The end of Little Things and the start of a flight to quality

Jeff Jarvis
Feb 28, 2018 · 2 min read

The death of Little Things was a self-fulfilling prophesy of a tragedy.

Facebook created a system that rewarded “sharable” “content.” So companies were started — and detoured — to make sharable content. But what content was shared? Oftentimes, useless, meaningless drivel. We complained about a junky experience. Facebook fixed that. The companies started to create said drivel suffer.

I’m not going to cry many tears about losing the drivel because drivel it was. (“I Put A Wacky Doggy Leotard On My Dog To See If It Would Help With Her Anxiety And Dander.”)

Now there’s nothing wrong with that and far be it from me — former writer on People, creator of Entertainment Weekly — to condemn fluff.

But Facebook — and, for that matter, media as a whole — are being turned into perpetual fluff machines alongside massive polarization factories because that’s what the business model of volume for volume’s sake — eyeballs by the ton! — leads to, especially in an abundance-based market where prices fall toward zero.

We need to turn our attention to the one, true scarcity: quality. (No, the scarcity is not attention for that is just another way to say CLICK ON ME!”)
Then WTF is quality? That is the key question platforms — Facebook as well as Google and Twitter — are just beginning to address. It is a question that we in media have to honestly face as well. This is a start.

What business model and what measures will support that quality once we define it?

Many folks on Facebook have said the moral of the end of Little Things is “live by the platform, die by the platform.” I disagree. It’s live by the business model, die by the business model if you don’t realize the implications of what that business model drives you to do: in this case, make drivel that will be shared.

Each revenue stream we consider brings such implications. Some folks say that pay walls will lead to quality. Maybe, maybe not. If it does produce quality, that quality will be red-lined, available only to the elites who can afford it. (I heard an editor behind a wall recently argue in its favor by invoking “trickle-down” journalism.) Also, pay walls and dependence on your audience alone could lead to making pandering drivel.

No matter the business model, if you don’t have a north star of purpose and value, you will be lead astray. That is the lesson platforms and media are learning and re-learning.

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