Feeds, and Frequency over Relevance

Dumb feeds are rewriting Sturgeon’s Law, and not in a good way.

Let’s go back a step. Feeds generally fall into two categories: smart and dumb.

The most well known smart feed is the Facebook Wall. Using their data about your interests, behaviour, and the social relevance of the content generator to you, Facebook presents a selection of the overall content pipe to you.

Dumb feeds are much more common, and give you everything created from every subscribed channel. This includes blog RSS feeds, Podcasts (yes, I know this is just another RSS feed), Twitter and the Tumblr Dashboard.

Smart feeds offer the potential downside of content blindness - only seeing what your past behaviour dictates you like, which is inherently a slippery slope - future behaviour will be limited by the past actions, making it more likely that you narrow down on a specific subset of your actual interests.

Dumb feeds have two major issues, beyond narrowness of feed selection.

A dumb feed turns into a flood, very quickly. As the only settings are on and off, things get either skimmed over, or ignored. There are many blogs that I adore, but cannot keep tracking in my RSS reader, due only to volume (an example would be the excellent BoingBoing.net).

What worries me more, however, is that dumb feeds encourage a specifically negative behaviour in content creators - cherishing frequency over relevance. If every piece of content is being pushed out to every subscriber, more = increased impressions. Functionally, in a world of “if you build it, they may not notice due to how much else is being built every second”, pumping out 30 blog posts a day is a semi-logical response.

But relevance, and beyond that meaning, is often a matter of remaining selective. And I’ve realized that having one meaningful piece of content a day, or even one a week, is more valuable than 5 daily pieces of ‘good but not great’. Not everyone will agree with me, and I can understand why; I’m speaking of intangible value, rather than pegging it to a quantitative measurement.

But my issue with dumb feeds is that they shift Sturgeon’s axiom (90% of everything is crap) to an even more depressing number, by emphasizing frequency over relevance in terms of reach and audience building.

In a world of constant creation, making 95% of everything crap has a much greater than 5% impact in the value of content consumption and monitoring.