The Attention Economy Is Not Your Enemy

There's a popular narrative that the attention economy is broken - that platforms reward outrage over insight, noise over substance. There's some truth to this at the extremes. But most creators who blame the algorithm are actually dealing with a different problem: they're not publishing enough, or not publishing in the formats the platform surfaces, or not being specific enough to earn real engagement from the right people.

The platforms are not looking for generic. They're surfacing content people spend time on, save, and share. Those things still track quality - they just track quality-as-received-by-the-reader, which means you have to meet the reader where they are.

The creators who complain loudest about reach are often the ones who post format-agnostic content - the same thing pasted everywhere, ignoring how each platform serves its audience. A LinkedIn post formatted for LinkedIn and written for LinkedIn's reader performs differently than a blog post cross-posted with a paragraph trimmed. The algorithm can tell the difference, and more importantly, the reader can.