According to Twitter’s co-founders, the web is awash in bad content. Are you part of the problem?
I’m a professional writer. I make my living creating, well, stuff like this. I’m also the president of a national organisation of people who do the same thing. And I spend an absurdly huge amount of time reading. (At one summer camp I was mercilessly dubbed “Professor” for the large stack of books I kept in my cabin.) So you could say I’m deeply committed to the idea that content is king.
When Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone announced Tuesday they are “rethinking publishing” and creating an online medium (named Medium) dedicated to the idea that the quality of content matters, I took notice. “Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced,” Williams writes in his opening Medium post.
It’s a shot across the bow for sucky content.
Bad content is everywhere, and it’s Google’s fault. Its algorithm that rewards most frequently updated content has inspired “news” sites that pay writers less than $10 per article, forcing them to write each one in half an hour or less. On Twitter, you disappear if you don’t tweet often enough and some software will automatically un-follow you. So people tweet… whatever. I got a fair amount of attention for my piece last week on why people unfollow you on Twitter: One of my complaints was the use of foreign languages; the rest all amounted to sucky content.
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