Most things are normal. But the edges get the clicks

You don’t often hear in the news about normal things. They don’t make interesting content.

But most things are normal and it’s worth remembering that.

When we forget this, it has a lot of negative implications. Nuanced opinions go unnoticed and we’re driven to the edges.

Social media algorithms maximise the chance that we’ll end up at the extremes. Leaving us with either a warm feeling of solidarity or an upwelling of outrage. Their only goal is to elicit a strong feeling that engages us enough to respond or share - to hang around long enough to see adverts.

So we miss out on a lot of the mundane reality of human existence.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all content should be boring. But when it comes to important things like current affairs and politics, we ignore the mundane details at our peril.

Politics

Politics provides plenty of examples of where we only get fed sound bites and snippets of the whole story.

Notwithstanding the biases of whichever organisation is sharing information, even the most impartial ones are more likely to report on the extremes.

In the recent general election in the UK, beyond some diligent journalists, how many people actually read the parties’ complete manifestoes? Yet how many people hear about the most extreme views on the fringes, or see the one gaff from a speech repeated over and over.

So we have a feedback loop where the more extreme the content, the more it gets shared, and the more it gets shared, the more extreme content is produced.

Climate change

There may be scientific consensus on the broad trends of climate change, but there’s inherent uncertainty about exactly how the future will play out.

That uncertainty means that, discounting the ones who think it’s all completely made up anyway, media outlets are much more likely to discuss a report that comes out with an extreme prediction - one way or the other. An editor will chose whichever extremity fits their narrative and is more likely to get clicks.

`Projected global temperature increase over time`

The same goes for all sorts of reporting on scientific studies. A dozen studies might come to the same conclusion about something, but an outlier is more likely to make the news. Especially when it can justify a non-intuitive headline like “beer is actually good for you”.

Does this then incentivise academics to publish papers with extreme results? You might argue that academics have more moral fortitude than politicians, but they still want clicks and shares. Their next round of funding could depend on them.

Messed up view

The result of all this is that it leads to broad misconceptions and we end up with a distorted view of the world.

The truth is often a bit boring so we don’t hear about it.

Yes, bad things are happening in the world right now. Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan are not happy places. Global warming is bad and will have bad consequences.

But on a macro level, most aspects of human existence are getting generally better over time. Things like poverty, health, access to safe drinking water, and wars between states are all trending in a positive direction.

Gapminder is an independent non-proﬁt whose mission is to ﬁght these global misconceptions. Their website is well worth checking out.

News consumption

The business model of news has become more transactional, and competition for attention is more intense than ever. Twenty years ago someone may have considered themselves a Times or a Sun newspaper reader. There was a lot of inertia in their choice of news provider. One interesting headline in a different newspaper to their usual choice would not be enough incentive to switch allegiances.

These days our attention is much more elastic. We’re all one clickbait away from reading or watching something we never would’ve done in the past.

Why this matters for your Kickstarter

I’m partly writing this as a bit of a rant, but I think it’s also relevant to my usual writing about crowdfunding.

As with everything online, when you’re running a crowdfunding campaign you need to capture people’s attention. I believe it’s actually the hardest single aspect of a Kickstarter project.

It’s not enough just to have a great product. To grab people’s attention you need to stand out from the noise.

Of course, an extraordinary product is more likely to be noticed than an ordinary one, but with any product you can spin it to make it sound more interesting.

Find something extraordinary about you or your product and tell people about it. Or you can do something peripheral that then draws attention to your core product - perhaps what some might call a publicity stunt.

I did something like that recently when I created the world’s smallest playing cards to get a Guinness World Record. It was never going to be a money-spinner as I only made a small number of them, but it generated a lot of interest which then I could refocus on the regular playing cards that I sell.

…

The internet and social media have transformed the way we consume information, often pushing the most extreme content to the forefront.

This is bad in many ways, but the game is the game.

Although most things are normal, if you want people to care about what you’re doing you need to come at them from the edges.