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Eyeball-Minute Land

Just as we pay our electric company by the kilowatt-hour, modern media, from cable channels to newspapers to recipe blogs to social media, is paid by the eyeball-minute. More eyeball-minutes equal more ads equal more money. It's not enough for a site to have good content, provide it to their users, and then have those users fuck off and do something else. The pool of new users to extract eyeball-minutes from would run dry quickly. Users must instead be kept "engaged" with new content which is constantly evolving to their tastes.

This frantic novelty has been inherited by the latest generation of social media platforms. The infinite scrolling feed of recommended content is paramount, any platform without it cannot be sustained only by eyeball-minutes. Luckily, generating an infinite feed of fresh content isn't difficult, it just requires a critical mass of users who will generate it on the platform's behalf. As long as the user base can generate a wide enough breadth of content, recommendation engines can keep shuffling people from one side of the content space to the other, like a theme park which installs new rollercoasters in one half of the park while people are on rides in the other half.

It's all great fun, but is it real? Is there anything actually _happening_ in the eyeball-minute land amusement park, or is it just that: idle amusement? One certainly hears a lot about the goings-on in there. There's conversations which feel important, information which feels fresh and useful, and huge groups of people organizing around this cause or that. Lots of passion, lots of conflict. Aren't these all more than idle amusement? And would all these people put so much effort into something frivolous? Maybe it's not all fun and games in this theme park.

On the other hand, one might cynically suggest, maybe a system which is powered by attention will generally evolve to produce whatever illusion earns it the most attention. The only way to know is to escape the theme park (no easy task!) and see the world anew.

When one manages to stumble out, back into apparent reality, back into a world not powered by eyeball-minutes, things are bleak. The world feels very slow and uneventful, with months going by without significant developments in any topic of interest. New content must be _found_, it doesn't just arrive, and a hungry user might go days with only a handful of small finds. What one does find is usually simple, unpolished, and not at all exhilarating. Books start looking palatable.

Life outside the walls of eyeball-minute land is boring, there's no way around it. But it's not barren. New ideas and amusements live in this space, and even some fragments of content from within the walls are able to survive. But unlike within the walls, where content survives of its own accord, here someone must directly bear the cost of hosting it, possibly completely independent of its engagement value. Someone must find the content to be worth its weight.

The worth of content is judged differently here. Within the walls worth is roughly equivalent to engagement ability, or "virality". Content which is not immediately engaging may as well not exist. In this respect life outside the walls is more forgiving. Here content can have any quality it likes, as its worth is tied only to its host's opinion of it. It may be hard for content to thrive, but a wider variety has a chance.

Hence, "the weird internet".

And more than it being naturally harder for content to find a footing out here, there's artificial pressures as well. The weight of hosting content goes far beyond mere monetary cost. One must be able to create a website which looks pleasant enough to use, and serve the content they want efficiently and without vulnerabilities. One must understand how to host that content, whether that means finding a hosting service, renting a server, or hosting at home (and all the fun ISP-related issues which come from that). One must also enable others to find the content, or else what's even the point? This last is probably the hardest task of them all, and it's barely within any one's control!

At every step there's a roadblock, an added piece of weight which must be born, which is only incidentally related to the content itself. Really it's amazing anything exists out here at all.

(Projects like gemini are trying to help remove some of that weight, specifically in the area of creating a pleasant website, but the other areas still need help.)

All that said, the barrier to survival outside the walls will always be inherently higher, because the metric used for determining fitness is different, and it's a much harder hurdle to clear. It's easy to amuse a person, it's much harder to get them to do any amount of work, especially if they don't see real value in it.

There is content missing out here, outside the walls of eyeball-minute land. But if no one really cares enough to shoulder that content themselves, maybe it's not really worth all that much. And if things feel empty around here, maybe it's just because there's not that much worth talking about.

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Published 2023-02-20