Responsibilities
As much as I like to think otherwise, I am a content creator. What I mean by that is that I create content and that content gets, at some point, published on the internet for everyone to consume. As a result of that I believe—and maybe I’m wrong—that I have some sort of responsibility towards you, the “content consumer”.
It would be easy for me to say, “well, if you don’t want to read this content go read something else”. And it would be somewhat true. No one is forcing you to read anything. But at the same time, I do think we—and be we I mean both creators and consumers of content—have a shared responsibility. We should all strive to create and consume worthy content.
Now, defining what worthy content is can be tricky, I’ll give you that. And I don’t pretend to be even remotely in the position to be the judge of what should be considered worthy content. But we can all agree, without pointing fingers, that a good chunk of the content out there is pure garbage. And that’s our fault.
The reasons why most content is garbage is because, sadly, the current financial incentives are set up in a perverted way and you’re rewarded for the wrong thing. As a blogger, you’re rewarded if you generate traffic and that because we can’t really track anything else. We can’t really track the real life impact your words have on people’s lives. That’s fortunately not an option. So we settled for a model that rewards people who capture attention.
And this has a terrible effect not only on you, the consumer of content, because it becomes harder and harder to find quality content, but also on us, the creators, because it can trap us into recycling content that “works” over, and over, and over, and over again.
And this is something creators should be more mindful of. Recycling content and becoming a grifter can sadly be very beneficial for you from a financial stand point. But for the rest of the people, it only increases the noise and makes it harder to find other quality content.
So, if you’re a content creator, and have written some good content in the past and don’t have much else to say on the topic, just shut up.
Or even better, use your platform to point people towards other great content. Because that’s how we improve the situation and discover more worthwhile material.