The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat. The absence of a clock on a casino wall can keep you gambling through the early morning. On social media, our For You Pages give us the illusion of infinite content. How our environments are designed influences how we consume. And wouldn't you know it, everything around us is designed for maximum consumption.

Open TikTok, and you can easily burn through a hundred videos or more before you glance at the time. It doesn't help that the For You Page hides the time on our phones.

We are over consuming content on the FYP. The sudden surge of low-quality, AI-generated content, i.e. “AI slop,” is a byproduct of that overconsumption. We don't see it because, well, we're conditioned not to, but slop always arrives on time. Slop is inevitable. Slop is quintessential. Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see.

Olive oil, wasabi, saffron, vanilla, Wagyu, honey, champagne, and truffle,...reality TV, all hold examples of what happens when demand exceeds supply— companies fill the gap with slop. The free market loves a good filler. So, why should the digital realm be any different?

The For You page is designed to keep us playing the dopamine slot machine for as long as possible. The Average Time on Site metric is still the goose that lays the golden eggs, and both TikTok and Meta are reporting that their egg baskets have never been fuller.

But, there's a problem. On any given platform, only 1-3% of users publish content. It's called the 90-9-1 rule, and platforms that rely on free user generated content have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the commercialized web. The introduction of the For You Page, and the illusion of endless content, has only exasperated the inequity.

Curation used to be part of our media consumption process. We would hop from website to website looking for a laugh. We used to click on hyperlinks for Christ's sake. Now, all we must do is sit at the trough and let daddy Zuck feed us.

In a recent essay, Joan Westenberg makes a complementary argument that the algorithm has “flattened” curiosity by eliminating the need to “hunt” for our content. They go on to say:

There’s a concept in behavioral science called the “effort heuristic.” It’s the idea that we tend to value information more if we worked for it. The more effort something requires, the more meaning we assign to the result. When all knowledge is made effortless, it’s treated as disposable. There’s no awe, no investment, no delight in the unexpected—only consumption.

(I'm reminded of the scene in Jurassic Park when the tour Jeep pulls up to the Tyrannosaurus rex exhibit. Doctor Grant says “The T-Rex doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt.”)

This type of mindless consumption is not only harming our curiosity, it's helping to cheapen creativity for the people who produce what we consume.

Creativity isn't scalable. Content creation has a hard productivity ceiling. Every human-created video on our feeds require some level of writing, production, and editing. Yet the For You Page has made the content consumption so efficient, that perhaps demand has exceeded supply.

If you're a product manager for a social media platform, you can reduce the friction of publishing content to the app, or ship better editing tools, but you can't optimize creative spark. You can't treat humans like content-generating machines (as much as they have tried). Despite the illusion of infinite scrolling thanks to the FYP, art remains a finite resource bound to the whims of human creativity.

You see their problem.

Mark Zuckerberg wants us on his platforms, flicking our thumbs, for as long as possible. But the more we open Instagram, the more creators he needs posting multiple times each day. Mark has very little control over this variable. Creators could suddenly post less, or simply stop posting all together, and there's nothing he could do about it. What's worse, creators could demand Meta pay them for their art.

Could you imagine?

Actually, yes. And it turns out, you could rather effectively kill a platform if you got a small group of top creators organized and angry.

In the summer of 2016, twenty social media personalities took down one of the largest mobile video apps on the internet. They wanted money for their labor. The executives at Vine said no. The gang of twenty, who were the highest performing creators on the app, walked away. They stopped posting entertaining content to Vine, and instead repeatedly implored their followers to find them on competing apps.

Vine shut down for good just months later.

From Inside the secret meeting of Vine stars that ushered in the app’s demise:

Vine’s spectacular rise and fall showed the power of online creators. Its demise offers crucial lessons for platforms trying to engage with power users — and a deeper understanding of who ultimately controls a social product.

Vine creators exposed and exploited a weakness in Vine's conventional approach to social media. Follower count had power. Old-style discovery algorithms could be easily manipulated. Vine creators used that power to take over the app, and convinced users to migrate to other platforms.

You see why follower counts are less important today, and why black-box algorithms have full control over who goes viral and who gets “shadow banned.” TikTok saw the mistakes of its predecessor, and made it so content creators could never exercise collective influence again.

Because virality now feels more like gambling, I suspect people post more content today than a decade ago. But it's not enough. Our insatiable appetites for content is pushing for corporations to meet that demand with slop. 

If it were up to TikTok and Meta, our feeds would be exclusively robot-made. Humans are a variable they cannot control, and I think they despise us for it.

Anyway, I have good news. Outside of our FYPs you'll find a surplus of art, essays, articles, and videos just waiting to be discovered. And best of all, these artists and writers are making things on their own terms. We, too, can enjoy the products of their labor on our terms, while not giving a dime of our attention to big tech.

This is the open web. Or the social web. Or the open social web. Or the-- you get the point. To find it, you must reacquaint yourself with the lost art of surfing the web.

Surfing the web is very different than scrolling the FYP. You don't often hear the words ”mindful” and “internet” together but, surfing the web was an art of mindful consumption that doesn't much exist today. Not to get all old man yells at cloud at you, but maybe we should bring it back?

Up next: The Lost Art of Surfing The Web (coming soon)