Same Old Stuff — Let’s Stop Diluting the Internet with Regurgitated Content
OK so maybe this is just a symptom of the combination of Twitter and RSS feeds I’ve chosen to follow, but does anybody else feel like A LOT of the content on the internet these days (especially in the tech / entrepreneurship / startup / social media spaces) is the same stuff regurgitated and recycled over and over again?
Seriously, I can’t tell you how many articles about Pinterest, iPad 3 speculation and “social media trends” I’ve seen in the past week or two. It’s unbelievable.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the concept of trending topics, and it makes sense that at any given point in time there will be a few things that are particularly “hot.” But there is a difference between adding a new perspective or advancing the conversation on a hot topic vs. regurgitating the same stuff that has been thrown out there 50 times already.
Truthfully it’s difficult to come up with something completely new and original. There’s so much content out there, it seems like almost everything has already been said by somebody. And this is one of the reasons I don’t write as often as I’d like–a lot of the things I would write about have already basically been said–many times. Even so, I know I have at times contributed to the continual churn of regurgitated online content.
So from now on I’m going to try to commit to doing the following things when posting content online:
- Be original whenever possible.
- If I write about a “hot topic” I’ll try to make it uniquely my perspective so that it’s not simply a regurgitation of what everybody else is saying.
- If I re-post or RT something it will be because I think it is outrageously awesome or funny or something a lot of people may not have seen before.
On a final note, I know there are probably already forty articles out there about how so much of today’s online content is unoriginal and regurgitated. How ironic. FML.
