4 ms·

> unwilling to actually pay for content The "content" industry (books, music, movies, all of it) has a systemic issue of which we are only just seeing the begi

by jl6 2y ago

> unwilling to actually pay for content The "content" industry (books, music, movies, all of it) has a systemic issue of which we are only just seeing the beginning. Namely, there is now so much content, and it is all so easily accessible, that the relative value of any one piece of content has fallen way, way down. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in a lifetime, and only so many humans on the planet, and growth in that aggregate content consumption capacity has been far outstripped by the growth in content production capacity. There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content than you can ever consume - and an increasing proportion of it is available very cheaply, or even free. Anything new faces an uphill battle against everything old - and now, against AI too. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better (and it may never get better).

apantel 2y ago
Well said. It’s the same with news. When something big happens in the world, there is an explosion of communication about it on the internet. You can absorb the event from countless sources. So what value is any one news outlet’s coverage? It’s not worth much. The media outlets used to be able to monetize a captive audience, i.e. people living in a certain locale would have a few newspapers and television channels to choose from. Now anyone, anywhere, can go online and absorb news from all of the posting and aggregating and reprocessing and commenting going on. It’s almost impossible to sell into that. The value of generic / impersonal content is rapidly approaching zero. The only thing that still has value is a particular creator of interest posting their next video — like your favorite YouTube channel, you’ll watch that. It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of personality around themselves and their content with its signature that is unique to them. It’s something like ‘releasing content that is personally signed’ where the person’s signature has value to a certain audience. The audience is ‘captive’ because they can’t get that ‘personal signature’ anywhere else. Even AI can’t deepfake it, because the perceived value of it is specifically that it is coming from a particular real human person.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of personality around themselves and their content with its signature that is unique to them. Correction: pretend to be a real human (or even a hyperreal human), not to be a real human. This is the game YouTubers and Instagram influencers have been playing for over a decade - there's a team of people building a brand around the face of the vlogger/influencer, making them seem like a really nice and interesting human, where in fact the opposite is the case. The point of it is to exploit human vulnerability to parasocial relationships, creating a captive audience primed to be receptive to the deluge of advertising that follows. Yes, this is one of the few ways for "content" to keep value these days. Which is ironic, given that the net value of it to the consumer and society is squarely negative.
cess11 2y ago
"There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content" Are you sure about this? How are you measuring quality? For me, if something resembles advertising I consider it to be of very low quality. There are some exceptions, for example some of the movie work by Roy Andersson, but they are very few. As far as I can tell, ad-discourse and ad-style permeates pretty much everything in contemporary "content". Every time I go to my library and open something older than me the language is like a fresh air, it's clear that someone put some intellectual work into it and there is a distinct character to the text, personality imbued by the typographers, authors and editors. This is very rare on the Internet, and whenever I come across it the typography is usually ad-adjacent anyway.
- jl6 2y ago
  Even if a super-Sturgeon's-Law holds at a 10000:1 crap:quality ratio, there's still overwhelmingly so much stuff out there, produced over so many generations of talented writers, artists, musicians and directors, that you'd have to be unreasonably picky not to be able to fill a whole lifetime of consumption with enjoyable content. It's only our predilection for novelty that keeps the content mills going, and I wonder how long that can last against the ever-growing accumulation of culture.
  - cess11 2y ago
    Seems to me you're conflating the excretions of the entertainment industry with culture.

by jl6 2y ago

apantel 2y ago

Well said. It’s the same with news. When something big happens in the world, there is an explosion of communication about it on the internet. You can absorb the event from countless sources. So what value is any one news outlet’s coverage? It’s not worth much. The media outlets used to be able to monetize a captive audience, i.e. people living in a certain locale would have a few newspapers and television channels to choose from. Now anyone, anywhere, can go online and absorb news from all of the posting and aggregating and reprocessing and commenting going on. It’s almost impossible to sell into that. The value of generic / impersonal content is rapidly approaching zero. The only thing that still has value is a particular creator of interest posting their next video — like your favorite YouTube channel, you’ll watch that. It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of personality around themselves and their content with its signature that is unique to them. It’s something like ‘releasing content that is personally signed’ where the person’s signature has value to a certain audience. The audience is ‘captive’ because they can’t get that ‘personal signature’ anywhere else. Even AI can’t deepfake it, because the perceived value of it is specifically that it is coming from a particular real human person.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of personality around themselves and their content with its signature that is unique to them. Correction: pretend to be a real human (or even a hyperreal human), not to be a real human. This is the game YouTubers and Instagram influencers have been playing for over a decade - there's a team of people building a brand around the face of the vlogger/influencer, making them seem like a really nice and interesting human, where in fact the opposite is the case. The point of it is to exploit human vulnerability to parasocial relationships, creating a captive audience primed to be receptive to the deluge of advertising that follows. Yes, this is one of the few ways for "content" to keep value these days. Which is ironic, given that the net value of it to the consumer and society is squarely negative.

cess11 2y ago

"There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content" Are you sure about this? How are you measuring quality? For me, if something resembles advertising I consider it to be of very low quality. There are some exceptions, for example some of the movie work by Roy Andersson, but they are very few. As far as I can tell, ad-discourse and ad-style permeates pretty much everything in contemporary "content". Every time I go to my library and open something older than me the language is like a fresh air, it's clear that someone put some intellectual work into it and there is a distinct character to the text, personality imbued by the typographers, authors and editors. This is very rare on the Internet, and whenever I come across it the typography is usually ad-adjacent anyway.

jl6 2y ago
Even if a super-Sturgeon's-Law holds at a 10000:1 crap:quality ratio, there's still overwhelmingly so much stuff out there, produced over so many generations of talented writers, artists, musicians and directors, that you'd have to be unreasonably picky not to be able to fill a whole lifetime of consumption with enjoyable content. It's only our predilection for novelty that keeps the content mills going, and I wonder how long that can last against the ever-growing accumulation of culture.
- cess11 2y ago
  Seems to me you're conflating the excretions of the entertainment industry with culture.