The Big Scale Brag
Size really doesn’t matter.
Have you ever noticed that everyone on the internet talks the same game — they want the most users, a massive scale, and other numbers that they can claim are the biggest? What if what the world really needs is much smaller?
At any given moment, someone on this planet is scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube before stopping upon a mesmerizing video of disembodied hands making a “quick and easy” recipe, a “watch this“ DIY hack, or the bizarre alchemy that makes an egg grow bigger (just use vinegar, maple syrup, and blue dye). Publishers like, 5 Minute Crafts, churn these hacks out for its 71 million subscribers — more than the population of Thailand — making it the 7th most-subscribed channel on YouTube.
These video formats by content mills eventually led to a backlash from creators and have even invoked questions about their origins and opaque mission — Lisa Kaplan asked: are they smuggling in covert and subliminal messages to spread disinformation and discord on behalf of Russia? The truth might just be that they saw an opportunity to run a money making operation by reverse engineering algorithms, which in turn capture clicks that convert to watchtime and then eventually — revenue.
By cracking this content to revenue code, content creators and advertisers were convinced that like the magically expanding egg, the internet runs on the illusion of size.
Clickbait is the symptom. The pathology is big platforms’ — and venture capital’s — obsession with scale.
5-Minute Crafts responds to the same incentives that all contemporary creators share: human attention, that has become completely industrialized. Once platforms began programmatically measuring attention as units of impressions, we became participants in a mass media market assembly line — either assembling and stamping out more content pieces as creators, or binging through a junk diet of short videos and listicles as consumers.
Silicon Valley, venture capitalists, and Big Data have converged together in this moment to associate size, growth, and crowds with value. User counts and reach, along with other key scale metrics, become speculative indexes for big returns on risky investments.
Digital media’s numbers game confuses size with influence, significance, and meaning.
The big problem: once a business model is predicated on explosive growth and imposing numbers, it’s stuck in an unsustainable trajectory. And often, the math doesn’t add up. For example: damning details have recently emerged about Facebook’s inflation of its “potential reach metric” to advertisers. A product manager quoted in the class action filing said, “it’s revenue we should have never made given the fact it’s based on wrong data;” in some cases, Facebook reported to its advertisers that its reach exceeded the actual total populations of some states and territories.
The metrics we are using trade attention for value — views, impressions, engagements, and watchtime — have become a form of capital, which has been translated through new forms of creative accounting. What’s become of us?
Human activity has been translated to derivative forms of value and we can no longer tell who is a person, a bot, a troll farmer, or a fiction altogether. We have lost the human.
The consequences of a super-scaled internet
As an Asian American woman and conditional model minority who has had to navigate the digital media content space for over twenty years, I have been acutely aware that my journey in the media market has been dominated by competitive and (mostly) white men at the top.
It’s no surprise that this masculinist world of big media has an unhealthy obsession with bigger size.
Big industry players and their obsessions with size aside, we still need to grapple with the consequences these decisions have left upon our audience. By manipulating the marketplace under this big-scale framework, we have inadvertently created the conditions in which the worst parts of our collective psyche — the loudest, most fearful, most outrageous — fetch the highest returns for aspiring creators. Just like the platforms that organize them, they are devoted to the big scale brag above all else.
But what is tougher to see, and harder to admit, is that competition in the passion economy inhabited by aspiring creators is a real drag. The media scholar Brooke Erin Duffy has described influencers as “idols of promotion”: they serve as models to other (often young) would-be creators on how to make it in a tech-optimized rat race to instafame. Her book, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, collects interviews with young women beauty bloggers who are encouraged by the influencer economy to populate their feeds with images of luxury, and abundance in the style of the top 1% of successful, sponsored creators. Most never see a return on their investment — but all are pressured to mimic the aesthetic appeals of the most-followed.
Under this perspective, the influencer economy begins to look more like a pyramid scheme rather than a renaissance for female voices. The sum of their expenses (like investing in equipment, vacations, expensive garments to project the image of consumer luxury) will never be recouped for the vast majority of participants. However, the platforms still win in this world by refreshing their user counts and maintaining their big scale.
It’s a world designed and run by those in search of the big scale brag.
Numbers don’t have a soul. People do.
As of this writing, at least two impactful big scale events are happening simultaneously- states in the U.S. are rushing to quickly and effectively inoculate its population and there is a public calling out to #stopasianhate.
How do we design vaccination portals and scheduling pages to connect as many arms to needles as possible? In the chaos and confusion, and motivated by anxiety and a year’s worth of lost experiences, thousands have turned to Facebook to hunt for doses on local vaccine-finding groups. How do we stop the escalation of anti-Asian attacks and reverse racism towards Asians brought on by a year of rhetoric surrounding the origins of the coronavirus? Feeling vulnerable, angry and afraid, many have found support and services through social media.
Posts on these groups share anecdata: there’s a pharmacy outside of town that has a waitlist to save doses from the trash bin at the end of the day; the mass vaccination site will start registering appointments at midnight. Others post glimpses into individual lives and motivators: a worried nephew hunts for a precious appointment for his elderly beloved aunt, while hundreds of young volunteers sign-up to walk the elderly in Chinatown. Another volunteer delightfully announces a slew of new appointments and starts signing up relieved group members, while a 75-year old asian woman recovering from being attacked in San Francisco plans to donate the (almost) one million dollars raised for her medical bills to fight racism. Read together, their stories communicate the catharsis of shared empathy while preserving the individuality of each experience — and the limits of campaigns that are designed to reach everybody at once.
The names and faces attached to these posts are teaching us something about our platforms: the difference between virality and communicability. Some messages should be shared by mass audiences at once, like washing your hands or #stopasianhate. But other, more intimate communiqués can only occur between people who see each other as peers where it can be profoundly more impactful to share a message with a smaller audience that has shared values and objectives. Cultures are created from person to person.
Until now, online media companies and platforms have made the same play: amass audiences, get massive scale, make more viral content, watch our graphs and spreadsheets grow bigger and bigger.
But isn’t there a braver, more daring, and more worthwhile play?
Maybe we should work on creating moments of engagements that transcend the click or the impression — moments that become experiences. We could operate under the understanding that the audience is an assembly of persons, honor the individual and respect that they have consented to participate. Shouldn’t they be the ones guiding our creative and design choices? Ultimately, they would then be the ones who would tell us when we stray from our mission. And in turn, we’d connect directly to them and their needs through the content we create.
What if, instead of focusing on who has the bragging rights to the biggest audience, we were to focus on scaling engagements of kindness? Now that’s the kind of scale worth bragging about.
