Death of the Follower
Jack Conte's 2024 keynote at SWSX, and why it's going to get so much worse (and better)
Paul Bakaus turned me on to Jack Conte’s 2024 keynote at SXSW, and I’m grateful as it’s a great speech. I’m still thinking about it, but wanted to end this week sharing some reflections.
(For those who don’t know, Jack rose to fame as part of the musical duo Pomplamoose, who I adore and still regret not seeing when they toured in my neighborhood. He went on to found Patreon based on his experiences as an artist, and his company hosted a Bay Area Creator Economy event in SF recently, where I met Paul. I’ve worked with creators of different stripes for about 8 years and I continue to invest in this area).
Jack captured the magic of web 2.0, when publishing suddenly became much easier. We take YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. for granted, it’s just internet content, but that was not always true. It’s also not true that the earlier web, web 1.0, lacked user generated content — it had weblogs stitched together with RSS, hosted on whatever, and prior to that there was usenet — but these new services did enable a huge new cohort of creators.
Jack’s also spot on when he said algorithmic feeds changed the nature of the internet. Machine learning (ML), which powers algorithmic feeds, was the first wave of AI and it absolutely transformed the demand side of the equation by commodifying content consumption. (My major thesis, and the purpose of this newsletter, is that generative AI is going to do the same to the supply side).
The irony here is that this was unnecessary. I may write a longer note on this in the future, but it’s not hard to capture the benefits of a demand-side optimization function (“time spent”) while still supporting supply-side health. It was just not seen at the time.
For various non-obvious but related reasons, content then moved to private direct platforms (chat, Discord, and more recently substack) but none of them capture the independence of the early (usenet) communities and combined them with the ease of use of the web 2.0 centralized services. This is a gap to be filled.
Now that supply is going to scale the way demand once did, whither the creator and their 1000 true fans? Stay tuned.