Repetitive, mindless content wins every time
Illustration by Chloe Latour.
I love repetition. I love my schedule. I love being able to do the same thing day in, day out, eating the same lunch while watching the same Youtuber. Is it boring? No. To me, it’s reliable, and more importantly, it’s comforting.
I believe that this love for familiarity is what makes social media addictive for so many people. Not only is there an algorithm always ready to feed you personally engaging content, but there’s a physical aspect to the repetition. The swipe, scroll, and the double tap. Combined, these lead to an insatiable need to constantly consume.
This is addictive for the consumer and great for the billionaires running the social media platforms, but what does it mean for content creators?
If you’re looking for advice on how to build a following on social media, chances are you’ll see one word everywhere: consistency. The algorithm will reward creators who upload consistent content at a consistent pace.
To me, this need for consistency feels like nothing more than a creative restraint. To succeed, you need to have a cohesive identity, and should you falter, you will fall out of the algorithm’s favour and your views will tank.
The result of this pressure to produce homogenous content is digital monoculture.
Let’s go back to 2005, where the concept of a “content creator” didn’t even exist yet. The internet was just starting to become widely used, and YouTube just made its debut. For the first time, anyone could easily create and share video content. This was also the time that Apple computers started to have built-in webcams and video editing software, allowing for the entire video making process to take place on just a laptop.
Nowadays, it’s even easier to make content. Almost everyone is walking around with a high-definition camera in their pocket that can upload content to the web instantly. How do you stand out in a world where anyone can create content? By being the same.
Create the same video, over and over and over again. If you’re a chef, every recipe you share has to be filmed and edited in the exact same way every time. Even if you’re an artist working in wildly different genres and media, your videos still have to adhere to a repetitive format. While everyone has started creating, the creativity behind it is gone.
If you do want to try something new, then you run the risk of losing any traction you’ve made, potentially saying goodbye to all those followers you worked so hard for.
As someone who enjoys being creative, the thought of being shoehorned into one restrictive niche scares the hell out of me. But for many people who do want to make a living being creative, building a following on social media is almost essential.
Journalist Taylor Lorenz recently made a video on the prevalence of resentment within Instagram videos. There is an entire genre of videos featuring creators who complain about having to make videos just to stay relevant in the algorithm.
And that’s similar to what I see online — people are tired of having to conform. I fell in love with the internet back in the early days of YouTube because it felt like everyone was making interesting content just for the hell of it. Now social media has become such a rat race that there’s no more fun or creativity left on these platforms.
While I’m not a content creator exactly, I do enjoy making content. I’ve made videos for a business’s Instagram account and spent a summer trying to be an amateur food reviewer. To no surprise, neither of these gained any real traction. But as an experiment, I made the lowest quality content possible — clips stolen from a comedy TV show. Within a few days, it had more views than any of my other videos a thousandfold.
It made me realize that people didn’t want to see what I wanted to create. The lowest common denominator, something easily digestible and appealing to anyone, will always win.
So what’s the solution? Probably just turning off your phone or at least supporting creators who do create interesting, original content. But at the end of the day, a singular person’s support won’t do anything in an algorithm that thrives on unoriginal and repetitive content.
The best way to create change for yourself is to just make art for art’s sake. Forget about view counts, interactions, and followers — focus on the creativity of what you’re doing. I know for me that the less I focus on what others think of me, the happier I become.
