(Short Form) Content Is King

People optimize for the solutions to their queries. Everyone skips the life story before a baking recipe. A number of people (not me, I swear!) skip straight to the answer on StackOverflow. People prefer the instant gratification of a straight answer, and long content doesn’t provide that like the short does.

For a long while (pre-TikTok I’d say, but you could go further back) the general lay of the internet land was that long form, high quality content is the absolute king, and anything other than that gets pushed to the depths and ignored.

Write long quality stuff and you’ll have the adoration of a few interested intellectuals, sure. But that idea is flawed in principle, as a result of modernity: in the grand game that is social media, spending three hours and a bunch of effort making one long, quality post/video isn’t as practical as making three short low effort ones. It’s just the way it works. If you feed more content into the platform, it gives more room for the recommender engines to breathe, lets them get a better grasp of what you do and who likes it.

Whatever the dynamics of the platform, the principle remains the same: the more you make, the more you grow, the more reason/backing you have to grow. It’s cyclical, and some lose steam and many are disfavored by the algorithms. It’s a grindy slog.

There are instances where the longer content succeeds. YouTube has a great draw for the documentary + video essay crowd, and probably other crowds for genres I haven’t thought of. Some TikTok creators have long-running narratives, like a creator who forgot the password to her long lost diary app and tried different combos over the course of a month. Twitter users weren’t pleased with the core concept of Twitter, so they started making tweet threads and bots to manage and save said threads (really over-engineered solution, methinks.)

But I imagine it to be less lucrative, in some senses. More genuine, likely the better way to build a quality audience, sure. Quantity, however, the numbers game, is the central concept that the platforms themselves optimize for. The slog is the point.

It only makes sense, doesn’t it? The more content you have, the better it probably is by principle of gradual improvement. The faster you make it, the more recent stuff engines have to recommend to users. The shorter it is, the faster they can move on to other content (and ads.) It’s just the endgame, the way it’s been optimized to be.

Kinghood

Bill Gates, Flavio Copes and every SEO optimization org says the same thing: “Content is King.” And I’m certain that’s right, it only makes sense. Yet the statement has always been vague, to me: Is it the deep, effortful sort of content that’s king, or is it a wealth of shallow, mass-producible content? Quantity, or Quality? I’m unsure.

I suppose the most correct answer would be that the preference of the internet has progressed from the former to the latter, over time. Attention spans and free time have shrunk, and to feed the infinite scroll, the filler must exist. Long form content was king, and in a way, the short form is being coronated over time.

ME! ME! ME!

I’m still at a crossroads of sorts: Do I stick to short technicals or long ones? I don’t look at the analytics for what I write (helps with mental, methinks) but I’m probably at the stage where I should “pick a side.”

I like making long technical posts. Spotify’s Authorization Code Flow For Dummies was fun to write. But it was draining, took me an afternoon and a couple of rewrites to get everything just right. I like to make things well.

That draining bit is my problem, and it’s why I’m leaning more towards short posts like this one. Furthermore, if I get used to making short ones, I could extend the practice into uni pretty easily. I doubt I’ll have the time to make long posts.

Not that I’ve written enough to make a concrete decision at this point, though. Bit more time, couple more topics, perhaps I’ll have a feel for what’s best.

If you’re interested in my previously mentioned RSS feed, here’s the link! Content’s embedded in the feed, and it’s generalized for both musings and technical posts.