion, design, and literature. But there’s something about digital content in particular—something unique in both the creation and the consumption—that has pushed us quite far down the long tail.
And it’s a long tail indeed. In my immediate social circle alone I have dear friends that spend a great deal of time creating and consuming content as varied as academic papers, fanfic and retcon, podcasts and audiobooks, and haiku to name but a few. The cost of production and the cost of consumption of digital content have fallen so close to zero that people today are truly empowered to create and consume everything under the sun to their heart’s content (no pun intended).
This wasn’t always the case. A generation ago we all more or less consumed the same content. There were no blogs, no podcasts, no digital newspapers, no Youtube and no Tiktok. There were a tiny number of enshrined, sanctioned content creators and they published on a tiny number of channels like ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, FOX and NYT. The explosion of content since then, thanks to the digital revolution, is a beautiful thing but it’s also led to a situation where we can no longer even reach consensus on the ground truth about the world around us.
I remember reading around 15 years ago a book called The Long Tail. In it the author forecast that one of the main impacts of the internet would be the “long tail” effect whereby consumers even in isolated geographic locations would find like-minded individuals and companies all around the world to service their craziest desires. This effect is more powerful in digital content than in anything else.
It’s wonderful that people with niche preferences can satisfy them on the modern internet by venturing down the long tail, but this effect has had the polarizing effect of pushing everything to one extreme or another. At the tail end there’s enormous quantities of niche content that will only ever appeal to a tiny number of people (although it may appeal to them very strongly). At the head of the curve there’s increasingly bland, saccharine pop hits.
As an example, with few exceptions pretty much all film these days feels like utter garbage. It’s mostly reduxes of formulaic superhero content, franchises that are worn to death, and star-studded casts (since stars sell). As another example popular music today is nearly all formulaic, distorted, autotuned trash (the last truly great album was probably Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, released in 2006). Maybe content was always this bad, but I somehow doubt it. For better or worse artists used to be forced to serve a mainstream crowd. Niche creators had to be less niche to appeal to a wider audience, and the influence of other, more creative mainstream artists meant pop was less formulaic and more palatable. Now the long tail creators can find a tiny niche that will support them through 1000 true fans, and only the largest creators can afford to serve the masses.
Meanwhile the cost of production at the head of the curve has become so enormous that anyone trying to appeal to the mainstream has no choice but to produce dross that’s almost totally devoid of creativity and novelty. The popular stuff seems to get trashier and stupider and blander all the time, as epitomized by the most popular, successful, prolific content creator of our age, Mrbeast, whose silly, frivolous videos regularly garner tens or hundreds of millions of views. Real art and real artists still exist but they’re increasingly forced to cater to a smaller and smaller niche, a self-reenforcing effect that severely limits their reach. Aesthetically speaking it’s a pretty sorry state of affairs.
Thing #2: There’s Entirely Too Much of It
They say there was a day, some hundreds of years ago, when it was still possible for a single person to read every book ever published in a single lifetime. That day is obviously long gone. Attempting to consume content today on pretty much any app or platform feels like drinking from a firehose.
I remember what things were like before this happened. Just as it was once possible to read all the books, I remember when I could still keep up with everything in my feed. This was in the pre-Facebook days. There was email and ICQ and newsgroups, then there was AOL and AIM, and then blogging appeared around 1999. I used a platform called Livejournal, which had an early sort of feed of all of the things my friends were publishing. For the first year or so I followed only one or two dozen people and I could keep up with everything they wrote. I would spend around 30 minutes per day catching up and responding to everything in the feed. I followed a handful of mailing lists and newsgroups and there, too, it wasn’t too difficult to keep up with everything.
Then Eternal September happened and over the course of the following few years all hell broke loose, culminating with the release of Facebook in 2004. If the turn of the century was the golden age of digital content, it’s all been downhill from there. Endless scroll feeds began appearing everywhere and FOMO began to kick in and it’s only gotten worse—much, much worse—since then.
Fast forward to 2023 and I don’t even make a modicum of effort to keep up with anything. I feel that I have no choice. It’s all I can do to keep up with just my work email, Slack messages, and Github, i.e., the really really important stuff. Everything else is a crapshoot. I feel anxiety every time I check my email or Telegram, to the point where I often go days or sometimes even weeks without even looking at it, and that feeling is spreading to lots of other apps and platforms. I have thousands of articles queued to read, hundreds of which are marked important. I have hundreds of books on my reading list and hundreds of podcasts and audio books in my listening queue, and I’m lucky to get through one episode per day and one book per week. I’ve given up trying to manage or maintain or prune these lists. I don’t even want to look at them. I just pull whatever’s next, or sometimes something random, and call it a day. In spite of being a perfectionist and someone who’s detail-oriented and thorough, I’ve made my peace with the reality that I’ll never get to 99% of this content.
Two things make this okay, mental filters and social proof. My brain is much better at filtering and sorting content than any app or algorithm I’ve ever seen. It has a sort of background process running all the time that reminds me when something is urgent and needs my attention, and I have no trouble finding something interesting and relevant when it’s time for something new. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty darn good. And if I see or hear something mentioned many times, especially by people I trust (i.e., something with social proof), I’ll recall it and read/listen to it before too long. I did an experiment once where I took a few days 100% off social media (at a time when I was sort of addicted), and realized that I actually hadn’t missed anything important because I had been exposed to the same ideas socially via other channels. (I’ve been much less addicted since then!)
I trust my friends but I don’t trust algorithms (and I strongly suspect I’m not alone in feeling this way). I’m really, thoroughly tired of endless doomscrolling feeds and “smart” AI-based recommendations (which are nearly always garbage). What I really want to see is what my friends—as in, the 100 people I actually, truly care about—are seeing and recommending, and almost nothing else. Yes, there’s a place for serendipity and breaking free from the echo chamber, but that’s a little more complicated and beyond the scope of this issue. Let’s solve one problem at a time.
It’s sort of shocking that there’s still no easy way to do this—because literally every app and platform wants to maximize eyeballs and retention and engagement and outrage and serve you what it wants you to see, not what you want to see. A centralized, closed source, for profit social network is incapable of doing this for structural reasons.
There’s been an enormous explosion of alternative social platforms lately: Bluesky, Nostr, Substack Notes, Minds, Farcaster, Lens, and now Threads to name but a few—it feels like there’s a new one every week! I’ve tried them all and don’t particularly love any of them, but they’re all immature and will improve, and I suspect they’ll rapidly develop in different directions. I remain hopeful that one or more of them will eventually figure this out and solve this problem.
Over time curation, presentation, discovery, and filtering, ideally by humans and not bots, will only increase in importance. We need content creation, management, sharing, and consumption platforms that make these as easy and as composable as possible, and we need economic systems that properly incentivize this constructive behavior. That’s what social 2.0 and content 2.0 will look like.
Thing #3: It Needs to be Liberated
Content wants to be free. Publishing it in walled gardens like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok is a tragedy. Platforms such as these that don’t allow deep, direct linking, that don’t allow content embedding elsewhere, that require logins to view the content, etc. are a disgrace. Twitter and YouTube are slightly better but are engaged in the same war for eyeballs and ad dollars as all the others. All of these centralized platforms share the same big issues: arbitrary, unaccountable censorship, deplatforming and demonetization, and generally screwing over all but the very largest, most popular creators. Paywalls, Javascript- and ad-heavy sites, and broken links only make things worse. Web2 is irreparably broken. The incentives are all wrong and I can’t foresee it ever getting better. Web2 is caught in a doom loop, death spiral, Moloch trap.
It’s vital that content creators retain full control of their content, which is after all the work product of their lives, the thing they pour their lifeblood into creating. Creators should not give control to distant, unaccountable companies that don’t care one whit about them. This means creators should themselves host the master copy of their content, which they can update or delete at will. They should of course be free to syndicate content wherever they like, but they should remain fully in control of their content and their destiny. And creators should have a direct relationship with their consumers, subscribers, and supporters, a relationship not mediated by a third party platform. (It makes me wonder, has anyone ever tried writing a digital content creators’ bill of rights?)
No centralized platform enables this today. Having said that, some are better than others. I refuse to publish content on particularly egregious platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn. (As a rule of thumb, any app that opens external links inside a web frame in the app in an attempt to keep you inside the walled garden is a big, red flag.) I publish this newsletter on Substack because it’s better in some important ways, and has done a pretty good job resisting censorship and keeping content creators in control, firmly in the driver’s seat where they belong, by making it easy to monetize content, have a direct relationship with readers, etc. Of course Substack is nascent and still relatively small, and platforms tend to start out small and nice and then exploit their users more as they grow. It could happen to Substack too.
There is of course no perfect content creation or publishing platform today. There are decentralized alternatives like Urbit (and apps on it like Urbit Studio) that solve many of these problems, but in general they’re not yet as feature-rich or user friendly as centralized alternatives, and they don’t yet have the reach or massive network effects of the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn. There are also self-hosted Web2 options like Ghost or Jekyll, but these require more technical knowhow and, again, lack inherent network effects.
I don’t know precisely what the content platform of the future will look like but I can sort of make out the outlines. For one thing, it’ll be built on an immutable, append-only database so that, while updates and revocations can be published, links can’t break and content can’t arbitrarily disappear. For another, all content will be censorship resistant at the “base layer.” Most of it will be free, but creators should of course be able to monetize access to their content as they see fit. Presentation, filtering, curation, etc., as mentioned above, will be built on top of this base layer. Creators will be able to make their content available globally, syndicated across the most relevant, interesting presentation layers, apps, networks, and platforms, with different filters applied to each, collecting fees and royalties from all of them, without having to rewrite, reshoot, or reproduce content tailored to each individual platform. Regardless of where their content appears, they’ll have access to analytics and financial data and they’ll be able to interact directly with their fans and followers.
In this model, the base layer will also have at least some basic incentives built into it: hosts have to be compensated for storing content and relays and edge nodes have to be compensated for relaying it and making it available quickly and easily. The human aggregation, presentation, and curation layer is really essential, and building a decentralized, open base layer protocol means that many different versions of these can be built on top and can compete. In the future platforms won’t earn money from ads or eyeballs or monetizing attention as they do today, they’ll instead earn money by curating, filtering, and presenting the most relevant content in the best form. This is a fundamentally better experience that people are willing to pay for.
Content wants and needs to be free. The current, balkanized state of affairs can’t hold for much longer. It feels inevitable even if the exact path forward isn’t clear yet. For the first time ever we have a set of tools, technologies, primitives, and protocols that enable us to build a better system and to finally get the incentives right. I’m convinced that the way we create, share, and consume content will be completely different in ten years—and it’ll be a lot better than it is now (an admittedly low bar). We have our work cut out for us to get there so let’s get building.