The Algorithm Is Creatively Bankrupting Us
I was watching a YouTube video from Dave Plummer, one of my favorite YouTube dudes, and he said something along the lines of “Everyone seems to be ending their videos abruptly now? I guess that’s the new thing the algorithm likes.” And then he ended his video abruptly.
We don’t make stuff for people anymore, we make stuff to conform to a set of instructions entered into machines. If we’re really lucky, the stuff we make will weave its way through the labyrinth of “if” statements and “while” loops and emerge from the other side with the machine’s stamp of approval.
And I realized so much of what we talk about as creative types, whether hobbyists or professionals, orbits around The Algorithm. We have to appease it at all times. Yes, you can emerge from The Algorithm Labyrinth, the head of the minotaur in your hand your prize won purely by luck. But in order to be successful, to replicate that minotaur slaying, you need to keep going back through until you know your way by heart. Only then can you enjoy success and riches.
Except then they’ll change it without explanation. Of course, if you’re a big entity it’s not that tough to adapt to these sudden and unexplained changes. You might even have a rep or partner-manager at The Algorithm Company helping you navigate. If you’re a smaller creator, get fucked, loser.
Have you ever watched a MrBeast video? It’s the Goodest Content of all.
They tell us The Algorithm wants what we want, which is Good Content. Have you ever watched a MrBeast video? It’s the Goodest Content of all. I know this morning I woke up and said “Man if only there were a way for YouTube to suggest to me a video about $1 versus $1 million boats". IT WANTS WHAT WE WANTS AND THE ALGORITHM GIVES IT TO US.
It’s awful. Modern creativity is a race to appease the algorithm, and we can all lie to ourselves while also believing the lies of the giant companies who work hand-in-hand with government agencies the world over and say “yes, but again it’s only showing us what we actually want!”
You can’t be honest when you have to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules. You can’t even say “gun” or “killed” in a video about someone who was KILLED with a GUN because The Algorithm will punish you for it. You have to say they were UNALIVED by a NERF BLASTER. Eventually that will become the new English term for murder by gun and holoTube creators will be saying “This person was UNMADEHAPPY by a YIKESHAMMER” so they, too, can say something factual without upsetting the robot overlords.
The Algorithm is not pathing us toward a future of creativity. When you create something it should be for the following:
Your own enjoyment
The enjoyment of others
A combination of the two
Unfortunately in order for your creation to be enjoyed by others, it must first navigate The Algorithm.
I already realized it, but to remain creatively true means having to come to terms with the very real notion that no one is ever going to see anything you create, no matter how much effort or time you put it into. It doesn’t matter how good it is, either, or how informative, how well edited or shot or hosted. If it doesn’t conform to a set of arcane rules over which you have no control, it’s probably not going to be seen.
So while I’ve realized this, it’s a lot harder to accept the new reality is just, well, the old reality. It’s what the web was like in 1997, when you had a counter at the bottom of your GeoCities page showing how many people had visited your site since its inception. I remember the excitement of hitting 1,000 visitors on one of my pages. It took literally years.
I hope we can all come to accept this new reality. The egalitarian dream of the early internet was completely obliterated during the 2010s and mostly no one cared. Now we have more information available than ever, more ways to self-soothe ourselves from the plague of boredom, and none of it is designed for people, rather it’s designed by people to satisfy the ruleset of a machine.
Before search engines, the only way to find stuff online was via hyperlinks. Do you know what a hyperlink is? Here, here’s a hyperlink. Very early on, when you’d make a shitty website, you’d just throw hyperlinks everywhere. If you mentioned a train you’d hyperlink the word train to a GeoCities page about trains.
You’d do the same for any other word that caught your fancy. Anime. Cat. Beef. Whatever! And then visitors would follow those links and discover a new website about beef. It was fun and exciting. There were no rules, really (today effective linking is the backbone of any SEO growth strategy worth its salt). Sometimes you added a hyperlink for comedic effect. That’s how you found new stuff! You followed someone’s hyperlink and you just stumbled upon something interesting.
Hey, remember StumbledUpon?
If you want to be creatively pure online in 2024 and going forward you need to accept the fact very few people are going to ever see what you make. Either create stuff that makes you happy or create stuff to pass the checks in the code. There’s very little overlap between those two endeavors unfortunately. So pick one or the other. It can’t be both.