The Small to Average Internet

Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People

This quote came up today in a session with a client in regards to the news. We had been speaking about the events of Ukraine and the people involved, but in my opinion, we didn't discuss ideas around it - well, I felt we didn't at least, however my student was using the news as his source of thought inspiration and inevitably, ideas aren't discussed in the news, only events and people are. We then scrolled through a news site front page and quickly categorized what kind of content was actually there events focusing on people.

What I brought up is that the reason that it is this way is because of target market, where clicks are the incentive driver. Because there is no weighting on who is actually clicking, the only metric that matters is the volume of clicks, meaning that the more clicks, the more money made. In order to get more clicks, it is required to activate the consumer to click and that comes with a few skews involved.

But, let's break this market down a little into small, average and great minds using a very rough normal distribution, with the assumption that the top 20% are "great" and the inverse is true for the bottom 20%, leaving 60% in the average. The lines are obviously blurry and context-based, but this'll do.

Essentially, discussing ideas is only going to engage 20% of the audience, but not only that, engaging great minds to the point they are willing to interact, is likely harder. On top of this, a "great mind" is also not only likely to consume different kinds of information, but also that information would likely be longer form, reducing the potential clicks they can make in a period of time. And, they are also probably less likely to share what they consume, which lowers the potential for engaging other Clickers.

But, start to present events and suddenly the attention of over half the market is available, which is a 3-fold increase in what the "ideas" category attracts. And, because the people in this category are more likely to share, there is far more chance of virality. And, because events are happening all of the time that can be cherrypicked globally, there are endless points of content that can used, as well as flavors of each to differentiate further and target specific sub-categories and demographics.

Then, embed the "people" content into the event content and without and ideas needed or solutions suggested, a full 80% of the population are engaged and a large portion of them are willing to engage and share for even more clicks. Those that share the most, are generally those who get some kind of emotional reaction from what they are consuming or, what to broadcast their emotions in some way to signal their position. Great for clicks.

But, this is why the pay-per-click model that drives most of the content on the internet leads to a very base content range, as it is incentivized to attract volume, not quality. If for example there was a weighting system similar to Hive on the internet, the type of content that gets supported would likely change quite heavily, as consumers would "feel the cost" of their consumption. Also, if it was driven like Hive by financial holdings, it would also be a sorting mechanism where on average, those who hold more weight, are probably people who are more idea discussers, than people discussers. Again, remember the blur here, this is averaging and stereotyping.

There are plenty of sites out there that do discuss ideas of course, but that is not where most people get their news from, because news by definition is timely and related to the moment. However, ideas are not bound to a specific time for the most part, which is why the same ideas can be discussed for literally thousands of years, without reaching a conclusion - with ideas, there is no end to the war (event), nor are there generally only single actors involved (Putin). Not only this, there is a lot of ambiguity around the ideas without conclusion, making it harder to engage with and of course, far harder to polarize cleanly, as people discussing ideas have to allow for the colors of nuance and variance, not the black and white of right and wrong.

For me, I am not a great mind, but I do tend to discuss ideas, because I find them more interesting. I think this might also be because I look long on a lot of things and value relationships, and if the topics are changing day to day on a 30 minute, there is little value in developing strong relationships that across time that can build through the development of the conversation. But perhaps more importantly for many is, this "news" content might be highly consumable, but it doesn't affect mindset or habit - it is consumed, emotionally reacted to, and then forgotten as the next piece is fed into the loop.

When it comes to truly great thinkers in the past though, they spent months, years and sometimes entire lifetimes working on their ideas, discussing them, turning them over again and again to see the problem as deeply as possible, by entertaining as many perspectives. The "discussion" wasn't about right or wrong, it was about idea development and knowledge progression, meaning that people could argue heavily with each other, but it wasn't personal, like arguing about mathematical equations.

But, if we look at the last 100 years and especially the last 30 years of the internet, longevity of discussion has got far shorter and there has been increasing focus on the events tied to individual people, without a lot of general discussion on what leads to the events and how to affect them. Instead, we are consuming throwaway and passive content, where we don't feel as much the need to act directly, as we don't have to think about it for long, before our attention is drawn away. and then, because we don't have to be consistent in our views, we can consume broadly and hold conflicting opinions, but not have to think about the conflicts we hold, as we can compartmentalize our world into neat boxes, as we don't have to look from many perspectives.

The "free internet" is not free, there is a cost to all of it and we are paying it in many ways, but I believe that one of the most underreported is the loss of idea development, as the content is incentivized by clicks. People click on the content they agree and disagree with, not on what they know very little about. This means the content doesn't change their minds or make them think, it reinforces what they already believe.

And, when it comes to the voting public, that works on a majority too, which means it is that 80% of people who dictate who is in power, and which corporations sell. Because they are often influenced heavily by the content environment in which they live, they are easy to herd into a direction and the more they click, the easier it gets.

Luckily, I am an idiot myself, so don't have to think much about any of this - just consume.