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Almost two years later, this rings even more true. The only good option is to make something that *makes* people sit up and take notice. So hard but worthwhile.

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Jun 26, 2021Liked by Thomas J Bevan

Thank you for this beautiful article!

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You wrote this before I got the chance to. Damn you. Now I can’t write it because it’ll be worse than yours and we’ll go down the spiralling hole of content land.

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founding

Thank you, Tom! This is very thought-provoking for me both as an audience and a creator. So, allow me an incoherent couple of words...

As a writer, this possible convergence into a niche worries me and calms me down at the same time. Maybe I am not at the point when I want to double down on something? I have got that freedom to throw any nonsense I want but haven't got a big audience (yet?). Maybe once you get an audience you get responsibilities. It's human relationships after all. Not family-like but it creates certain demand for what you are good at.

This is the point when it's easy to slip down and stagnate, right? But does the audience forces an artist to stagnate and be comfortable with repertoire? Or does the artist just becomes lazy seeing that things "already work"? Looking at many people, writers, bands, etc I follow I can say that both can be true. But as you said, if we, as an audience, responsible for the "height of the bar", for the demand we create. "You get what you pay attention to." is very true, and I believe money is secondary and price rarely matters if you are intended to "consume" something.

> "You will soon possess the mental bandwidth (and desire) to take in the greatest novels and music ever written. Which will doubly reinforce just how bad ‘content’ is."

This really works. I noticed that when I decided to cut down consumption of 'content'.

One thing I would argue is how A/B testing works. Testing randomly is a bad strategy, it's inefficient because of both the time and money you spend on creating this nonsense. So it's more than just a grid search for what works (if there's an intention to do it well). Although the general idea is true - finding what's the most efficient.

Anyway, thanks for a great read (again).

Sincerely your weekly assembly attendee,

John

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Jun 21, 2021Liked by Thomas J Bevan

I "get" that bettering the art is bettering its audience as well, though this is no easy task.

Currently these essays, together with some ordinary life boring problems, inspired me to stay off of the Contentland since march. God, it's been great, I am not complaining. And I did notice many, many improvements in my taste for this thing called ~art and my audience performance...

But sometimes it gets lonely.

See, I feel like I am deprived of the appropiate means to "share" (sorry, I did'nt find a proper term to describe this another probably acient dynamic) something I like because I sense that people are only looking to what is down the path of their feeds or what is following the sides of their stories.

In an attempt to try and do so, I could manage to go back into the Way of Social Media, only to share what I became passionate about. I just don't know if anyone who is connected with me there will bother to look it up by themselves (since I won't be everyday in my stories displaying ~nuggets of it).

But I guess that's how we all got here anyway. Or at least, for those who don't know The Commonplace, that's how "we" are not "there" anymore.

And maybe a ton of people are still looking for a way out, in the back of their minds. It's just that the tip of the iceberg hasn't appeared to them yet, at surface... Maybe not even for me - because in the end maybe it's a path you go on to explore in depth, rather than a view to look for in a matter of seconds, distant of the actual scenery where the real party is happening.

But if it is so, I can only hope to always get invited.

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I applaud your virtuous attempt at improving the general state of affairs when it comes to content. While there are clear merits to your argument against the deprecation of artistic quality, it misses out on one very important point.

Art is, and always will remain, subjective. Imagine a song by an artist you can’t bear listening to if your life depended on it. Even that song can be on someone’s list of all-time-greats and every time they hear it playing, it makes their knees buckle and gives them goosebumps.

The general standard has actually risen with time, but so has the access and distribution to content in general. Not all content is created with an artistic intent, but the algorithms of the internet pipelines are not sophisticated enough to discern that yet.

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author

‘For whom does the notification bell toll? It tolls for thee’ ~@PaulPublisher

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