I Stopped “Creating Content”
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I Stopped “Creating Content”
1–10 of 249 posts
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#2A good point overall. It's skin-deep, though. Do you think a catch-all name is useful for something like content? Is it only distasteful on the internet/TV/etc. because of the negative impacts of mass-production and commoditisation, or is the idea itself inherently distasteful?
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#3For me the term users sometimes sounds similar to traffic. I prefer customers - that you serve with your product.
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#4I feel that all the terms mentioned are useful in specific contexts. Web traffic brings visitors to your resource. If they read your blog, they become readers. If they use your products, they become users. When someone buys something from you, they become a customer.
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#5A good point overall. It's skin-deep, though. Do you think a catch-all name is useful for something like content? Is it only distasteful on the internet/TV/etc. because of the negative impacts of mass-production and commoditisation, or is the idea itself inherently distasteful?
The author addresses this, no?
> But I did notice an immediate change, especially with words like “traffic.” Traffic makes me feel like I’m just throwing out flypaper and measuring whatever sticks. When I describe website visitors as “readers,” it reminds me that these are real people who have literally billions of other things they could be reading that day, but they’re choosing to spend some of their limited time with me.
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#6A good point overall. It's skin-deep, though. Do you think a catch-all name is useful for something like content? Is it only distasteful on the internet/TV/etc. because of the negative impacts of mass-production and commoditisation, or is the idea itself inherently distasteful?
OP here. Thanks for reading!
I don't really have anything against the existence of the catchall term "content." Like, I don't expect the CEO of YouTube to say, "music, short film, art, comedy, journalism, ..., creators" every time he talks about YouTube users. It makes sense from their perspective to bucket everything into "content."
The thing I found interesting was just that the language had crossed over to people where it doesn't make sense to bucket everything. If I'm a blogger, I can just say "blogger" and it's more meaningful than "content creator" but I think the people running small businesses or doing creative work have needlessly adopted the big bucket terminology of "content."
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#7For me the term users sometimes sounds similar to traffic. I prefer customers - that you serve with your product.
The term "user" maybe made sense before any software was commercialized. It differentiated the programmer of the software from the non-programmer that used the software. Even then it was sometimes used derogatorily (especially when people were sneered at as "Lusers"). In the original Tron the Good Guys had to fight for the users.
Customer is a much nicer term. Words do matter.
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#8I feel that all the terms mentioned are useful in specific contexts. Web traffic brings visitors to your resource. If they read your blog, they become readers. If they use your products, they become users. When someone buys something from you, they become a customer.
OP here. Thanks for reading!
> I feel that all the terms mentioned are useful in specific contexts. Web traffic brings visitors to your resource. If they read your blog, they become readers. If they use your products, they become users. When someone buys something from you, they become a customer.
I'll respectfully disagree. I think those terms make sense if you're talking in general terms, but if you're an individual person talking about your work, they're generic catchall terms with better alternatives.
Like, in concrete terms, let's say I publish funny cartoons on my website and sell prints of those cartoons. It doesn't make sense for me to say "web traffic brings visitors to my resource." What traffic? What resource? It would be more meaningful to say, "Visitors find my website through Google search."
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#9A good point overall. It's skin-deep, though. Do you think a catch-all name is useful for something like content? Is it only distasteful on the internet/TV/etc. because of the negative impacts of mass-production and commoditisation, or is the idea itself inherently distasteful?
Stanley Kubrick, Kane Parsons, and Mr. Beast walk into a bar. Bartender says, "Sorry,we don't serve content creators here."
Who gets kicked out?
Re: I Stopped “Creating Content”
#10The first paragraph seems to insinuate that "content" is replacing "art", but that doesn't seem at all related to what the author's actual work looks like, nor does it seem related to the thrust of the argument, which is about how descriptions of your work influence how you think about it. The entire blog looks more like "content" than David to my eyes, but maybe that's because most of the blog predates this shift in the author's thinking?