The Case for Ignoring the Algorithm

Maybe 5 hour podcasts and arcane newsletters are telling us something about human interest.

In my last newsletter, I questioned why we’ve always considered the longer-form film to be the creative cornerstone of brand campaigns, while the short-form content and social cutdowns are often appended to the project at the last minute.

The topic clearly touched a nerve. A lot of people have been thinking the same way, but there were also valid questions about the long-term value of short-form content.

So this week I’m making a counterpoint to my own argument, but less from the qualitative perspective (long-form videos have more artistic and emotional value), than through the lens of impact and audience relationships.

Let’s see how it goes….

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At the bottom of last week’s newsletter, I referenced a Taylor Lorenz interview with Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon. One of Conte’s core points is that while short-form video can be great for discovery and daily exposure, algorithmically driven feeds change the relationship between follower and creator.

"The way I like to think about it is that the unit of value on Tik Tok is really the piece of content, the stop-me-from-being-bored-for-15-seconds piece of content,” Conte says. “What that has essentially done is that it has commoditized creators. It doesn't matter if I get that content from this creator or that creator. It's just corn, it's steel, it's rice, it's literally a commodity. With the follow, the unit of value is the relationship, it's getting to know a person over time, which is very different from the unit of value being the piece of content and then never seeing work from that Creator again.” (Emphasis mine.)

Today’s content-driven algorithms shift the value from the creator to the content.

Today’s content-driven algorithms shift the value from the creator to the content. That’s the pivot from social graph to interest graph, and while this presents upsides for discoverability, there are some massive downsides.

Interest-driven algorithms essentially mandate format and topics. They create a combination of algorithm capture (you have to produce exactly what the algorithm dictates will work), and audience capture (to stay relevant, you have to give your audience a more extreme version of what riled them up yesterday).

Secondly, the actual feed dynamic, particularly on TikTok, may hollow out communities. It’s increasingly difficult to get your content in front of even your own followers, and accordingly, the audience may not even remember who produced content they liked. When everyone is producing variations on a limited variety of themes to work the algorithm, the story changes from “who”, to “how well does this content fit the game.”

Conte and Lorenz discuss this in terms of shrinking creator fandoms, but the same dynamic applies to brands and even creators who just want to build consistent reach.

Algorithms Mute Originality

The impact of this becomes clear when you look at platforms where algorithms don't dominate. In any content category, there’s an inverse relationship between the importance of the algorithm and the diversity of content.

Take podcasts, for instance. Thanks to uniformly terrible discovery tools and clunky interfaces, podcast content offers remarkable diversity. Massive hits range from 30-minute news shows to the famous talk shows to arcane stuff like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, which has 5+ hour deep dives into obscure historical topics. There are Dungeons and Dragons podcasts with tens of thousands of listeners and uber-online shows, like Smoosh Reading Reddit Stories. That’s not even counting YouTube’s massive parallel podcast ecosystem.

There’s an inverse relationship between the importance of the algorithm and the diversity of content.

Newsletters share many of the same qualities as podcasting, although the Substack homepage is encouraging both discoverability (good) and sameness (bad). You can find much of the same diversity in newsletter content.

It turns out that algorithms aren’t condensing our interest into limited formats because that’s what audiences want — they’re doing it because that’s what keeps people on the platform the longest, while allowing for the most efficient ad delivery.

If you can figure out how and where to deeply connect with your community, you can build something with much deeper connection than the rented attention on TikTok.

I argued in favor of short-form video because it’s where the audiences are, and there are massive benefits of daily exposure and discoverability. It’s hard to beat getting in front of your audience 5 of every 7 days, even for a few seconds, with potential for viral reach and discoverability.

Algorithms aren’t condensing our interest into limited formats because that’s what audiences want.

As I write this, the online topic of the moment is the death of Duolingo owl in a hit-and-run accident with a Cybertruck. Somehow everyone from mainstream news to Reddit threads to other creators are discussing it. Yes, it’s ephemeral and largely meaningless, but you could never get that coverage in any other format.

However, as soon as you remove algorithmic mandates and look at the fast-growing ecosystems around newsletters and podcasts, you discover a kaleidoscope of content and format types. You find “niches” with hundreds of thousands of followers, passionate fanbases interested in epically long podcasts, odd newsletters, or YouTube shows with cult followings.

The biggest brands in our space, like The North Face and Nike, have been struggling at least in part because they’ve become so far removed from their communities.

The success of podcasts and newsletters indicates that going deep into the right community with content that adds real value may trump the reach potential of the biggest social platforms. **However, it’s worth noting that these stand-out podcasts are not an annual or quarterly effort. They’re weekly or more, and they’re committed for the long haul. Will twice-a-year brand films break through in the same way? I’m not as sure.

So, what’s the verdict – short-form or long-form?

Maybe we can paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald and say that the mark of first-rate content strategy is “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”