Content creation for all
8 ways to simplify online publishing
The World Wide Web enables publishing at an unprecedented scale.
Anyone can create content. Any piece of content can be instantaneously distributed to anyone in the world.
Pretty awesome, right? There is just one thing:
Although content creation has never been easier, the number of people who create is surprisingly small.
This has become known as the 1% rule: 1% of people create the content, 99% of people consume. There isn’t anything wrong with the 1% rule, but it isn’t ideal. The web lets everyone have a voice, yet 99% of people don’t take advantage of it. If more people created content online, we would have more shared perspectives, more communication, and in general, more people connecting over their passions and interests. You have to believe that the world would be a better place.
Content creation should be easier, and fortunately, it can be.
As a thought experiment, let us study this blog post. Long-form blogging is a particularly difficult form of content creation. If we why study this post is difficult to write, we uncover several product design decisions that could be made to simplify the creation process.
1. Strip away identity.
If you look at the top of this blog, you’ll see my real name. Do you know how difficult it is to write under my real name? I’m afraid of publicly being wrong, sounding like an idiot, or even worse, coming off as a complete jackass.
If we separate my real identity from my online identity, writing becomes easier. I become less fearful of what others think, and may write things that I otherwise wouldn’t.
Historically, handles (or user names) have been used for anonymity. They were used back in the days of IRC and forums, and are still used today on many popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Handles help with anonymity, but don’t ensure it. As time goes by, users leak information which can often be pieced together. With enough time, a motivated third party may learn the real identity behind a handle.
You could take anonymity on step further by dissolving the idea of an online identity. For example, Secret (shown here) uses anonymous transient handles in the form of icons that stay consistent within a single conversation.
Or, you could go all the way and completely dissolve online identity (e.g., Startups Anonymous).
The more you strip away identity, the easier it gets to create content. And, the more honest people get. It isn’t surprising some of the juiciest secrets are surfaced via anonymous social networks.
2. Constrain the audience.
This blog post is public. If I say something stupid, anyone anywhere in the world can read this post and catch me looking like an idiot.
Writing is public is hard. If we If we constrain the audience to my Facebook friends, things get easier. I’m more likely to share my current status. If we limit the audience my close friends and family on Whatsapp, I may share a rumor, a racy joke, or what is actually on my mind.
Audience matters, and the more comfortable the audience is, the easier it is to create honest and authentic content.
3. Constrain the media format.
The content in this blog is unconstrained. A post may be of arbitrary length and include any combination of images, videos, and text.
The unconstrained nature of a blog post makes it flexible and expressive, but also brings up many questions in the creation process. How long should a post be? Should I add images? How many images? Where should they be placed? What about a video? Or a GIF? Should I have split this post into two posts or leave it as one? There are many questions, and each question makes it less likely that the ‘publish’ button will be pressed.
Constraining the media format helps simplify the creation process. There are many examples of this
- Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Now you don’t need to worry about content length.
- Tumblr makes certain types of posts super easy: photos, quotes, links, chats, audio files, and videos. You could write a long blog post, but it is easier to quickly share an image or quote that you like.
- Pinterest and Instagram limit you to a single image, with an optional block of descriptive text.
- Vine and Mindie limits you to a few seconds of video.
You might think that placing constraints on media limits self expression. But, it turns out that media has weird properties related to self expression, similar to doing arithmetic with infinity. Divide infinity by 2, and you feel like you’d have less, but you still have infinity. Divide it by 10, or 100, and you get the same thing. Media works the same way. An image or a 140-character tweet feels like less than a blog post, but still offers infinite self expression.
As an added benefit, constraints often force users to get creative with your product. As an example, just hop on over to Twitter and check out all the things people have figured out with tweets (e.g., @mentions, hashtags, tweetstorms).
All in all, if you can simplify the media format while still allowing for meaningful self expression, it is probably a win.
4. Remove the feeling of permanent publishing.
Most bloggers have a complex relationship with the ‘publish’ button. It is the source of accomplishment (it feels great to ship a post into the real world!), but it is also a large source of stress.
Blog posts feels final in two ways. First, publishing a blog post feels like a one-time action. Once I hit that ‘publish’ button, it gets sent out to the blogosphere to RSS and email subscribers. Most likely it will be read at this point. Old blog posts quickly loses interest as well as discoverability on the Internet. Second, the post feels final because it kind of is final. Once it gets cached in a search engine, or archived by archive.org, it is accessible forever.
Removing the feeling of publishing makes content creation much easier, and there are several ways to do this.
The first way has already been mentioned in (2) constraining the audience. A Facebook status update doesn’t feel like publishing because it is relatively private (compared to this blog post). Take this to the extreme and you get 1-to-1 messaging, which is essentially private.
Second, you can encouraging works-in-progress. In college, I used to manually write HTML for websites. I wouldn’t have any problem leaving my work online for people to see because it was a work-in-progress. Wikis are the same way. You can easily add to them because it is expected that the content will be edited/removed at some point in the future.
Third, you can delete by design. This has become a big thing with ephemeral content. Snapchat and Frankly are two great examples here; your content lives for only a few seconds, and then it disappears. Or, it feels like it disappears. I would bet that the content lives on their servers forever, but the ephemeral feeling is what matters.
5. Enable references to existing work.
This post includes original content. Original content is difficult to create.
You know what is easier to create? Existing content.
It sounds a little funny, but people do this everyday sharing links on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. Or, sharing images on Pinterest, imgfave, weheartit, etc. Or quotes from other websites.
“Creating” such content isn’t as much creating as it is identifying with content. There is so much content out there on the web, and more gets churned out on a daily basis. While we consume existing content, it isn’t difficult to find something that we identify with and want to share.
There is an extra benefit to sharing existing content: it is simple from an interaction standpoint. At the simplist, you can narrow creation down to a simple click a button to reshare, reblog, or repin something.
6. Add context.
Writing this post began with this:
Creating content within a vacuum isn’t difficult. A blank canvas is intimidating.
Adding context makes creation much easier.
A common way to create context is to add a prompt, such as an image to caption or a URL to comment on. Creating content within a context tends to be an emotional response, a sign of agreement/disagreement, or a perspective/comment. Sites like Quora, Quibb and Reddit lets users create prompts for other users to react to. Sites like Pinterest and Tumblr let users write a note within the context of an image, video, etc.
Oftentimes, a reaction to a prompt becomes another prompt. For example, a message which requires a response. Or a comment that invites a reply.
7. Constrain the reactions of others.
Allowing others to comment on your content can be intimidating. Unconstrained commenting allows anyone to come along and shit on your thoughts. Because of this, it is often a good idea to constrain the reactions of others.
Products constrain reactions in different ways. Quibb constrains membership, only allowing vetted members to comment. Product Hunt only lets vetted community members write comments. Secret constrains comments to your friends and friends of friends. These constraints effectively remove the vast majority of trolls on the Internet.
Tumblr is designed to encourage likes and doesn’t emphasize comments. Medium and many other blogging platforms require comments to be OK’ed by the original poster. Some bloggers implement a timeout functionality where the comments section for posts become closed after a fixed number of days.
While everyone appreciates thoughtful comments, this is the Internet and there be trolls everywhere. Finding a way to limit reactions to content can be a big win.
8. Mind the content container.
Blog posts don’t tend to exist on their own: they need a container to live in.
This post was originally posted on my personal blog called ‘On life and startups’. Starting and maintaining this blog isn’t easy. There are a lot of questions involved with this container. Which platform should I use? What should the tagline of the blog be? Will the tagline be too restricting? Should I blog about everything on my mind, or specific topics? How often should I update the blog? What if I stop writing? What if I run out of ideas?
There is another problem with the blog as a container: once you decide what it is about, and once people follow it, it doesn’t leave much room for new content. For example, my blog has become the startup version of Alex. So has my Twitter stream. I have many other interests that I could write about, but those containers are the wrong place for those interests.
One approach is to give users multiple containers. Perhaps the best example of this is Pinterest, which lets users create multiple pin boards.
If you look at Ellen’s boards above, you’ll notice something: they allow her to be herself. Ellen likes funnies, animals, V-day, quotes, cooking, babies, pets, etc. Now compare this to Ellen’s twitter account, which seems like a one-dimensional public persona.
Another approach is to decouple posts, containers, and user accounts. This is exactly what Medium does. This post is it’s own thing that can be syndicated to any collection which will have it. A user can curate a collection, maintain multiple collections, or just follow collections that they like. Because a post seems like it’s own thing, it makes writing easier within Medium. Just begin a new post and write whatever is on your mind. There is probably a home for it somewhere on Medium.
Yet another approach is to free content from containers. Secret does this by making each secret independent. Secrets don’t live within a user profile. And since user identities only exist within a single secret, all secrets feel independent.
It may seem like a small thing, but the relationship between the user, content, and the container makes a difference when it comes to content creation.
Enable content creation, change the world.
Did you notice a trend throughout this post?
The largest and most successful social media sites are defined by their methods for simplifying content creation.
Twitter is defined by its 140-character tweets. Pinterest is defined by allows users to curate multiple collections of images. Snapchat is defined by images that self-destruct. Medium has been purposefully vague about its intentions, but it is clear that it changes the relationship between users, content, and collections.
One of the biggest promises of the web is that is allows anyone to publish. Anything that makes this process easier is a huge win for the world.
Have some ideas on how to simplify content creation?
I would love to hear them in the comments. Better yet, build the idea and get it out there. You might just change the world☺
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