Sometimes browsing the internet makes me feel like a miner, mining a plot of gravel for a gold nugget or two. Or like a sailor, desperately seeking drinkable water, but only finding the salty sea.
"Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
This is because in a torrential flood of content on the internet, 'quality content' still only makes up a tiny percent of what's out there.
A quick bit of background: I've personally consumed more content than anyone I know. Thousands of movies. Tens of thousands of songs. Hundreds of thousands of books & articles. I've also created hundreds of posts & articles, created a book, been in the press, made animations, made digital art, performed songs, coded games and more. I say this not to brag, but because I want you to know where I’m coming from before we dig deeper into 'content quality.'
This came up because @ybanezkim26 asked me "how do I, [J-Ryze], define 'quality content?'"
And the best definition of quality content I have is:
"Quality content is that which satisfies a consumer's desires and/or uplifts their state of being, while aligning with the author's goals." - Me.
This definition can sound like quality is something to be judged by 'popular opinion.' If many people 'like' something, it must be quality, right? The masses are always right, yes? Wisdom of the crowd, etc? Are posts quality because they get plenty of upvotes, earnings, comments, and so on? Not exactly, because there's more to it than just pleasing consumers. The author has to feel fulfilled as well. Quality content is win-win.
So we also gauge content-quality by how well it achieves the author's goals.
If the author's goal is just to 'express themselves', with no aim of appealing to an audience, it's fine if their piece gets zero upvotes. (At least they achieved their goal of self-expression.) If the author's goal is for mass-appeal and to set upvote records, 'just expressing themselves' may not be good enough. Their post could be considered low-quality, as it didn't achieve their goal. An author's post could be considered 'high quality (for them)', so long as they exceed their goals with it.
For example, I love photos of beautiful, minimally-clothed women. I often find them to be high-quality content, because they satisfy my desire for beauty, and they also uplift my state of being from neutral to turned-on, grateful, and appreciative of life. But @mattclarke showed me that in the past, many Hivers have responded poorly to this type of content (see his post regarding @alexanova for more on this.)
So Alexa had to make a decision: Was she satisfied with the quality of her posts if they're only upvoted by a few Hivers like me? Or was her goal for ‘Hive mass-appeal’, in which case her content didn't meet the 'qualities' necessary for that? Or was her goal positive engagement? Or shares? (She hasn't posted on Hive for years, so perhaps you can guess.) The point is that creators make choices. They have power. They create for a variety of reasons, but ultimately... creators have some intention behind their content, and that matters quite a bit when judging content's quality.
So when we sit down to make a post, our intentions could be any number of things:
- To self-express.
- To help one key person.
- To help many.
- To inspire discussion.
- To earn upvotes.
- To make money.
- To change minds.
- To rally others.
- To get shared.
- To be the most popular.
- To win awards.
- To touch hearts.
- And so on.
Our intentions can be a combination of these goals and more, but there can only be one primary goal, and it's in light of that that the author can gauge the quality of their creation. At least, from the author's perspective. Now, once the content is published, the public then begins gauging the quality of the content from their perspective as well. And remember, the content ideally "satisfies a consumer's desires and/or uplifts their state of being, while aligning with the author's goals." And the more highly it scores on these aspects, the higher-quality it is.
It sounds simple, but here's some examples of what often happens when I come across a post.
- Post A introduced me to a game I'd not heard of. But it also rambled on about the author's cat, so I had to skim.
- Post B shared a heartfelt story of a parent's passing. But was also brimming with dogmatic politics which turned me off.
- Post C taught me new methods of audience-building. But the author wasn't an English speaker, so I struggled with it.
- Post D showed me a revolutionary new tech. But the diagrams and explanations were unclear jargon, so I bounced.
Each post had some value in it, yes. And we can probably guess what the main 'goal' of each post was. But each post also had some issues which weakened its 'quality-level', at least from my perspective as a consumer. So I’d guess others didn’t find the posts very high quality. Perhaps I was the exception and millions of other consumers actually loved the pieces. Or perhaps my assumptions about the author's goals are off, and the results in my four examples above are exactly what they were aiming for. It's not something I can sort out here in this post without talking to the authors. But it doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that I could get the same value from a competitor's post, without the downsides.
I could find higher-quality content on the same topic that achieves all the authors' goals and more, all while being an amazing consumer-experience for me.
Content isn't created in a vacuum.
The internet is a big place, and whatever you're writing competes for attention with all the other writers out there, whether you like it or not. If a platform like Facebook doesn't have enough 'quality content' on it that is easily findable, people will stop visiting it, and spend more time on Hive, (or any other platform that has a higher abundance of quality content.)
This is how the world works.
So it's in all our best interests to take an honest look at our content and roughly assess its quality. Does it get the result we were after, or not? Are we going to blame someone for its performance, or simply improve our skills and try again? Are we putting as much love into our writing as journalists, screenwriters, authors and other writers do, or are we just sh*tting out whatever we feel like with minimal care?
As we work on (or publish) our content, if it doesn't measure up in our eyes, we're free to improve it. We can experiment, study, practice, learn, apply, refine, redraft, polish, and more. We all have the ability to 'pour more love, energy, and mastery' into our creations, if we want to. And we all have the choice to half-a$$ it, and 'phone-in' our content, instead.
And if we're already satisfied with the quality-level of our content, we have the opportunity to be more efficient, scale up, and deliver more of that quality to people, should we desire. If the quality is already good, we can write longer pieces, or post more often.
A good thing to do before we click publish is to ask ourselves:
- Does my content uplift the consumer and/or satisfy their desires?
- Does my content achieve my end goal (traffic, upvotes, engagement, etc.)?
- Does my content at least get shared by those who aren't ready to engage?
- Is it likely people will consume it fully from start to finish?
It's easy to get excited and click 'publish' without some quality control checks, or running through a question-list like this, but it's worth it. You can even come up with your own checklist of questions to ask about your content before launching.
Personally, I get proofreaders ( usually @cynshineonline , but once it was @nickyhavey ) to go over my content with their 'fresh eyes', because 'strangers' who've never engaged with content before have a knack for zeroing in on issues we may have missed. They often have a broader, less-biased view than someone who's been immersed in creating the content for hours or days.
All this is to say that despite the sea of writing out there, people are thirsty for quality. We might say they're eager for a sip of quali-tea. In the internet's ocean of posts, consumers are eager for another drop of 'pure, highly-consumable' content…
And each of us controls the quality-level of what we put out.
@intothewild recently did this by diving into video content, aiming to funnel centralized traffic over to Hive. As for me, I'm continually looking for ways to #ryze up the quality-level of my content. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I learn. But it’s not just about what he did, or I did, the question is...
What are you doing to elevate the quality of your posts?
Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your ideas! Or maybe you have a different definition of quality content? I'd love if you shared it. Either way, thanks to anyone who upvotes, shares, comments, reads, or even skims this. I appreciate you.