I am so glad someone said this! I get really mad when a PR person writes the word content in the press release for my company. We don't create content.

To me "content" means you don't know what you are making or you are very embarrassed about it. We make art or entertainment that people pay for.

In general there are two axis I think about in media. One axis is originality, the other axis is durability. Very unoriginal is a transcription of information everyone already knows. Investigative reporting that reveals new information is very original. A creative story is original.

Durability is how long the thing will have some value. They can put the Wizard of Oz in Sphere today. A Tik Tok video will probably be forgotten in a day or two. You could call that "quality" but that's harder to define and measure.

Value is created in being as original and durable as possible. Platforms want you to be the opposite-- that's the slop they call content.

> "content" means you don't know what you are making

This again reminds me of the Telecom New Zealand rebranding. They changed their name from Telecom (meaningful) to Spark (maximally meaningless) and their logo from the word Telecom with a pair of wires passing through the O, to a Claude-esque generic inkblot (maximally meaningless). It gives the impression it got taken over by new management who have no idea what the company actually does, which is probably true.

To be honest mass appeal does not mean great content! I launched an online business recently so Iam trying my best to post stuff that gets people's attention. I still get zero views on TikTok after two days.

> There is a tug of war between people and platform as such across this diagonal axis.

People want value whereas platforms want content, the incentives between a viewer and platform/content creator are getting broken because of the overhead incentive of the platform/content creator for money aka content.

There are some places where its not the case, namely wikipedia (aside from its recent controversies) and archive.org both being non-profit, though there are issues with non-profits as well in terms of their funding and other things. Open source being the example of it in terms of how much value it gives us but there is a lack of funding of that as well.

There has to be some balance in all of it but it seems that the balance is binary-like. Either we are seeing mostly open source underfunded software or we are seeing platforms/content-creators using their power for more money.

It also comes to the point that GP comment makes though, content is created by the expectation of profit and so that is its benchmark but value is created for something more emotional but people also like to eat food and would prefer to do so doing work on open source/the work they like for example but then it also pushes itself into content boundary rather than value.

@tombert has a comment about it which says that they are writing blogs and creating value for the sake of it because they have job on the side and its just the first example that I got reading this thread but many people actually create value as such, but as such they are creating value "in-spite" of incentives and the actual incentives are working on the opposite side of value creation.

It is similar to how actual Musicians in music industry are really exploited by all the systems around them yet they still create Music (value) in-spite of all of it because creating music (value) means more to them than all the issues and there is something human about creating value/music. Here's an extremely good video about it[0]

if money follows content and content follows money, perhaps content is just value which follows money and being shallow rather than something deeper and all these dynamics that interact with each other are leading to a tug of war in the first place.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx7baJMQuVA