[jachee]

> On YouTube, I follow about 120 different YouTube channels... regularly, every week. On Twitch, I watch some other channels. In my Inbox I get about 25 newsletters per day, and on Feedly, I follow about 100 more sources, regularly.

Holy crap. How do you have any time for anything else?

I sub to 3 YouTube channels, never watch twitch, avoid email newsletters like the plague, and still don’t have time in my day to keep up with it all. Especially while I have actual work to get done.

Used to rely on Reddit for sip-of-the-firehose news acquisition, but they screwed that up. Now it’s mostly HN, and even here I miss tons of things.

[NoZebra120vClip]

I subscribe to 141 channels on YouTube. However, only a fraction of those subscriptions involve channels that actively, regularly publish content that I want to watch. Say 10 or so per week.

I watch a lot of YouTube; it pretty much fills all my free time. But I have plenty of playlists to keep me busy, and I pick through recommendations and try "mixes" sometimes. I will even watch the "Free with Ads" films they offer, which is a hilarious mixed bag of box office bombs and diamonds in the rough.

I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium. I don't do Patreon or "Join" any channels for a subscription. I don't send "tips" in live chat. I endure a lot of ads! But I feel like, if I would pay for one channel, I would probably end up paying for 10, and that I can't afford.

[COGlory]

This, 100,000x this. There's a piece to this whole puzzle I can't figure out exactly, but it has something to do with this.

There's two aspects at play here:

1) attention economy 2) network radius

I can't quite get them disentangled in my head, but I'm confident it goes something like this:

Attention economy is zero sum. Huge network size (i.e. the firehose of Youtube et al) means there's infinite competitors. Economically, it's a race to the bottom, every competitor is trying to get whatever fraction of your attention they can (not to mention monetize it). So they wind up competing over smaller and smaller fractions.

There's an additional problem on top of this, which is that you can't vet that many people, as the consumer. This amplifies a lot of negative things in its own right.

It's like we just weren't built to be exposed to networks this large. I think it's OK to not be completely informed on all topics, and typically this used to be outsourced to communities and specialists within your communities, each of whom you knew and trusted in their own domain. But small communities are gone, and the current communities are too large for you to get to know who to trust. So you need to be an expert on all.