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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

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.

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.