Links are broken- is anyone building a network link sharing social tool?
Sure we still have search and social media, but these are fundamentally broken
This one’s going to be a bit of nostalgia pontificating!
Back when Newton found out about gravity, he could only share his ideas on a tome called the Principia Mathematica. Contemporary tech bro’s of that bygone era like Aristotle and such also had the similar options. Handwritten tomes, downtime at the village square over beer, or parchments and scrolls.
But these were crucial for those ideas to get distributed and drive the progress of science. Ideas have always fascinated man from the beginning of time, and they always needed some form of distribution to reach the “mass”erati . So when Gutenberg’s “disruption” in the form of a printing press hit the firmament, the universe conspired to create something called the “Book”.
Books became the medium for distributing thoughts and ideas from unique voices. Magical days. Remember how you would go crazy seeking a book from a particular author if it was unavailable in your neighbourhood book store ?
Beg, borrow and steal if you had to? Book barters anyone!!
Books just had two modes of distribution at that time. Publisher led retail stores and the insanely amazing neighbourhood library. The coolest analog search engine after the neighbourhood book store. A bunch of books, tagged and categorised by labels. Unlike the digital search engines which came much later on, the early version analog search engines had less scale and thus less monopoly. There was the neighbourhood one. The school one. The town hall one. The national gallery one, the big one at the Capital and so on.
Along with book stores these were the analog platforms for distributing your ideas.
Then came the internet. Distribution at scale. No more barriers to distributing your word. Everyone could be a writer and an author. More unique voices could be heard. No more need for pages, inks and pens.
A billion tiny blue links exploded. The publisher lost its relevance. The library lost its job. Technology became the enabler, advertiser, rule setter and gatekeeper.
Cycle of innovation as economists theorise.
In an all-you-can-eat menu, we got convinced that if we could have a lot , we could consume a lot as well. Think about the 20 movies you can see everyday, because a disruption called “streaming” “changed the world” and delivered all movies ever built right into your pocket playlist.
You only have time to watch two or three in a week you said?
No way!!
Subscription was supposed to enable us to consume a lot more. What happened?
Or maybe it was a just the price of a promise which said “you can if you want to” ?
So anyway, back then it was the media house or publisher whom you needed to influence. They decided if your idea deserved a larger canvas. In a world full of of people from all kinds of culture, race, ethnicity and background , your reach was limited. So you needed the publisher to open these doors. The publisher in turn scaled reach through retail book stores that sprouted through cities, villages and towns.
The one who had more - set the rules.
Barnes and Noble, Simon and Schuster, Penguin Random House, remember the names? If you wanted a career as an author you needed them. But didn’t they ultimately become a closed group cabal who could kill or give wings to your dreams ?
They needed to be “disrupted”.
The internet disrupted and democratised that. Freedom, from the hegemony of elitism.
Finally.
With one click of a button called publish, you could reach larger audiences at a cheaper cost and faster pace. It was amazing and in those early days, some early movers in the self publishing space definitely got lucky because publishers built on the internet needed people and incentivised them to discover these new voices.
New markets got built.
Bloggers got birthed. Influencers were influenced. Everyone else became a guru or teacher.
More people chucked their library cards in the bin and hit subscribe. With Prime, Plus and One you could get anything in one hour!! Just hit click and magically there would be a person at your door.
“You ordered a Giraffe sir”?
Giddy days of distribution and happiness. There was just a tiny problem. The answer to the word “ more” is actually “more”. Not less. No company built on public debt (yes I mean shares) can deliver more value, through less sales. And more sales generally need more potential customers.
So, just like the publisher bro’s before them, tech bro’s too had to keep churning the profit wheel. After a decade or two of incentivising traffic, they controlled the traffic, and the easiest way to scale their earnings was to monetise it.
Setting rules around how you, as a seller of ideas and dreams, could reach this traffic.
It started with paying for your reach. Pay more and get more reach. However, in a free market economy there is no end to “growth”. So, after a point in time everyone wanted the reach and everyone was willing to pay for it. The buyer however, could only consume that much! Remember the few movies at max you can watch a week with Netflix? Same thing. The public could only read or watch that much.
So, after a while you could not pay your way through it. Scale wasn’t helping. Because when everyone pays to get inside a 100 seater theatre. Only100 can get it. You can pay but there is no guarantee you will get in.
To solve for this, tech bro’s created a solution. It was called the algorithm. A nicer process to remove a few voices and promote a few which drove more revenue. Magical stuff that would decide for you what you want, by analysing what you had consumed before.
Whoever won the algorithm could thereby win your attention.
This worked for a while, although as you can imagine, a lot behind the scenes was breaking down in this cycle of entropy. Like publishers, tech enablers too had to contend with competition who wanted some of that advertising revenue associated with reach. So everyone created their own platform and own algorithms. The same user “coolblue76” was now a different signal of a different algorithm across different platforms.
The problem was that “coolblue76” still only had one wallet and could only pay so many creators, artists and entrepreneurs to distribute their ideas.
The core problem remained on how sales, marketing and product could create better recall and win wallet share. A problem we have been solving for 2000 years.Some tech enablers decided that they would guide users to where they wanted to go in lieu of a price. Others who could not win the traffic cop game, decided to create walled gardens.
Idea merchants had to distribute their ideas within the algorithm of the walled garden they chose. Still even in all this, it left creators with some links that they could play with to gain some distribution.
“Innovation” and evolution never stop though, and in the next instalment, came the machines and data systems titled as transformers and large language models. They took every single algorithm and indexed every single word, thereby condensing thousands of authors and millions of links ever published on a particular topic into a simple paragraph (or more details if needed) in less than 3 seconds.
This output had no links though.
Damn helpful. Super efficient. Time saving. So much so, that if you so wanted them to write you a new story, narrate it, sing a song or pen a poem and they would do so. Easily.
LLMs synthesised the idea and removed the voice.
So, this is where we are today. This has benefits of course, but unique voices now need to do a lot more to be heard and get identified. Search engines, social media, bookstores and libraries used to connect the buyer to the owner of the voice. AI has removed that ownership and became the voice itself. (ok not really but you get the drift). To adjust to this, platforms have stopped allowing links to be widely distributed beyond their walled gardens. Many of them want to harness all the data and build their own LLMs.
This is no AI doomsday rhetoric. This was inevitable the day we started on digitisation, and it will only grow from here to its next evolution. For sure it has its benefits but what do indie creators now resort to ?
How do the the owners of new unique voices attract traffic if they cannot distribute their links? Independent authors, writers, idea merchants, product builders, mom and pop shop owners still need a platform where they can reach out to potential audiences when they are starting out without getting drowned out. Social media and search is too convoluted and crowded by now to help these unknown voices. They have become a closed group cabal who can kill or give wings to your dreams.
So. I asked two very popular LLM agents the following question:
“LLMs have killed traffic distribution. How will independent authors, writers and bloggers get traffic to identify with their work?”
They both gave eerily identical responses which seemed massively regurgitated, but can be summarised as follows
LLMs are not the enemy (funny)
Creators should use LLMs to write better
Creators should create hyper niches and write quality content
Creators should build communities by promoting on social media
Creators should engage with communities
and so on….
Low quality responses with synthetic “advice” which neither gave an answer nor a solution.
Creators and artists need to attract “real” people to build “niche”communities and distribution. Unless of course they are planning to go door -to-door with flyers and handouts. Building social communities is incredibly hard, more so, because by now most digital platforms of distribution are walled gardens. Algorithms optimise engagement signals, not the quality of what is being shared and engagement does not always mean quality or rarity.
Unless they get traffic for engagement, unknown voices thereby have very little opportunity to build a niche. It was the ability to share links and direct traffic via digital channels of distribution that helped small creators and indie small businesses get attention. That honestly is kind of dead.
It’s not for a lack of trying though. From Reddit to Discord to Etsy to Medium and Substack and countless others - each platform started with the same promise, but only the early movers and celebrities could build their community and brand. Once everyone moved in, it was impossible to get discovered without resorting to advertising, algorithms and curation.
A cycle of repetition with the same ending.
Most recently Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky is also kind of built around the same idea, a decentralised feed sharing network (or Twitter before it became Twitter), but it’s very early days and with only 3 million people onboarded it will take time to grow. I like it though for what it’s trying to achieve and any unknown voice who is trying to get heard should spend time there and hope that it takes off.
The first movers will get distinct advantage, before it starts resorting to the mean.
Beehiv’s newsletter only ad network plus the concept of “boosts” is also trying to do the same. Sometime back it was “The Deck” which provided a route for discovery through a niche advertising platform for influential blogs.
But none of them have been able to solve for this in a meaningful sustainable manner. The moment they became successful, and everyone moved in, it was more or less the end of the fringe players and unknown voices. Meanwhile people got saturated with newsletters, blogs, tweets, facebook posts, instagram reels and so on.
The problem wouldn’t have been this pronounced if the popular platforms had a little less greed, but in a capitalist world, one cannot blame greed. Instead of 10% if they allowed let’s say 30% of the feeds to get organic distribution without resorting to ads, the problem would have been a lot less acute. But that means loss of revenue.
So they won’t be solving for this. Which means, someone else somewhere will have to come up with something new which can attract a healthy body of users whose needs currently cannot be met by the popular media platforms.
Maybe a paid only simple link sharing medium with a network effect. Less of algorithm led curation and more of community led distribution. Where you don’t have to create your own community but you can get access to a relevant community to deliver your content.
Is anyone building this?