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Medium, Twitter Founder on Media: We Put Junk Food In Front Of Them and They Eat It (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader points us to an interview of Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, and founder of publishing platform Medium: Ev Williams is not a fan of the increasingly homogenised media he currently sees, with its emphasis on feeding the great, gaping maw of platforms like Twitter and Facebook too often producing what he describes as tantamount to junk food. "It's understandable why media on the web is like it is today," Williams tells the Guardian. "That's not to say there's not a lot of great stuff out there, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with it. A lot of journalists who want to do great stuff are dissatisfied. Advertisers and brands are dissatisfied. We're still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that's what they want -- it's like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want."
Most people are incredibly stupid. They DO want junk food, both figuratively and literally.
I don't respond to AC's.
What a lot of people don't realize is that social media and the various ad clickbait sites are becoming a primary form of entertainment, much like TV was a generation ago. Everyone looks at this stuff, not just "computer people" anymore. Try this experiment -- go wait for a train for 5-10 minutes, or go to the DMV or any task that requires sitting still for a few minutes. Every single person who has one and knows how to use it is going to take out their phone and start playing. Advertisers and junk food websites like BuzzFeed or Medium are going to want to capitalize on that. TV is almost 100% reality garbage now because most people who still watch "regular" TV aren't all that swift, so the advertisers give them their junk food.
I like the fact that you can still ignore the Internet's junk food for the most part, but the aggregator portals like Yahoo or MSN are full of it. Seriously, people complain about Slashdot but it's actually not bad compared to some of the alternatives.
I would be more impressed by what he's saying if I didn't know he founded Medium, the biggest McIntellectual pile of crap since TED talks.