🦹 Are you an unwitting participant in an online conspiracy that’s destroying your content and brand?
According to Wikipedia, the "Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these social bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers…”
The theory expands into darker aspects. For this post, I want to focus your mind on organic content.
@FurqanR, co-founder of AppLovin & more recently @thirdweb highlighted the Dead Internet Theory and "infinite content creation" in a recent video where he was discussing Blockchain as the solution for confirming authenticity of content. He refocuses attention on the need for authenticity and distinguishes between "LLM Furqan" or "real Furqan."
I suspect most of us can tell by our own Internet experience there is some accuracy to the Dead Internet Theory. We've all experienced automatically generated content and bot accounts across platforms. Millions of anonymous or generic accounts posting and engaging. Add GenAI content and we've exploded the amount of content available on the Internet. Or, as Furqan calls it, “infinite content generation.”
My feeds are filled with AI-generated written, audio, and visual content. It's not only coming from the major advertisers, but from people I know and respect. GenAI has allowed us to create content so much faster, we didn't stop to think, “how does this effect my brand?” Weekly and monthly content calendars became daily calendars.
We got this exceptional boost of productivity from GenAI. I love it! With that productivity came more content than anyone can ever consume. I mean, I’m even discovering “famous” 2010s musical artists I never knew existed!
Anecdotally, I'm tuning out more content than I'm consuming. Why? I want to hear from people. Not the LLM-version of the person. Social networks were intended to be social. In marketing, we used to espouse the value of authenticity. We yelled from the rooftops, “help your audience get to know, like and trust you." That's how they'll decide if they want to work with you.
Lili Zumout, M.S., our Experts.com social media associate, reminded me about the “visibility paradox” in digital marketing. The visibility paradox essentially means the more content that is generated, the harder it is to stand out. She explained, authenticity is the differentiator. If your authenticity suffers, is your massive increase in output making you less visible?
I encourage a return to organic content. I don't want to read book-length posts every day and you’re not capable of writing them every day. Only Stephen King seems to be capable of such output. Let’s get back to authenticity! 0 reply
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