Sea of Clickbait  vs Keepers (the Last Lecture Concept)

I stumbled upon a lecture that was recorded as part of Stanfords “Last Lecture” series and, not surprisingly it was quite inspirational (because that was the goal of the whole series!). I wasn’t looking for something like this, specifically. But, the Youtube algorithm has been tuned well, and this particular message connected.

I got lucky, because there’s so much click-bait chum out there that it’s gotten very easy to block out and ignore the hype, yet this one link broke through. And for me, at that moment, it was a keeper. 

But, as the volume of content overall goes up, I know I’m missing some good and useful stuff,  the ideas and inspirational takes and information that might be helpful to me.  We’re overwhelmed with stuff to click on, with ideas to put in our face, courses to take, stuff to subscribe to. 

Like many, i’m “dropping out” in some ways. I’m just not taking the bait when I see the provocative headlines, because I don’t want to provide positive reinforcement  to someone just trying to get my click. 

And, I’ve realized I’m just sort of assuming more and more articles and essays and posts are machine generated and won’t hold any real value for me. Low quality content steals my time and attention. I’m afraid I’m losing faith in the internet. 

The “Last Lecture” concept from Stanford got me thinking about where and how to find the “good stuff.” We can’t trust the algorithms anymore because they are core to a business model. There are fewer and fewer actual curators (not to be confused with the traffic chasing instagram influencers who aspire to being “curators”) of great or interesting stories. 

This was a problem from, literally, day one of the internet, but it feels more urgent now for some reason. In the early days of the commercial internet, there was strong representation from the small army of librarians who were organizing what we being generated, making it findable and useful.  I wish there was a library and directory of the timeless, high quality work that was been generated and distributed across the web over the years.