Actually, one reason I think about this stuff a lot is not for strategizing the future of my own sites, but trying to grok what sometimes strikes me as the completely bizarre decisions made by other, much bigger commercial scale media properties, like say Fox or NYT or Vox.
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Basically, writing is pure ideas. There's nothing else there. No product, nothing to eat, nothing to use/do materially. So it is a real mystery to me how/why people can choose to grow without any clear ideas driving the growth. It's like empty growth.
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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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Replying to @vgr
Are you restricted to just 1st- order distribution? If not, multiple points of >1st distribution can create the network to identify those most likely to value the 1st order information. Visualize as a Venn diagram and your Super Reader is at the intersection of n>2 sites.
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Replying to @opendna
Yeah, I'm not trying to be super-precise about the topology of information/surprisal propagation here. Just trying to point out that the idea of mass reach is an uncritical hangover from industrial age dumb media
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Replying to @vgr
I get it. You're look for a generative metaphor to help guide tye way forward. History of 19-20th century media isn't my bailiwick but, IIRC, the mass market model developed with radio, which had a near-zero marginal cost per audience member. Print was all about micro-markets.
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Well actually print went mass market too in the 1890s, a couple of decades earlier... unit economics of offset printing were far better than previous movable type. That's what drove the explosion in pulp fiction, yellow journalism etc. But yeah, your point is overall right on.
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Replying to @vgr
I shouldn't say that print micro-markets died off either. If mass-market newspapers are struggling (because reasons), niche magazines seem to be doing fine. Instead Vox and BuzzFeed, you might find a business model from Woodworking Magazine and Wood Sailboat Magazine.
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