Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Content Is King

divinations.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 82 posts

Re: Why Content Is King

#61

Post by im3w1l »

enriquto wrote: post #4

A good start would be to stop using this stupid terminology. Quoting RMS [0]: I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages). [0] https://web.archive.org/web/…

My pet peeve is User Generated Content. Generate is often used when an inanimate object gives rise to something, so UGC is dehumanizing in addition to being devaluing.

Re: Why Content Is King

#62

Post by username90 »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #59
powvans wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally consuming something means that it no longer exists after it has been consumed. A fire consumes a home and it can no longer be lived in. I consume a hamburger and therefore you cannot eat it. Content on the internet isn't consumed in this sense. If anything it's your own time and attention that is consumed when watching videos.

The novelty of such works, however, is consumed when seen for the first time. You can never see a work of art for the first time a second time. And that's important.

A big difference is that others can consume the same thing, a million content creators is more than enough to supply content to the entire world. There is no reason why consuming digital content should cost a significant part of your income when it is so cheap to produce at global scale.

Re: Why Content Is King

#63

Post by bonoboTP »

Bakary wrote: post #57
bonoboTP wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really ambivalent about Stallman's language crusades. Similarly to how I dislike the focus on the newest politically correct terminology. Why is "creative" OK, when "creator" isn't? I think it's more about the fact that adopting the enemy's language is seen as a kind of submission, a recognition and acceptance of their power over you, even if their words themselves aren't "bad" intrinsically. Not sure if it's the…

In this case the language crusade prompts us to think about our assumptions more deeply. The comment did bring my attention to concepts I had not noticed before. There is an adversarial aspect to it, but it's no different from debating ideas. You're just questioning certain premises, it doesn't mean you have to discard them afterwards.

Good point. We should notice such shifts in language and what they imply.

Re: Why Content Is King

#64

Post by SarikayaKomzin »

As many have pointed out, this is an obviously oversimplified maxim. But I’d like to add two reasons why I think it is a useful heuristic despite that.

1. Great content can’t be commodified, despite the industry’s best efforts.

2. Content lives in extremistan. [1]. Though the average piece of content has little upside, the upside of a great piece of content is nearly limitless.

At the very least, content is a “prince” alongside distribution (network effects).

[1] “Taleb provides another example of Extremistan: book publishing. Suppose one randomly chooses a thousand authors, and adds up the total number of books they have sold. Now, add the bestselling author in the world, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Her book sales with vastly exceed the total of the other thousand authors.”

https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

Re: Why Content Is King

#65

Post by bonoboTP »

amelius wrote: post #24
enriquto wrote: post #4

A good start would be to stop using this stupid terminology. Quoting RMS [0]: I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages). [0] https://web.archive.org/web/…

What is wrong with "content"? It's the opposite of "without content".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Conten...

Re: Why Content Is King

#66

Post by [deleted] »

powvans wrote: post #47
Veen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consuming" always irritates me. We don't read written works or watch videos, we consume content.

Generally consuming something means that it no longer exists after it has been consumed. A fire consumes a home and it can no longer be lived in. I consume a hamburger and therefore you cannot eat it. Content on the internet isn't consumed in this sense. If anything it's your own time and attention that is consumed when watching videos.

[deleted]

Re: Why Content Is King

#67

Post by Bakary »

inglor_cz wrote: post #51
srivatsamudumby wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, "please let's not call them creators, they are not gods"

In fact, they sort-of are, in the worlds that they have created. GRRM is de facto a creator god of Westeros, and Tolkien of Middle-earth.

Gurm in this case would be the deist type of God that spun the universe into existence and then stepped away...

Re: Why Content Is King

#68

Post by cbozeman »

fmajid wrote: post #13

Content is not king, and Andrew Odlyzko explains why: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282 At the time he wrote it, the whole of Hollywood yearly revenue made less than 2 weeks of telcos’, and SMS by itself was worth more (SMS has been commoditized since, to the benefit of Apple and Facebook).

Wow, thank you very much for the link. Now I see what's gone wrong with all the ISPs in America.

> “I don’t want to be anyone’s dumb pipes,” says Hindery. “If all you do is racks and servers, that’s dumb. What we’re doing is melding the network and the content.

This is a fancy way of saying, "I'm not content to just create a huge, high-speed network that services as many customers as possible, I want to extract yet more revenue out of a business I probably don't understand and can't be expected to competently manage."

Trying to explain to these idiots that the only thing an ISP - be it Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Spectrum, Frontier, whoever, can offer me, is a great big fat dumb fucking pipe, is like trying to explain the finer points of Shakespeare to a mollusk.

Re: Why Content Is King

#69

Post by username90 »

blfr wrote: post #30
Veen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consuming" always irritates me. We don't read written works or watch videos, we consume content.

The new way of interacting with videos and other media online does warrant a different term. Many people really don't watch videos, they consume content, ie. scroll or swipe through an endless stream of tweets/videos/reddit posts stopping and then moving on. It's just like watching a movie vs watching TV, reading versus paging through the newspaper, etc.

> Many people really don't watch videos, they consume content, ie. scroll or swipe through an endless stream of tweets/videos/reddit posts stopping and then moving on.

How is that different from plopping down the sofa, turn on the TV and watch the endless stream of content being broadcast to you? This isn't really a new thing, most people consumed TV that way before digital consumption became a thing.

Re: Why Content Is King

#70

Post by cbozeman »

dmje wrote: post #8

Conflating "media" and "content" is the issue here. Facebook is successful because of content. Google+ failed because there wasn't any content. Heading tech up against content in some way is also a silly argument. Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech. Ultimately, a web page with some stirring, moving or life changing words on it is going to hav…

Facebook isn't successful because of content.

Facebook is successful because of its ease of use comparative to Google+. Facebook's genius was that it was designed to be easy enough for the masses to use. Google+ was clearly designed by engineers, for engineers.

There's your problem right there, but you got it right in the second part of your post.

> Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech.

That was the crux of the issue. Steve Jobs understood this. Its why my Mom was able to grasp an iPhone interface far easier and sooner than the Android phone she had had for years before. It still blows my fucking mind how anyone can find the iPhone more intuitive, but I guess that's because I grew up in the 80s and 90s, with 80s and 90s computers as a kid, so you had to learn the technical underpinnings somewhat in order to even operate those machines.

Ease of use = more content.

Post reply on HN