The (partial) resurgence of nuance
How platform innovations are attempting to delayer information
What is common between Tiktok's 20 sec videos and Twitter's (original) 140 characters?
They both constrain the creator. Constraints are good because they determine a starting point. But at the same time, it shapes the content irreversibly.
Since the signals of popularity are same (like, share, comment, follow), such constraints make the creator focus on ROI - what can deliver the most powerful punch in those 140 characters? This inevitably leads people to write the extreme version of their thought. Enough people write enough extreme thoughts and social media platforms become a pendulum swinging hard between extremes on any domain and delivering dopamine hits on each side.
This has been, legitimately, a common complain against platforms. Extreme views distort reality and blind people to the nuance in each domain. How do you reverse this trend?
Source: Twitter and Clubhouse
Two ways
You enable more long-form content
You enable a series of short-form content on the same topic
More long-form
This is the underlying trend in the rise of Substack and even Clubhouse.
As Substack founder Hamish Mckenzie says,
One of the reasons we started Substack is that we were concerned about the effects of the attention economy on the human mind. That might sound grandiose, but it is undeniable that our addiction to social media is having negative effects on both individual and collective thought. As individuals, we fret about doomscrolling and watch in hopeless horror as we become rage-monsters in the digital public square.
The product enables people to write longer essays/newsletters and host talk shows. As the duration increases, the exhaustiveness of thought (hopefully) increases and that leads to capturing more nuance.
This also augurs well with the business model change, of shifting from eyeballs for ads to creators getting paid directly for their content. Money is still a better indicator of quality than attention, because the friction to shelling out money is higher. But even without the business model change, long-form at least captures more nuance than short-form.
Series of short-form
Platforms which have grown over short form content can't just wake up one day and start serving long form content, because of two reasons
It is self-disruptive — core users want short form content and serving long form will alienate at least some of them
The entire platform so far (content, design, algorithms) are all geared towards making short form successful and require significant changes for long-form.
This has led to a new approach for existing platforms — enable bundling of these short form entities.
Some examples of these trend
Twitter threads — Instead of one tweet, expand more on what you want to say through multiple tweets.
Story streaks — Instead of one photo/story, expand more on your captures through multiple ones.
This empowers creators to expand more on their ideas, mellowing a bit of the extremism. However, since each tweet is still designed to create maximum impact, hence the extremism never really goes away (hence 'partial').
Will we ever reach a state of complete resurgence?
Unlikely. Fleeting attention span is a reality and you can only push a person so long. Short term dopamine hits are quite irresistible to us humans as a species. However, the emergence of these platforms at least provides a space to balance that with more nuanced information flow.
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