The A-word.

There is nothing more exciting than when you find a writer or a YouTuber or an artist that you really resonate with online. When you find somebody who isn’t huge or trying to influence or grift and has a genuine talent they’re trying to share with the world. But this is… insanely hard?

Because of this, I’m trying to figure something out that’s important to me and maybe a little existential: How do I find good content creators on the Internet?

Algorithms, although I understand why they started in the first place, don’t work. Maybe they never really have. But a 2024 study from researchers at Leipzig University found that Google is “struggling to combat low-quality websites that manage to secure top positions in search results.” The research examined over 7,000 product-review search terms and discovered that the highest-ranked pages featured more SEO optimization, more affiliate links, and lower-quality text overall. As one SEO executive told Fortune: “I’ve never seen Google in such disarray.” Google’s March 2024 core update promised to reduce unhelpful content by 40%. Many complained that websites which had improved their quality still saw no recovery in rankings, while Reddit and Quora posts inexplicably ranked higher than sites with established expertise. The people who play by the rules get punished. The systems reward the system-gamers.

People have dealt with this in one of two ways: either

a) gamify their content for maximum chance of the algorithm catching their work, or

b) shout into the void and hope the algorithm does its job—posting things like “hey, I’m an XYZ creator and I hope the algo pushes me to my kind of people!”

Both operate with the same bizarre mysticism (and, sometimes, occultism) that occurs because of the impossible black box the algorithm is. Consider MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson), who spent five years “relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm.” He’s built an empire by engineering every aspect of his content to maximize retention and click-through rates. From obsessive A/B testing of thumbnails to eliminating any buildup in the first 10 seconds of videos. His approach is so precise that every second is designed to keep viewers watching, essentially forcing YouTube’s algorithm to promote his content.

Even the engineers don’t fully understand their own creation. Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer who worked on the recommendation algorithm, admitted that “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online.” Because YouTube uses machine learning and deep neural networks, there are no set rules—the algorithm is a black box that even its engineers can’t fully explain. As one article put it, “nobody knows the details—not even YouTube, to an extent.” We’re all praying to gods we can’t see, hoping they’re benevolent.

Things don’t need to be this way. The open-source social media platform Mastodon specifically only has the ability to see content based on the hashtags and who you follow. Tumblr, though now owned by WordPress’ Automattic, still puts the ability to only see who you follow at the forefront of their dashboard.

This is a welcome alternative to the default endless-scroll of content that’s seemingly conjured out of nowhere and yet perfectly curated to keep you on whatever app for as long as possible. But it doesn’t really solve the more important original issue: how do you find people and work you want to follow?

The algorithm’s replacement isn’t the absence of an algorithm. I think it’s something else entirely.

Studies have found that algorithms prioritize content generating high engagement, and unfortunately, negative emotions drive the strongest response. A 2021 study published in PNAS found that Twitter’s engagement-based algorithm amplified tweets expressing anger and made users feel significantly worse about their political out-group. Research shows anger is more contagious than joy and “can penetrate different communities and break local traps by more sharing between strangers.”

Facebook discovered this the hard way. Their own internal research in 2018 warned that their algorithms “exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” When they weighted the “angry” reaction emoji at 5× the value of a like, it favoured “toxic and low-quality news content.” They eventually dialed it back to zero by 2020. The damage was already done.

As one scholarly review noted, “engagement metrics primarily promote content that fits immediate human social and affective preferences and biases rather than quality content or long-term values.”

The longer you’re miserable, the longer you scroll. The longer you scroll, the more ads get served. The system is working exactly as designed.

I think an okay solution to this is hashtags or categories, to look through specific topics and sort by “most recent” or “newest” instead of “trending” or “popular” or whatever. But man, that sure is a slog.

The few platforms that still allow you to view everything do a terrible job at automatically filtering any automated bullshit or low-quality work. More savvy users have figured out a clever way to circumvent this: create their own hashtags rather than using the more obvious widely-used ones. For example, “#spilled-ink” on Tumblr typically has higher-quality, more curated writing than just the “#poetry” tag.

It’s exhausting, though. The workarounds for the workarounds.

There are a ridiculous amount of people online now. So much content being created every second. It’s overwhelming. I appreciate the niche, tight-knit communities that emerge organically, places like Ravelry (for knitters and crocheters, with over 350,000 users), specific subreddits like r/succulents or r/turkishcoffee, Strava’s running and cycling clubs, Goodreads for book lovers, or even niche YouTubers like Half-Asleep Chris who’s built a devoted following around LEGO builds and cats. The #VanLife movement started as a small group and became a full-blown phenomenon.

But those are so personal, and often full of interpersonal drama as a result. This isn’t to mention how people randomly drop off the face of the earth digitally sometimes. If you have an account on a non-mainstream platform (or maybe a declining one, like Medium?) then it’s easy to forget about it and have your profile begin to collect dust indefinitely.

I have done this so many times with microblogging platforms: Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon. Despite how much I seem to be able to yap here, I just cannot find the ability to maintain usage on these kinds of apps. And I think it’s doing a real hindrance to my “reach,” which is partially why I want to solve this problem.

I’d love a curated list, what was once known as a “blogroll,” but then I feel as though I run into the original mover problem: Where does the curator find these people and what are their methods for doing so? It’s curators all the way down, and eventually someone has to do the actual looking.

Newsletters seem to be the best way of communicating with an audience still. Research shows that 77% of B2B buyers prefer email communication, more than twice as much as any other marketing channel. 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads, and email marketing delivers an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. In a survey about communication preferences, 90% of respondents chose to receive email newsletters over Facebook updates (only 10%).

Even 79% of millennials and 57% of Gen Z prefer being contacted by brands via email.

Assuming you have good email hygiene practices (I certainly don’t), you can curate a folder of newsletters from your favourite creators and read them akin to a collection of digital newspapers. But this is such a one-sided communication method, isn’t it? You receive. You consume. The conversation happens in your head, if it happens at all.

Maybe it’s too idealistic to seek a town hall in today’s day and age of the Internet. Somehow, I’m asking too much by trying to figure out a way to make social media platforms genuinely social.

Perhaps the only thing I can do is look for the most popular accounts, and hope that I can sacrifice a burnt offering to the algorithmic God to get my work in front of the right people, and likewise have the right people’s work in my face by random chance. That’s bleak. I don’t want it to be true. But some days, it feels like the only option left.

A Request

All of that said, if you’re a writer that puts a lot of time, care, and effort into your work, then please drop a comment and I’d absolutely love to follow you! You don’t need to be brilliant or gifted, or write about any particular topic, just somebody that consistently and actively uses the site.

80% of success is showing up, isn’t it?

And maybe if enough of us keep showing up, keep making things, keep reaching out into the void, we’ll find each other. That feels like the kind of inevitable ending we can write ourselves.