This article is part of a series of blog posts aimed at developing ideas and vision defining the DNA of the Gharial project.

There is something that has been bothering me a lot in the modern web for quite some time now, and I feel this topic is still wildly underrepresented in public discussions.

It’s the feeling that in the modern web, artists and creators have been globally failed by the field.

With tools and platforms directly working against them, sometime with such constraints and consequences that it can impacts the art itself, when the presence itself on the networks is looking more and more like a second full-time job.

But let’s unpack this more in details.

Modern platform floods content

In the race to grab and keep people’s attention - so that it can be resold to their true clients: advertisers - platforms have converged to an inefficient and time-consuming content handling. The inefficiency of it can be describe in numerous ways:

• Content is short lived. Creating a Fear-Of-Missing-Out sentiment for the audience (if you’re not here, you’ll miss content you want to see, so don’t leave), and incentivising creators to split and spam content to extend the life of it, artificially increasing activity.
• Content isn’t organized nor structured (enough), to keep people busy tackling inefficiently inside the platform. Although they have the teams, the fundings, and had years of development, platforms are still unwilling to present you content in a way that doesn’t waste your time and is respectful of your attention. Even the few algorithms that are in place to redirect content toward their hypothetical audience, have proved themselves to be at least ineffective, at worst highly damageable and dangerous.
• Content must be reworked to fit properly the platform. To keep the walled garden closed to migration, high incentives had been put in place so that you host the content itself on the platform (making it unavailable from the outside), or strongly insensitive you to remix it under new forms (the platform’s Stories for example).

All this leaded to new behaviors and functionalities over the years, as people changed and adapted to those incentives, and the platforms providing new tools to support those changes.

Twitter’s Thead is maybe the best illustration of it. When I joined Twitter in 2009, its global feeling was - and I will quote one of my closest friends here - a “Personal RSS of people’s life”, where content was still hosted elsewhere and the Twitter posts were just a notification, with a link, a quick description, and a way to react and interact with. So, we posted a link to a blog post in a single tweet and that was it.

But due to the short-lived aspect of the tweets, people started to change the way of sharing blog post, by posting the article bits by bits, flooding the space so that it could stay a little longer visible to the potential audience. This practice had also some advantages as since the content was now hosted on the platform, it was now compatible with re-sharing it (retweet) easily, or even being compatible with other tools of the platform like commentaries on content (quote tweet).
Making it even more long-lived and rewarding the original author with more visibility.

The visibility heist

Once the platform and the users where trap into this constant flood of content, it became harder and harder to have access to an audience, especially if you didn’t want to capitulate to the diktat of the new ways to behave on the said networks.

They efficiently obfuscated the work of creators and artists so that they could made them work for them in exchange of some little bits of visibility they stole in the first place.

That’s why we started to see people trying to game the system to get at least some of the stolen visibility back.

For example, associations and groups hosting their activity on Facebook Groups started to ask their members to like and react on publications so that they could be send to a wider audience by the algorithm.

An audience that wasn’t even a new one, but the current one that already shown interest and subscribed to get updates and was actively kept in the dark by the platform.

Unless you and your relatives invest time and work into the platform, of course.

The salesman’s transformation

Since communicating and reaching an audience became more difficult and trickier, asking for more efforts and competence to be done effectively, people invested themselves into understanding those tools, focusing on metrics and what could influence them, trying to increase their control for a better efficiency.

That’s basically what marketers, salespeople and MBA holders are doing for a living.

And that’s an issue:

• Artists and creators that do (understandably) accept that bad deal, must redirect time, work and sometime even money from their main activity. Sometime the incentives can even be so rough that it can even have an effect of the art itself, pushing the artist to distort their work to fit better the platform’s frame. Normalizing and sugarcoating it.
• Marketing and Art aren’t a good match. The first is people-pleaser while the second doesn’t have to. There are people-pleasing arts, but it’s a small part of the full spectrum of the field.
  And if you ask me, it’s not the most interesting one.
• Artists and creators that doesn’t want to take the deal are effectively muted.
  It’s not uncommon nowadays to see editors “"finding”" their new talents on the platforms, it’s effectively less risky for them since they target people that already managed to reach and gather an audience around them, but that also restrict considerably the wideness of sensibilities and personalities that can go through this selection process.
• It’s not because you don’t have a hypertrophied ego, or that you’re shy, or that you don’t have a marketing background, that you’re not someone interesting to be heard. In fact, it’s maybe even the exact opposite.

Creators and Artists aren’t salespeople.
Or shouldn’t they.

We should be more vocal about this fact, and start working against this trend.

Gharial

This sentiment is what will lead my work in the Gharial project.

I must admit it was difficult for me to choose the first article to write on this blog, deciding from which edge to start from, since it will be the foundation I will work from for the next articles.

I hope it wasn’t too disjointed and will at least give a global idea of the path the project aims to follow.

This was a first glimpse of the problem, in the next blog posts I will dig and develop more related aspects of it, and will, of course, start talking of possible solutions.

I would love to get your opinion and feedback, do you agree with this analysis? What does it inspire you? Do you have insights you’d like to share me?

Feel free to reach me directly at @gharial@mastodon.social, or discuss directly under the (obviously non-threaded) post on mastodon.