> It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up.
I think its probably not a problem for the platforms, shorter content mean its easier to put advertisements and easier to recommend and manage.
Its a race to the bottom because now probably for the first time in history, social interaction is not made to be valuable or important, its made to be profitable.
Cafes and bars didn't control what you can say, and changed which topics are preferable and which aren't, obviously Social media does this and more.
So as long users exist, advertisers are paying to advertise, nothing really will change, and we are starting to see the affect of this in the world.
> It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.
I think this really depends on the audience, and who you are targeting.
HN is totally the opposite from TikTok, yet it still grows, and blogs that get on the front page get a very large amount of traffic that almost any author would be happy with.
But in general, I agree everything became stupider because its a race to the bottom at this point.
Ads don't apply to Medium. It's a subscription model. In theory it's a refreshing take as they rightfully recognize the many (ethical) issues with running ads, surveillance tech, and so on.
If for a moment we would assume a very large group of qualitative "citizen journalists" regularly writing, together they'd produce a vast sea of high quality content. Medium at one point also onboarded actual pro publications, so you'd get a really great set of content that in volume would be the equivalent of several thousands of newspaper and in terms of quality be close, whilst being more diverse.
5$ per month for that pile of quality is a steal.
But for that to work, the quality has to be discoverable. You need to able to look at the homepage, and see top notch writing in the categories you're interested in. It would be a single place to do most of one's deeper reading, with seemingly no end. For very low costs.
None of that has worked out, for the reasons I mentioned.
I think its probably not a problem for the platforms, shorter content mean its easier to put advertisements and easier to recommend and manage.
Its a race to the bottom because now probably for the first time in history, social interaction is not made to be valuable or important, its made to be profitable.
Cafes and bars didn't control what you can say, and changed which topics are preferable and which aren't, obviously Social media does this and more.
So as long users exist, advertisers are paying to advertise, nothing really will change, and we are starting to see the affect of this in the world.
> It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.
I think this really depends on the audience, and who you are targeting.
HN is totally the opposite from TikTok, yet it still grows, and blogs that get on the front page get a very large amount of traffic that almost any author would be happy with.
But in general, I agree everything became stupider because its a race to the bottom at this point.