There was an old joke from times I was back at school. It goes something like this:

A young student studies dragons and the art of dragon slaying for 10 years. He learns everything about them: all the types, their weaknesses, behaviors etc. After finishing, he goes into the world, and discovers that dragons do not exist. He returns to the teacher, and asks:

-What do I do now? I’ve wasted so much time on a worthless skill!

-Go on and teach other people how to kill dragons

Depending on your background, this joke is usually makes fun of subjects like philosophy, math degrees, or other things that seem impractical in “our day and age”. I don’t necessarily agree with the point it’s making, but it is a decent bit of life advice - that there might be a gap between useful things, and things you enjoy in life. In the last couple of years I’ve noticed an interesting behavior pattern of online creators that reminded me of this joke.

The grind loop

It starts something like this: you get interested in some niche topic. I’ll pick productivity, since it’s the first one I’ve noticed it in. Aside from a ton of self-help books (some valuable, most can be described as “a blog post stretched into 250 pages”), there’s obviously a market for people to make content on. And on multiple occasions, the “life cycle” of such niche channels looks like this:

1. Describe “the best workflow” (the one they are using today)
2. In two weeks, throw a d20.
   • if you pass your skill check, go to (3)
   • otherwise, switch something in your workflow and go to (1)
3. Write a book/sell a course on “how to do productivity right”
4. Find the next fad in productivity, and go to (1)

The first time a channel goes through this cycle In my opinion is OK. It’s only natural for a person, passionate about a topic to cover it from multiple angles and improve with time. My problem starts when you can’t understand anymore if they actually use what they preach, or are they just motivated by views to do a video about the next big notes editor/todo list/PKM organization style.

This, of course, is present in other places: food cooking channels go from describing some fundamentals into chasing the next trendy recipe, software/programming channels mysteriously start covering topics pretty much based on whatever gets upvoted on hacker news (or similar), and instead of getting an actual insight from a person with actual experience, you get a sea of echo chambers, just trying to get into trends. You can’t expect a chess channel from doing a tutorial or two for chess, then also falling into the whirpool of “OPENING X IS HOW YOU PWN NOOBS”, and selling you a course, a book, and merch about it.

Maybe the reason is the lack of attention span of general audience, but I tend to believe that the problem is that content delivery systems like Youtube, Tiktok and so on do not expect anyone to actually subscribe and follow a content creator. These systems did this from the “engagement” perspective - they seem to try to induce your desire to watch more content. Watching the creators you actually subscribe to probably goes against this goal, proven by dozens, hundreds of A/B tests most likely.

So what?

I don’t know what can I do about this, or what can we collectively do about this. The result of this way of motivating content creation is that I just don’t trust most things on Youtube anymore. I feel like I’m always advertised to - even when the actual content creators don’t sell me anything! I’m always waiting for next video to be “now since you’ve been warmed up by previous content, here’s my awesome branded knife set/book”.

Side note: of course, it’s important to acknowledge a couple of things:

• content creators themselves are not the problem here - this behavior is incentivized by the whole “content creator” grind.
• some of these ways to get paid are not problematic at all and come from the right place for people.

Silver lining

The one area where things are still somewhat manageable (but it’s getting worse) is personal blog posts. There’s still a lot of BS there, LLMs definitely didn’t help that also. But since the effort needed to write a blog post often does not require special skills (unlike working with video/audio), people who actually do the thing talk about doing the thing.

My hope with this blog is to dilute the ocean a bit by creating things I’d like to read about. Maybe someone actually randomly finds this some day and can appreciate it for the same reason I appreciate other people’s work. And sometimes the old man has to yell at clouds a bit, you know.