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Douglas McLennan's avatar

Nice outlining of the problem, Andrew. At the heart of the issue is the competition for attention and the impossibility of sorting through it all. Choice fatigue is an affliction that exhausts us all. The average American spends 4.5 hours a day on their phones (teenagers about 8.5 hours) in front of an endless scroll of distraction from which it's difficult to break out. Curational algorithms have both addicted us to the screen equivalent of junk food and dulled our initiative to fight through the clutter to find nutrition.

In the process it's loosened the relationships between artists and their audiences. When the endless scroll eliminates friction of finding things to be distracted by, you swipe up the moment you're even slightly bored. You're not choosing things to watch or listen to, you're banishing the dancing monkey as soon as the antics grow tiresome. In such an environment, it gets more and more difficult for creators to break through if you don't speak to the algorithm, no matter how good what you do is. And the problem is getting exponentially worse with floods of new synthetic AI content flooding all the platforms, all of which are optimizing to the algorithms which are then optimized on the AI-Synths in some sort of doom loop.

While I wholeheartedly agree with Conte in being clear about motivations and expectations, and Patreon is a terrific idea and platform and model, getting your voice/content discovered is seriously broken right now as social media platforms (including even TikTok) are collapsing on themselves, overrun by bots, ads and fakes. And we're starting to see new attempts to make content discoverable -- like Substack and others.

Part of what led to the problem is the near monopolies of the giant platforms, which for many people is now what they think the internet is. Thankfully Lina Khan at the FTC is making some beginning moves to try to loosen their grip. But I also have some hope that AI - which is/will blow up the problem with the astonishing overwhelming quantity of stuff it can create (Spotify is currently taking down about 100K AI-Gen tracks every day), will also offer some interesting solutions to solve the sorting/distraction problems. Already seeing some cool stabs at that.

Anyway, thanks for the post -- it helps define the binary.

(BTW -I always loved the 1000 True Fans idea. Maybe it seems quaint now (though SubStack is clearly its spiritual progeny), but it speaks to that time-tested notion of fans who love an artist or organization choosing to invest in them).

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