I'm stuck in a loop.
I am stuck watching the same movies, the same TV shows, playing the same games, listening to the same songs, reading the same things. I try to follow my own advice and try new things, and I often get disappointed. I sometimes prefer to stick to what I know I like than to take a chance and waste my time. I still force myself to experiment, but it often comes with great effort.
This applies especially to reading. It's been quite a long time since I found anything great to read online, something that makes me go "whoaaa, this was amazing" once I'm done. It's been a while since I learned something useful from reading an article, unless I searched for something specific. Google has been of little help lately. I've been mainly using Reddit to get most of my information for the past 6 months.
It seems as if everyone turned their attention towards making money and gaining followers, and no one cares about making something good. Every time I search something on Google I have to pay attention and skip the first few results, because they are almost always ads. Then I click on the first actual results, just to be disappointed by some random mediocre article that poorly explains something, or barely gives a proper answer to my question. I keep finding 1000-2000 words articles for questions that could've been answered in 2 paragraphs, filled with links and videos to lure you to more content.
Medium has been my preferred website for written content, but lately I've been avoiding it after getting frustrated with the boring, basic articles that I've been seeing there. The people I followed in the past now post premium articles, rarely giving away anything for free. My "recommended" section is flooded with stupid recommendations as soon as I click on some random Medium article that I stumble upon on Google.
I visited the website today in an attempt to find something interesting to read. I went to the "following" section to see only premium articles. So I switched back to "Recommended for you". Out of 10 articles, I found one that was a bit more interesting. The rest of them were absolutely horrific.
One article was about why you're taking notes wrong and why you should interact with them and use them in order to make the best of them, but of course, the article was not completed. It ended up with "Follow me for part 2 so you can find out how to get more out of your notes". Predatory article with little to no useful information, written only to gain followers using a very cheap and obvious trick.
Then it's the usual "top 5 - 10 income sources in 2022". It involves a random number of jobs from different statistical sources found on Google, with some basic description attached to the subtitle. "Digital marketing" - you can make this much money by doing this, this and this. I wrote this article or made this video explaining more, click here to see it. Here's my favorite article that I wrote about this topic, read this one too. Requirements? Qualifications? Job description? Those are irrelevant - you can become a millionaire with this job! Sales - same story. Software development - same story. God forbid they offer some useful information. The entire article is a promotional material to previous articles written by the same author, or videos, or TikTok or whatever. There is zero useful information in the entire article.
How to improve your writing - actually this one was okay. It offered generic information that can be found in a lot of other places, things I wrote about as well, but at least whoever wrote this one didn't fill it with links to their previous posts. This is a rarity.
Then there's the "top 5 sources of income that made me X amount of money in only 5 months!". I swear I read dozens of those articles just out of curiosity and none of them provided any reliable source of income. It was either "I learned software development for 2 years before, then I started freelancing and became a millionaire", which is completely beside the point of the article, or it's the usual shady app / website that offers you a few cents, maybe dollars, for half of your day and every bit of data you can provide.
I also found the typical "10 websites / apps that I used that made me more productive", filled with recommendations that are just... ah, I don't even know how to describe them. Most of those require an account, and a subscription unless you're happy with the limited "free" version. You get to install an app that you'll stop using in 2 weeks because it adds nothing good to your routine, and no useful information and it usually ends up getting in the way more than anything. I guess no one's surprised that I've been trying to search for open source software lately, because most of the programs / apps or even websites that are open source just get out of my way, allowing me to do my work. I usually get a specific tool that does one or two specific things and I'm happier than ever. But it's hard to find an article featuring those type of tools.
Last but not least, the "Why people don't follow you" article. Another predatory piece of content teaching people the wrong things while trying to get followers. The main idea of the article was that you, as both a user of the platform and a content creator, should go to each article you read / find, follow the author, then write a comment which contains 2 lines of compliments towards the article in question, and then the most important part in which you tell the author that you followed them, and they should follow you back. Obviously there's no talk about how the best way to grow is to create good content that attracts people, so that those who follow you actually read what you write and interact properly with your content. No, the main point, the main objective, is to see the "followers" number go up, regardless of how much interactivity or quality there is in what you create.
I'm getting tired of all this, honestly. It gets harder and harder to find good content.
This is not to say that good content doesn't exist any more, absolutely not. Medium and other similar websites actually do a good job of presenting something amazing once in a while. I've found some great articles this way and I was happy I did. But it saddens me to see how much predatory content is being pushed in the front because it attracts views and clicks. It is far easier to read one of those bad articles in 2 minutes than to spend 10 or more reading something good, but more difficult, and those platforms know this, so they promote what sells best.
This happens in too many places and it gets frustrating. YouTube is sometimes pushing the most mediocre boring content creators that yell or appear half naked in the hopes that you'll spend more time on the platform. Medium gives you the type of articles I talked about above after you click, even if by mistake, on one or two articles like the ones mentioned. Google offers me ads for everything I search. The list continues.
There are exceptions, and they are worth mentioning. Here, for example, is a great article written by Kristin Collier about debt: https://longreads.com/2021/12/01/debt-demands-a-body/
It took a while to read it, but it was stunning. It made me sad, it made me question our modern society, it made me afraid of the systems we have. It made me think. And I think more people who write those type of articles should be promoted, because that is the type of informative content that will help people grow.
But it's not gonna happen. It's a sad thing to accept, but it's the reality. As long as sex, marketing and generic content is what attracts clicks and what makes money, that will be the promoted material.
It is very important to keep in mind that good content exists everywhere on the internet, be it on YouTube, Medium, Hive, Instagram, whatever platform you can think of. If you dig for it, you'll find it. But that's often the main problem - you have to dig for it. It is not promoted, shared and featured on places where you can easily find it. If you aren't in the mood for that, or you just don't have time, then finding that good content becomes a real struggle.
One solution to this problem that I can think of is to find ways to share the good content that you find, or applications / websites that are actually useful to others. It can be through articles or videos or social media posts. But it's important to make valuable content available so that others can find it easily, as I did with the article I recommended before.
Another one is to buy subscriptions to websites that you know for their high quality content. But even that can be a trial and error thing. Yes, you can get a Medium subscription so you can read as many premium articles as you can, but there's no guarantee that those articles will be very good. Anyone can post premium articles if they become a partner, which is great for the company, because they make more money, but worse for the consumer.
Whatever solution you choose, good content should be promoted. So if you manage to find something good that deserves attention, share it! Here, there, on every platform you can where people are interested. Make it visible to others, and don't shy away from promoting something that deserves it.
