The commodification of mediocrity

why there is so much trash online

What’s good young and eager mind?!

Watching Dune for the 4th time.

Man, what a beautiful movie.

It caused me to delve deeper into that universe and there’s a lot of “tell don’t show” in the movie.

Probably because the story is so incredibly complex.

Funnily enough, this actually has a bearing on the topic of this week’s final piece.

I want to talk about the relationship between complexity & the needs of the social media audience.

Why is there so much trash online?

Specifically on X?

Where’s the intellectual, well-thought-out content?

Let’s get into it.

There's a certain kind of style you need to adopt to grow on X:

• Strong hooks

• Legitbait (clickbait that you deliver on)

• Not intellectually demanding (so no big words or even complex ideas)

Once you understand that, you get why all the big accounts are similar.

Surprisingly, this leads to great uniformity among the top performers on the left-most side of the power law distribution, even though nearly all of the content is extremely diverse.

If this is the first time you’re encountering this idea, take a moment to reflect on its weirdness. You’ve got a set with an incredible amount of diversity, you ordinally rank it, and then at the extreme, you get a homogeneous subset. That’s not intuitive. However in low-dimensional sports, see yesterday’s piece below, you see this all the time. E.g. You can have all possible races and both genders in sprinting, yet the top is exclusively black males. (Incidentally showing that not all disparate outcomes are due to some sort of evil scheming social construct but rather that nature isn’t uniformly distributed with respect to all (or even most) traits. I.e. World ain’t fair… deal with it.)

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So the implication seems to be:

When you fail, you fail uniquely.

When you succeed, you succeed typically.

Ironically, this in and of itself, is an example of a post that's not good.

A better version of this would be:

I've tweeted 26,000 times!

Here are 3 simple things you must do to grow!

1. Make it clickbaity (and then deliver)

2. Use strong hooks (keep 'em reading)

3. No big words (keep it at age 10)

You'll see the same pattern from all your favorite big creators.

Here are a few examples:

[…]

The difficult thing is to embrace that when you're dumbing down your content, you're gonna look stupid.

You have to fight your ego to not add nuance.

This is why dumb people have an advantage here.

They can just be themselves.

An example of this is my numerous highly intellectual friends responding with posts like these:

My reply:

Go on TikTok, go on IG, go on LinkedIn, go on Reddit.

You'll see the same pattern there.

And while there are smart cookies on YouTube, the vast majority of the content is still "dumb."

Dumb is not really the right way to think about it.

It's actually cognitively undemanding.

Mr. Beast's content is so "dumb" that 6-year-olds can watch it.

But a 45-year-old mathematician might watch a vid about giving away a Lambo to a pizza delivery person because they've turned their brain off & just wanna chill a bit.

It don’t want to end on a sour note.

Fortunately, I do not believe there is a need to.

Look at science communicators on YouTube.

There are ways to sneak the spinach into the mango smoothie.

As my older followers know, I study pure mathematics. Not formally but as a daily practice… like lifting weights.

In Set Theory, there’s this concept of a set with elements.

This set; [1,2,3] has 3 elements in it namely 1, 2, and 3.

The mathematical way of saying this is that the cardinality is three.

Well, what about the set of all the natural numbers?

N = [1,2,3,…]

There’s no last number so this set is infinite.

Turns out, there’s not just one infinity.

There are infinitely many “sizes” of infinities.

E.g. the set of all Real numbers: All the naturals and their negative counterparts, 0, all fractions, and all numbers that can’t be expressed in a fraction like Pi. Turns out that the cardinality of the Reals is bigger than that of the Naturals.

Well, this video from Veritasium tackles exactly that idea.

Guess how many views one would pull on a subject like that?

7?

15?

Perhaps a 50K because of the students taking an exam in set theory & a few autodidacts like me.

How about 28 MILLION!

So my conjecture is this:

Maybe you CAN make complicated content.

Maybe you just gotta figure out how to package and distribute it.

And on that note, have a wonderful weekend and I’ll talk to you on Monday.

RJY

Wood & Water