8 ms·

The author lost me here: "it is a reflection of the fundamental reality that the supply of content (and increasingly goods) is infinite, and thus worthless" N

The author lost me here: "it is a reflection of the fundamental reality that the supply of content (and increasingly goods) is infinite, and thus worthless" No, the supply of worthless content is infinite. The supply of interesting content provided by professionals with the backgrounds necessary to provide such content is not. This is why you still see the majority of journalistic content provided by a small number of organizations, with the rest simply aggregating that content. Facebook, Google, etc. actually produce very little cultural value on their own. Their entire existence is predicated on co-opting the content of others for free and using it to make money. It's a heck of a business model, if you can get away with it, but let's stop pretending that good content just appears out of thin air...

tribune 10y ago
I agree. I think in the future we will probably see a modest decline in demand for "worthless" content as consumers seek higher-quality variants
- kaspm 10y ago
  I think we're already seeing this in regards to YouTube monetization, there are a few YouTubers at the top of the pyramid making money and their content is increasingly "professional" - albeit with an air of amateur needed to connect to audiences. But the rest of the pyramid has collapsed and with it the MCN industry built on the idea that there was monetization scale in crappy content.
- oooglaaa 10y ago
  Exactly this. My facebook newsfeed is full of worthless content, which, though once fun and interesting is now a commodity (cat videos, for example) As someone in my mid twenties, I spend far more time on instagram and snapchat than on facebook. If facebook was to disappear tomorrow, it'd probably be okay with me. Imagine for a second if Facebook hadn't acquired Instagram. Attention shifts very quickly in the digital world, quicker than a lot of people think.
  - Demoneeri 10y ago
    If your Facebook feed is worthless, it's your fault. Either you have nobody you care about or you like worthless stuff. I'm connected with family and friends, I'm following interesting people and liked interesting pages. My newsfeed is full of great content, from people I care about or page with content I want to read/watch.
    - oooglaaa 10y ago
      Perhaps worthless is extreme. But its not nearly as interesting as insta/snap
      - astrange 10y ago
        I try to keep all my Content(tm) feeds not-too-interesting. Anything more is anxiety inducing these days.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
> you still see the majority of journalistic content provided by a small number of organizations Do I? Or do I see major stories broken by a larger and larger number of small organizations? I legitimately don't know. Both stories sound true to me. What makes you believe yours?
- TimJYoung 10y ago
  The fact that the NYT is aggregated here, and not "My News Blog for My Hometown".
criddell 10y ago
Isn't he saying that the marginal cost of showing an article to one more person is approximately zero?
avn2109 10y ago
The NYT is already longer than anyone has time to read daily, even retired people. Ditto WSJ etc. There are more good movies than you could ever watch. Too many really good TV shows to keep up with. By "infinite," the OP really means "vastly overwhelmingly larger than demand." Of course there's also plenty of dreck, but that's not the article's point.
confounded 10y ago
There is an argument that automation, and the fact that increasingly the goods we desire are digital, means that the marginal reproduction costs of many goods are trending towards zero (with obvious exceptions, like housing). Without effective regulation, this puts all the power in the hands of naturally monopolistic distribution platforms. For example, the only reason why an infinitely reproducible MP3 costs $0.99 is because Apple's lawyers say it does, Facebook get to decide the cost in digital-autonomy for you to speak to your aunt. Over the last few years this seems to have drifted from academic-Marxian/airport-business-book/TED lore to a motivation for seriously exploring policies like UBI (including by Y Combinator).
abannin 10y ago
Thompson's point here isn't about the content itself, but rather the supply chain for the content. Because the internet effectively provides 'infinite' distribution, the traditional models of controlling distribution are worthless. This is a very consistent theme in his writings. Consider that both the worthless and valuable content that you've defined use the same methods for distribution; Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.
- TimJYoung 10y ago
  Yes, but production <> distribution. It still costs money to produce something of value, whether it's an article in a magazine or an album. The fact that it costs virtually nothing to reproduce an album or distribute it digitally does not negate the investment it took to produce it. And the fact remains that Facebook and Google, among many others, profited handsomely from this confusion.
  - confounded 10y ago
    > It still costs money to produce something of value It costs rapidly decreasing amounts to produce something of value. If you want a few stabs from a violin in your song, you rarely need to hire a concert violinist these days, thanks to recordings and software-synthesizers based on infinitely reproducible code and data.
    - TimJYoung 10y ago
      Absolutely, but that doesn't mean that it's still easy to produce the final work. If anyone can do it, then it's obviously not valuable. Take "Stranger Things" on Netflix, for example. I normally hate sci-fi, but this was one heck of a great season 1 for a series. Did it take a lot less in terms of technical know-how/costs to produce than it would have taken in the 80's ? Sure, no doubt. But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value. The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".
L_Rahman 10y ago
Thompson would be the first to agree with you. He would in fact point to his very own business as an example that he believes in well-researched, expensive to produce content. He would then go on to argue that similar content sources will have to find ways of making money that don't involve putting display ads next to their content. https://stratechery.com/2015/grantland-and-the-surprising-future-of-publishing/ https://stratechery.com/2015/grantland-and-the-surprising-fu...
dilemma 10y ago
Indeed. The author charges for access to his premium content (and value added services) so obviously it is not worthless.
nostrademons 10y ago
Most of the interesting content I read is produced by amateurs. Amateur writers, that is. They're professionals in whatever domain they happen to be writing about - food blogs written by chefs, programming blogs written by software engineers, startup blogs written by VCs & entrepreneurs, hardware blogs written by electrical engineers, gaming screencasts produced by gamers, political blogs written by political science professors. I think that what the Internet revealed is that being able to write well takes a back seat to knowing information worth writing about. Content over form, in other words. In the old days, you needed dedicated reporters who would go ask the actual experts their opinions on events because most people could not hold down two jobs, and an industrial company is not going to also operate a printing press. Now, with the ease & reach of publishing becoming so much greater, it becomes much easier to publish on your nights and weekends, as a way of getting your name out in the field. I actually view mainstream media as "low quality" now, because when you compare any piece with the blog of the experts actually quoted in it, you see just how many omissions and distortions appear in it.
- linkregister 10y ago
  Experts in a professional fields have been writing books for hundreds of years. How is anything fundamentally different now? The shortened cycle? Experts in various fields have written guest columns for newspapers since before the U.S. declared independence. Tabloid and marginally amateur newspapers previously outnumbered the established publications. When new towns and cities were formed in the American Frontier, often a printing press was brought with the first businesses. Your argument appears to follow from the premise that "MSM is bad" and then seeks justification in a just-so story of the old days that isn't accurate. I'm not defending modern journalism's accuracy. I'm disputing your assertion that the consolidated journalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are the default. On the contrary, they are abnormal with respect to the rest of American history.

tribune 10y ago

I agree. I think in the future we will probably see a modest decline in demand for "worthless" content as consumers seek higher-quality variants

kaspm 10y ago
I think we're already seeing this in regards to YouTube monetization, there are a few YouTubers at the top of the pyramid making money and their content is increasingly "professional" - albeit with an air of amateur needed to connect to audiences. But the rest of the pyramid has collapsed and with it the MCN industry built on the idea that there was monetization scale in crappy content.
oooglaaa 10y ago
Exactly this. My facebook newsfeed is full of worthless content, which, though once fun and interesting is now a commodity (cat videos, for example) As someone in my mid twenties, I spend far more time on instagram and snapchat than on facebook. If facebook was to disappear tomorrow, it'd probably be okay with me. Imagine for a second if Facebook hadn't acquired Instagram. Attention shifts very quickly in the digital world, quicker than a lot of people think.
- Demoneeri 10y ago
  If your Facebook feed is worthless, it's your fault. Either you have nobody you care about or you like worthless stuff. I'm connected with family and friends, I'm following interesting people and liked interesting pages. My newsfeed is full of great content, from people I care about or page with content I want to read/watch.
  - oooglaaa 10y ago
    Perhaps worthless is extreme. But its not nearly as interesting as insta/snap
    - astrange 10y ago
      I try to keep all my Content(tm) feeds not-too-interesting. Anything more is anxiety inducing these days.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

> you still see the majority of journalistic content provided by a small number of organizations Do I? Or do I see major stories broken by a larger and larger number of small organizations? I legitimately don't know. Both stories sound true to me. What makes you believe yours?

TimJYoung 10y ago
The fact that the NYT is aggregated here, and not "My News Blog for My Hometown".

criddell 10y ago

Isn't he saying that the marginal cost of showing an article to one more person is approximately zero?

avn2109 10y ago

The NYT is already longer than anyone has time to read daily, even retired people. Ditto WSJ etc. There are more good movies than you could ever watch. Too many really good TV shows to keep up with. By "infinite," the OP really means "vastly overwhelmingly larger than demand." Of course there's also plenty of dreck, but that's not the article's point.

confounded 10y ago

There is an argument that automation, and the fact that increasingly the goods we desire are digital, means that the marginal reproduction costs of many goods are trending towards zero (with obvious exceptions, like housing). Without effective regulation, this puts all the power in the hands of naturally monopolistic distribution platforms. For example, the only reason why an infinitely reproducible MP3 costs $0.99 is because Apple's lawyers say it does, Facebook get to decide the cost in digital-autonomy for you to speak to your aunt. Over the last few years this seems to have drifted from academic-Marxian/airport-business-book/TED lore to a motivation for seriously exploring policies like UBI (including by Y Combinator).

abannin 10y ago

Thompson's point here isn't about the content itself, but rather the supply chain for the content. Because the internet effectively provides 'infinite' distribution, the traditional models of controlling distribution are worthless. This is a very consistent theme in his writings. Consider that both the worthless and valuable content that you've defined use the same methods for distribution; Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.

TimJYoung 10y ago
Yes, but production <> distribution. It still costs money to produce something of value, whether it's an article in a magazine or an album. The fact that it costs virtually nothing to reproduce an album or distribute it digitally does not negate the investment it took to produce it. And the fact remains that Facebook and Google, among many others, profited handsomely from this confusion.
- confounded 10y ago
  > It still costs money to produce something of value It costs rapidly decreasing amounts to produce something of value. If you want a few stabs from a violin in your song, you rarely need to hire a concert violinist these days, thanks to recordings and software-synthesizers based on infinitely reproducible code and data.
  - TimJYoung 10y ago
    Absolutely, but that doesn't mean that it's still easy to produce the final work. If anyone can do it, then it's obviously not valuable. Take "Stranger Things" on Netflix, for example. I normally hate sci-fi, but this was one heck of a great season 1 for a series. Did it take a lot less in terms of technical know-how/costs to produce than it would have taken in the 80's ? Sure, no doubt. But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value. The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".

L_Rahman 10y ago

Thompson would be the first to agree with you. He would in fact point to his very own business as an example that he believes in well-researched, expensive to produce content. He would then go on to argue that similar content sources will have to find ways of making money that don't involve putting display ads next to their content. https://stratechery.com/2015/grantland-and-the-surprising-future-of-publishing/ https://stratechery.com/2015/grantland-and-the-surprising-fu...

dilemma 10y ago

Indeed. The author charges for access to his premium content (and value added services) so obviously it is not worthless.

nostrademons 10y ago

Most of the interesting content I read is produced by amateurs. Amateur writers, that is. They're professionals in whatever domain they happen to be writing about - food blogs written by chefs, programming blogs written by software engineers, startup blogs written by VCs & entrepreneurs, hardware blogs written by electrical engineers, gaming screencasts produced by gamers, political blogs written by political science professors. I think that what the Internet revealed is that being able to write well takes a back seat to knowing information worth writing about. Content over form, in other words. In the old days, you needed dedicated reporters who would go ask the actual experts their opinions on events because most people could not hold down two jobs, and an industrial company is not going to also operate a printing press. Now, with the ease & reach of publishing becoming so much greater, it becomes much easier to publish on your nights and weekends, as a way of getting your name out in the field. I actually view mainstream media as "low quality" now, because when you compare any piece with the blog of the experts actually quoted in it, you see just how many omissions and distortions appear in it.

linkregister 10y ago
Experts in a professional fields have been writing books for hundreds of years. How is anything fundamentally different now? The shortened cycle? Experts in various fields have written guest columns for newspapers since before the U.S. declared independence. Tabloid and marginally amateur newspapers previously outnumbered the established publications. When new towns and cities were formed in the American Frontier, often a printing press was brought with the first businesses. Your argument appears to follow from the premise that "MSM is bad" and then seeks justification in a just-so story of the old days that isn't accurate. I'm not defending modern journalism's accuracy. I'm disputing your assertion that the consolidated journalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are the default. On the contrary, they are abnormal with respect to the rest of American history.