🧠 We Should Build Our Own Content Feeds

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Welcome back AI prodigies!

In today’s Sunday Special:

• 📜The Prelude

• 🤖Does GenAI Make Content Less Valuable?

• 🔍How to Find Valuable Content

• 👷How to Build a Custom Content Feed

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 6 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• Generative AI (GenAI): When AI models create new content such as text, images, audio, video, or code.

• Deepfakes: AI that creates hyperrealistic fake images, videos, or audio to depict events, actions, or statements that never happened.

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS): A web-based feed that curates content from your favorite websites, podcasts, and newsletters.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

📜THE PRELUDE

Currency represents what things are worth, and content represents ideas; just like currency stores financial value, content stores social, cultural, and relational value.

If we print more money than we can use, each dollar becomes less valuable. If we create more content than we can consume, what happens to the value of content?

Does each piece of content lose value? How can we continue to find valuable content? Can we streamline access to valuable content?

🤖DOES GENAI MAKE CONTENT LESS VALUABLE?

Better videos tend to get more views on YouTube, so viewership is a decent proxy for content quality. The distribution of viewership is very unequal. Roughly 9 in 10 videos garner less than 1,000 views, while just 1 in 300 videos attract over 1 million views. Most YouTube videos are poor quality, and few are excellent.

As YouTubers integrate GenAI into their workflows, they’ll produce even more content, but it won’t necessarily be higher quality.

With GenAI, YouTubers who are already producing low-quality content will upload it much faster. On the other hand, YouTubers who are already producing high-quality content will upload it slightly faster; excellent content requires a human touch that can’t be automated. Over time, the amount of lousy content will increase faster than the amount of good content.

GenAI won’t affect the value of lousy content; it’s inherently less valuable. But it’ll make low-quality videos more common and high-quality videos more scarce. Thus, the perceived value of high-quality videos will increase. What we used to consider good content will seem even better.

This trend also applies to other content mediums like blogs, podcasts, online forums, or livestreams. As GenAI helps low-quality content proliferate across these communication mediums, we’ll no longer be able to rely on algorithms to determine our consumption. We must adopt new strategies to find valuable content.

🔍HOW TO FIND VALUABLE CONTENT

Can AI Help Us Find Valuable Content?

Today, AI-powered search tools can help us find quality content. If you want specific content (e.g., a free, beginner-friendly personal finance newsletter for millennials), conversational search engines like Perplexity AI yield better results than Google Search. With one search query, Perplexity AI shows you 10 relevant personal finance newsletters for millennials, detailing the newsletter’s content, sending frequency, and popularity so you can select the best one for you.

But AI-generated content will flood the Internet as GenAI tools get cheaper and more powerful, making it harder for AI-powered search tools like Perplexity AI to curate content. Next year, marketers plan to use GenAI to create 48% of their social media content. Yet, nearly half of consumers don’t trust AI-generated content. And as Deepfakes become more common, unfamiliar sources are more likely to post AI-generated content, further eroding our trust in AI.

Can We Find Trusted Content?

Services that curate content will become more popular. For instance, Jellypod AI, which offers a hand-curated newsletter directory, requires newsletters to post for at least 3 months and “provide differentiated value” before being featured. Though these criteria are vague, Jellypod AI represents the future of content curation: powered by AI but vetted by humans. In the post-truth era, Word-of-Mouth (WOM) recommendations from family, friends, and colleagues will also become more valuable.

There will be no shortage of quality content providers, but we still have to navigate several communication mediums to access them. We must use email inboxes to read newsletters, multiple social media platforms to be entertained, and several news websites to stay informed. What if we could consume all this content in one place?

👷HOW TO BUILD A CUSTOM CONTENT FEED

Will RSS Feeds Save Us?

Streamlining access to valuable content doesn’t always require fancy AI-powered search tools. In 1999, Netscape Communications Corporation (“Netscape”) invented Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a web-based feed that curates content from your favorite websites in one place.

In the early 2000s, RSS feeds grew in popularity, allowing anyone to view content from multiple websites in one place. But, in the late 2000s, Facebook took market share away from RSS feeds, so they gradually lost relevance. Today, RSS tools like Feedly’s News Reader are slowly regaining popularity, allowing you to curate content from across the web.

Here’s how to set it up: First, follow Sources—your favorite websites, newsletters, and social media accounts. Then, organize them into Feeds; make a separate Feed for each topic, or do it your way. Feedly’s News Reader has a free plan that limits you to 100 Sources and 3 Feeds—more than enough to start curating.

Why RSS Feeds?

RSS tools remove clutter from existing content feeds. Unlike X and Instagram, they exclude suggested posts from random accounts. Unlike TikTok and YouTube, they exclude automatically playing the next video. Unlike your email inbox, they exclude distracting spam so you can find the newsletter you want to read. Most importantly, they exclude advertisements.

Clutter isn’t just annoying; it dilutes our attention, making us more distraction-prone. In the highly cited Stanford University (“Stanford”) study called “Cognitive Control in Media Multitasking,” heavy media multitaskers performed worse at task switching, as they were more vulnerable to distractions from irrelevant environmental stimuli. By organizing content by topic and eliminating distractions like advertisements, RSS feeds prevent media multitasking, making our digital lives healthier.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

Consuming content nowadays is cumbersome, juggling multiple platforms and avoiding distractions. GenAI worsens the situation by rapidly generating poor-quality content. To regain control, we should find ways to build our own content feeds, like using RSS tools to consume curated content in a streamlined, distraction-free environment.

📒FINAL NOTE

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