Perhaps the platform era caused us to lose track of what a Web site was for. The good ones are places you might turn to several times per day or per week for a select batch of content that pointedly is not everything. Going there regularly is a signal of intention and loyalty: instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials—or videos or audio—from sources you trust. If Twitter was once a sprawling Home Depot of content, going to specific sites is more like shopping from a series of specialized boutiques (View Highlight)
The goal is to give readers a breadth of stories and opinions at a glance. “There was a period that Twitter did that job very well,” Smith said. “It was a place where you could find diverging good-faith arguments about shared facts. Social media has stopped doing that.” He added, “People are interested in things that are curated by humans.” (View Highlight)
Loyal audiences are pointedly not everyone; there is a limit to how much revenue can be juiced from them. Moving away from the traffic firehose of the wider Internet seems counterintuitive, in that sense, but it may be the only viable option left (View Highlight)