This is a submarine piece for Medium, but I found this paragraph to be poignant:
“I’ve been working on publishing systems on the internet for my entire career, which is coming up on 20 years now,” says Williams. “When I stepped back from operations at Twitter, I thought, OK, what’s next? There was no longer this need to make it easy. We’d checked that box. It’s easy to create a website. It’s even easier to send a tweet. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.”
It's easy to agree with this based on the media we encounter today, but this state is not an obvious result of the introduction of the internet. The network has changed our culture, and continues to change our culture, in ways that we don't yet fully understand.
Someone should make a plugin that counts the number of times a brand is mentioned in an "article" and uses ML/crowdsources votes to show a "sponsored content" or "submarine" score. Even if there is some interesting point to be made, I hate being manipulated into reading longform ads.
It's just content that exists at the prodding of a PR company on behalf of their client. Once you've worked with and around PR people, you start to recognise it in the wild even when it's subtle. It's not always a direct angle but could be things to build the brand of key personalities like "Running a business with small children" where the business owner is profiled, or "Staying healthy at the office" where the business owner talks about what they eat and drink.
A significant portion of print (and now online) pieces would be as a result of professional PR efforts.
(My wife works in PR and I used to share an office with another PR company.)
The internet is still new and so businesses remain committed to pre-internet business models. Modal popups, interstitials, encroachment on real content...all of this stuff comes from broadcast and print advertising models that a majority of the players in this world were trained on, either through degree programs or experience at agencies themselves wedded to the status quo.
“I’ve been working on publishing systems on the internet for my entire career, which is coming up on 20 years now,” says Williams. “When I stepped back from operations at Twitter, I thought, OK, what’s next? There was no longer this need to make it easy. We’d checked that box. It’s easy to create a website. It’s even easier to send a tweet. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.”
It's easy to agree with this based on the media we encounter today, but this state is not an obvious result of the introduction of the internet. The network has changed our culture, and continues to change our culture, in ways that we don't yet fully understand.