"Intentionally Uninteresting"

why a lot of online content is just a bit shit

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

I’ve been reading a fascinating non-fiction book called Filterworld by Kyle Chayka. The full title is ‘how algorithms flattened culture’ and the whole concept is so interesting. He is a journalist for the New Yorker and writes a lot about the internet and social media and its impact on culture.

Obviously I have a vested interest in this topic because of the work that I do, but I think this book would open your eyes about how much of our world is being homogenised by the internet. You may think that if you don’t post on social media, or at least don’t post for others to consume your output, that algorithms don’t impact your life. But they do.

Ever wonder why that person you’ve been Facebook friends with since school never shows up on your feed unless it’s an engagement, a pregnancy announcement, a divorce announcement, or a death? Algorithm. Or why you hear the same songs over and over on Spotify even when you’re shuffling on a playlist 20 hours long? Algorithm. The Netflix homepage, the recommended items on Amazon, the ads served to you wherever you go on the internet. Algorithm. Yours will be different to mine, but not by as much as you think.

The internet is constantly learning from the information we feed it.

Social media is the perfect example: Instagram used to be about photos and captions, ‘insta’ updates of the minuatiae of your day. You would follow people and see their content on your feed chronologically, which made you feel connected and up to date. Now, your feed is organised based on what they think you should see. People you interact with will be closer to the top, content that has ‘performed’ well with others will be prioritised in your feed, a post from two weeks ago can appear as the first thing you see today.

This is why creators like me are constantly reminding people to like and save and comment, because that’s the only way the platforms know you want to continue seeing the content. Without that input, my posts will be relegated to the bottom of your feed, next to the woman from HR from that job you left 10 years ago.

As content creators, we’re told how to maximise our reach - how to get more people to see our content, how to get them to stick around, how to get them to follow us. We should definitely do videos, but they have to be under 10 seconds to match people’s attention span. We have to open with a question to grab people before they swipe away. We have to posit questions to encourage them to engage with us rather than silently consuming and leaving. We have to appeal to the maximum number of people because that’s how you go viral, that’s how you get the big views, that’s how you grow your account.

Which is why - on the whole - our feeds are filled with short, bland, unoffensive, meaningless tripe.

The quote in the headline of this post, from Filterworld, sums up the kind of content that is rewarded online: intentionally uninteresting. This type of content isn’t groundbreaking enough that you close whatever app you’re on to act on the thunderbolt of inspiration that’s gripped you, and it won’t get you to click away or stop the mindless doom scroll. You give it your momentary attention (that sweet, sweet, valuable attention the algorithm thrives on) and then instantly forget it. In the book, Chayka references the famous Brian Eno quote, when describing the music genre he created with his album Ambient 1: Music For Airports: “as ignorable as it is interesting”.

Tiktok was built on the concept that one person invents a dance, or records a funny or inspirational voiceover, or comes up with a meme and then it’s copied by millions of others. That’s what is considered Doing Tiktok Successfully. There are songs I cannot listen to because I’ve heard them so many times scrolling through Tiktok: if I hear the opening bars of What Was I Made For? by Billie Eilish, I have an intense visceral reaction and must mute my phone immediately. What is it they say about familiarity and contempt…?

Within days of the initial ‘demure, mindful, cutesy’ video going viral, the phrase was already being used by ‘fun’ social media managers trying to sell us teabags. I’ve received briefs from brands who want me to create ‘authentic and genuine’ content for them, but specify: what I can wear, what colour my nail varnish should be, the presence of fairy lights in the background, no personal items to be shown on shelves, and no tattoos visible. They want ASMR nail click-clacking, exact phrases that need to be used, and they have an exact amount of seconds they want me to gaze vacuously into the camera to showcase the product in action. I’m not entirely sure how ‘authentic and genuine’ they think content can be with all of those stipulations, that have also been sent to hundreds of other content creators working on the same campaign.

(NB: It should be obvious if you know me, but my typical answer to those demands is ‘nah I’m alright thanks’…!)

But the problem is that these requests are so common, and understandable, because the proof exists that these elements are what performs well on the internet. We’re so used to seeing a certain kind of content from brands that anything that diverges from that either sinks without a trace or ends up with a comment section filled with insults: ‘those nails are horrible’, ‘did anyone else notice the messy flat?’, ‘couldn’t concentrate, too busy looking at her ‘tache’ - all real comments I’ve seen just today on social media.

Do you finish a social media scrolling session feeling comforted, happy, full of hope or joy? Or do you usually come to, like you’d been blacked out, realising you’ve just wasted an hour (or two… or three…) watching absolute nonsense when you could’ve been doing literally anything else?

The flattening of the internet has made everything accessible and everything boring.

In a world of trending audio, dance routine trends, and memes so ubiquitous even your grandma has heard them, it’s refreshing to step outside that box.

And this is why I’m enjoying Substack so much. I feel like I’m slowly untraining my brain, after over a decade creating visual content for the internet. For so long I tried so hard to make my writing, my photos, my topics, my face fit in with what was popular, what was liked, what was successful. And along the way I feel like I lost a bit of myself. Like my edges were sanded off to make me more palatable. I changed so I could fit in better, be more appealing to potential followers and potential brand partners.

I used to write stories as a child. I have a stack of notebooks filled with them and I would tell anyone who listened that I wanted to be an author when I grew up, until a teacher told me that wasn’t ‘a real job’ (!)

But over the years, I stopped writing. Of course technically I still wrote a lot - most of my weekly blog posts in the early days were 2k+ words each - but I found myself trying to keep things generic because, above all, I wanted to be helpful. I wanted to educate and share the information that I had in an accessible and simple way.

Over time, I cut out opening paragraphs with small updates about me, I jettisoned content that spoke about my personal life if it was unrelated to rosacea. I slowly stopped posting as much about the books I was reading, the holidays I took, the daily detail of my life because either the content would flop, or people would just respond with unrelated comments or demands. A pertinent example being a reply to an instagram story about my grandmother having a stroke that simply read: ‘moisturiser recommendations…?’

In the past I’ve complained to friends that I felt like a rosacea bot, that people saw me as a 2D internet entity. Type in question, get response, no emotion or humanity required, beep boop. I would have always described my content as honest, vulnerable, personal. And it is. But it quickly became honest, vulnerable, and personal about only about one topic: my skin. How my skin made me feel, the ways my skin upset me, the ways in which my skin impacted my self esteem and my confidence.

I can try to blame the weird access that the internet has created, the rise in parasocial relationships between online creators and their followers, and the general entitlement of people feeling comfortable with not only demanding information but expecting an answer nownownow because the internet never sleeps. But I must also acknowledge my part in constructing the monster. I consciously chose to change my way of communicating and my way of showing up online to appeal to the common denominator. I altered my output to try to maximise its reach. I encouraged people to contact me whenever they needed help, to leave comments with their rosacea questions, to see me as their friendly local Spiderman rosacea educator.

So can I really be surprised that people don’t connect on a personal level with writing and imagery from which I have removed extraneous personal information?

I am having to unlearn so much here on Substack. I have to resist the urge to turn every post into a teaching moment (it’s ironic that I simply cannot resist telling you that if you are looking for rosacea tips, advice, and recommendations, dont worry, you can find 12 years of articles on my website).

I have to shush the voice in my head that says ‘you can’t write about that, that’s just an unfinished thought you had in the shower!’ I have to give myself permission to share personal stories and to write about them in the way I want them to be read, rather than worrying about being called self-indulgent, or boring, or accused of wasting people’s time.

By having this outlet, this place where I can write and create the kind of content that fills my cup, I think I’m more able to show up in the spaces that tend to empty my cup. Instagram and Facebook are still a great place to reach people and share quick, accessible, snack content that serves as a great introduction to rosacea. But the lack of depth means they will never be the places that bring me joy. I’m too much of a waffler, too much of a sharer to be limited to 10 seconds or a single swipe of the thumb.

I appreciate you being here for the full meal.