Here is what finally bothered me about it.
Write something careful, publish it, and it does well or it does not within roughly forty-eight hours. After that it is effectively gone. Not deleted — unreachable. Nobody scrolls back. Nobody searches a feed. If a student asks me in March for the thing I wrote in October, I cannot find it either.
This is fine for a conversation. It is a strange way to treat an explanation that was true in October and is still true in March.
Whether a post reaches two hundred people or twenty thousand is not decided by me and not decided by the people who chose to follow the page. It is decided by a ranking system that can change next Tuesday and owes nobody an explanation. Pages that built an audience over years have watched it evaporate in a month without being told why.
I am not angry about this — it is Meta’s product and they can run it as they like. But building something long-term on top of it is like putting up a building on land you are not allowed to read the lease for.
I spend my working life studying what competition for attention does to the quality of what gets published. The short version of the problem: when many outlets chase the same limited pool of reader attention, the pressure runs towards sharper headlines and thinner substance, because that is what wins the click, and the honest version loses.
Then I went and published inside exactly that machine. Every incentive in the feed pushes against the thing the page is supposed to do — explain something properly, including the boring qualification at the end.
A website does not fix this. Nothing fixes it. But it removes one layer of the pressure: here, nothing decides whether you see this except whether you came looking.
Nothing goes away. The Facebook page continues, and will carry on being where most people first run into this. What changes is where things live.
Every explanation now gets a permanent address. You can search it on Google, send the link to someone, cite it, or come back in three years and find it exactly where it was. There is a concepts section that will keep growing, a library of PDFs you can download and keep, and no account needed for any of it.
And there is an email list, which is the only honest way I know to reach people who asked to be reached. If you want this in your inbox instead of hoping an algorithm shows it to you, that option is now yours rather than Meta’s.
That is the whole change. Same writing, better address.
]]>Neither is a very good explanation. Both are stories about character, and character does not usually change across an entire industry inside twenty years. Incentives do.
Newsprint was scarce once. Column inches cost money, so an editor had to choose. Today, publishing is close to free — anyone can put a million words online this afternoon for the price of a domain name.
What did not change is the reader. There are still twenty-four hours in a day and still only so many of them anyone will give to reading. So the scarce good moved. It used to be the space to publish in. Now it is the attention to be published to.
Once you see that, the shouting stops looking like decline and starts looking like competition. Every outlet is bidding for the same fixed resource, and the currency of the bid is the headline.
The intuition most people carry is that competition improves things. More outlets, more scrutiny, better journalism. For much of the twentieth century that was roughly right.
The modern problem is that readers mostly cannot tell, before clicking, whether an article is any good. They can see the headline. They cannot see the carefulness. So the competition happens on the thing that is visible — and the thing that is visible is not the thing that is valuable.
Economists call this a signalling problem, and it has a predictable shape. When buyers can only observe one cheap signal, sellers invest in that signal rather than in the underlying quality. The headline is the signal. Carefulness is the quality. The two come apart, and the gap between them widens exactly as competition gets fiercer.
There is a further twist. An outlet that would prefer to be careful cannot simply be careful. If everyone else is shouting, the quiet headline is not read at all, and an unread article informs nobody. The honest outlet is pushed towards the loud headline not by greed but by the arithmetic of being heard. That is the uncomfortable result: competition can turn a sincere publisher into a sensational one without anyone changing what they want.
It does not mean readers are irrational. Scanning a headline and deciding in half a second is a sensible response to having four hundred items and no time. Given what a reader can observe, the behaviour is reasonable. The failure is in what is observable, not in the person.
It does not mean more competition is always worse. Competition still disciplines outright lying, and still breaks stories that monopolies would bury. The point is narrower and stranger: along the specific dimension of restraint — the qualification, the paragraph admitting the evidence is mixed — competitive pressure runs the wrong way.
Anything that lets a reader observe quality before consuming it. Reputation that is slow to build and expensive to lose. Subscriptions, which pay for whether you stay rather than whether you clicked. Formats where the writing is seen before it is chosen.
Notice that all three are about detaching payment from the click. That is the lever. Everything else is complaining about the weather.
I write about this for a living — currently on what happens to news quality when outlets compete over readers who cannot pay attention to everything. If there is interest I will write up the formal version, which is more precise and considerably less fun.
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