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A million visit piece of content should in some sense be 10x the "idea size" in some memetic sense than a 100k visit piece of content. Trying to make a 100k idea artificially acquire a million visits seems kinda grimly nihilistic to me.
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To change gears abruptly, there's this idea that aliens will never detect us because after a brief period, our radio emissions have been getting more efficient and therefore less powerful. Our planet will get electromagnetically quieter for its communication levels in the future.
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This is a joules/bit/mile way of thinking about information and communication. Industrial age media models were very... energy intensive reach. "New media" is really "low wattage" media, properly understood. CFLs/LEDs instead of incandescent.
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Let's say that you have an idea that, in a perfect information market, would have highest impact if it reached a set of 5 people randomly distributed across the world. Everybody else would be better off with 2nd or higher order reception. The 1st order bits would be noise to them
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The *ideal* distribution/reach pattern for that idea is the one that reaches those 5, and only those 5 people, at the lowest joules/bit/mile cost. Anything more is waste. That's a sort of thermodynamic efficiency limit model for media. Kinda like Carnot cycle for engines.
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It's amazing the sheer amount of energy that went into information distribution and reach a century ago. An offset press producing a run of newspapers to be distributed even at a city scale... it's a HUGE cost of joules/bit/mile... only justifiable for very high-value bits
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Even the worst of yellow journalism and penny-dreadful bits were, I think, on average higher value than stuff we put up on the internet simply because the cost is so low. Jevon's paradox. We're almost at the thermodynamic limit, putting pure noise into distribution.
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In fact, even the very ideas of reach and distribution smack of industrial age thinking. They evoke metaphors of dumb pipes connecting static producer brains to static consumer brains. There is no room in "reach" and "distribution" for context-awareness, relevance/salience etc
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Really what we want is ideas that are produced just in time, and intruding on the attention of the right people, juxtaposed against just the right context at just the right time to produce maximum "aha!". Max redpilling per joule or something.
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In a way, though we like to hate on modern targeted advertising, that's really the cutting edge. Unlike other bits, advertising bits MUST seek out the lowest redpilling (=buy decision/conversion) costs.
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Ironically, the way to get past the trap of ad-supported models might be for "real" content to become more energy/targeting efficient than ads themselves. Today "real" content at scale rides advertising rather than the other way around because it is dumber. It has to.
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John Wanamaker famously said "I know 50% of my advertising works, I just don't know which 50%" ... I'd guess, historically, "real" content has always had lower, and less legible, effectiveness than the advertising it rode.
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Thought experiment about the challenge of media in the future. Rupert Murdoch started like 60 years ago and is shaping global geopolitics in 2019. If you are in your early 20s today and want to be the Murdoch of 2079 geopolitics, how would you go about building the empire?
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Would you try to build a max-reach/min-brain zombie army led by generals like Tucker Carlson etc.? Forget about the ethics/morality of it... would that even be the most effective path to influence via the pen? To make it clearer, consider the pen-and-sword analogy...
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"The pen is mightier than the sword" they say. Well, "swords" evolved from literal swords through precision firearms to smart missiles. "Reach" with swords evolved from a large mass rushing screaming at the enemy and dying in large numbers to pushing a button to launch a missile
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The pen, by contrast, is still in the "screaming melee rush" stage of evolution in reach. We have just invented the precision firearm. Long way to go to get guided missile level reach smarts. If you were young Murdoch today, you'd be building media missiles, not forging swords.
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As a random aside, technically, fiction has gotten sophisticated far faster than nonfiction, but has hit an earlier fundamental ceiling. Nonfiction tech is lagging but has fewer obvious limits (and here I mean tech at the level of humans handling language, not computers)
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Hence the rise of online communities with participation membranes. Raising a barrier to consumption of content actually increases the ability of its producer to build shared context and coherence where content is “targeted” by default. Self-selection into consumption categories.
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Yep. Escaped realities. But money is the worst participation membrane. That’s why I’ve usually relied on things like length of posts or obscure jargon to do the job. Many people criticize me for inaccessibility not realizing it’s a design feature, not an accidental bug.
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If you haven't looked at it yet, Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) by addresses this from angles."Informating" is piece of it:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informati . From bigtech-friendlier side, speaks in 3min segment (🎬1h:1m) livestream.com/accounts/14086 cc: