content as capital
on the state of content as an industry and machine for makers, creators, influencers, and users across the internet
Keely Adler and
content as capital
What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.
Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports... See more
Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports... See more
kyla scanlon • Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to... See more
theverge.com • Welcome to Hell, Elon - The Verge
The greatest danger of the culture war is that it pressures people to take a stance on issues they know nothing about.
-Gurwinder
The TikTok War: Why High School & College Kids Are Getting The Wrong Information about Hamas & Israel
I spent the weekend trying to reverse engineer the TikTok algorithm, as I am convinced this is the reason we're losing the information war with high school & college students.
Jeff Morris Jr.x.comwow. this is a very serious problem.
That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a... See more
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: Middlemen Without Enshittification; The Bezzle Excerpt
The unabated “creative destruction” of one kind of capital after another has only further increased the wealth of a few and done nothing to emancipate the overall collective creative spirit, which has remained stagnant. Today, almost every artistic effort inevitably (perhaps unknowingly) reinscribes the values of the ruling capitalist class.
GD Dess • Cultural Dopes
On top of dealing with the actual content, moderators are probably using an interface that hasn’t been updated recently, because engineering resources go toward developing new products and functionality for customers. Improving the experience for content moderators is never at the top of a company’s to-do list. For example, an old interface might... See more
Thomas Stackpole • Content Moderation Is Terrible by Design
The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture... See more