I found this insightful and generally agree. The one point I’d push on slightly is the idea of uber-personalization in short form. To me, it seems more like segmentation. Instagram learned that I like to see reels of snowboarding and mountain biking .. but i know many of my friends are shown the exact same reels. There are shared contexts, they are just shallow and fragmented.
To your point though, this is not equivalent with both of us having read, say, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and having a common language to talk and think about some of life’s most profound questions. Depth of overlapping context matters more than surface area perhaps.
I agree there are some overlapping contexts. I just think the math (combinatorics) works out so that you and I may have 10 or so “niches” we are in, and it’s never the same set of ten.
If there’s some healthy overlap, then there’s some bonding over the shared niches, variety in the differing ones.
But I think there are ever increasing potential niches so people are less likely to have enough overlaps.
Good point. Hard to tell whether we’re trending towards fewer or more overlaps in niches. On TikTok, the majority of videos I get served have 50-300k likes, few have fever than 10k, and even fewer have millions. Perhaps more overlap on these one-to-many platforms than the many-to-many social networks.
Whatever the current state of overlap may be, I think it could go either way — at one point in the distant past, YT felt like it had mostly small creators and now it resembles the classic power law distribution. That said, the search dynamics that drove YT for most of its existence favor the popular creators. Short form is less driven by those dynamics. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
Personally, I find it best to indulge sparingly in short form, and invest a lot of time in creating deep shared context with others.
I found this insightful and generally agree. The one point I’d push on slightly is the idea of uber-personalization in short form. To me, it seems more like segmentation. Instagram learned that I like to see reels of snowboarding and mountain biking .. but i know many of my friends are shown the exact same reels. There are shared contexts, they are just shallow and fragmented.
To your point though, this is not equivalent with both of us having read, say, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and having a common language to talk and think about some of life’s most profound questions. Depth of overlapping context matters more than surface area perhaps.
I agree there are some overlapping contexts. I just think the math (combinatorics) works out so that you and I may have 10 or so “niches” we are in, and it’s never the same set of ten.
If there’s some healthy overlap, then there’s some bonding over the shared niches, variety in the differing ones.
But I think there are ever increasing potential niches so people are less likely to have enough overlaps.
Good point. Hard to tell whether we’re trending towards fewer or more overlaps in niches. On TikTok, the majority of videos I get served have 50-300k likes, few have fever than 10k, and even fewer have millions. Perhaps more overlap on these one-to-many platforms than the many-to-many social networks.
Whatever the current state of overlap may be, I think it could go either way — at one point in the distant past, YT felt like it had mostly small creators and now it resembles the classic power law distribution. That said, the search dynamics that drove YT for most of its existence favor the popular creators. Short form is less driven by those dynamics. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
Personally, I find it best to indulge sparingly in short form, and invest a lot of time in creating deep shared context with others.