What happens when content REALLY takes off?

The pace of content on the internet already seems to be at a blistering speed. Twitter sees roughly 350,000 tweets per minute. Users watch roughly 4.5M YouTube videos every minute. Add in other social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and the numbers are unreal.

With that we haven’t even talked about web content. Sites are churning out tons of content, and roughly 250,000 new websites are created every day.

Despite those huge numbers, things are likely to skyrocket fro there in the next few years. I talked a bit about AI-generated art recently, but we’re also seeing a lot more AI-generated text, videos, and all kinds of content. As those systems smooth out and scale, content will be churning from everywhere you look.

So what can we do?

I’m not sure I have the answer, but I have some ideas. My first thought is that it may not be as bad as it sounds. Even if content goes 10x in the next few years, it doesn’t mean that you need to see it. I mentioned above that there are 350,000 new tweets every minute, but I only follow who I want to follow. If people are publishing too frequently for my taste or it’s just spam, I can stop following them. Scale doesn’t hurt me there.

A potential issue is the growing rise of “recommended” content on social media…