🟧 Aggregation theory

The internet has few centers of gravity right now. (Media thoughtz from Kyle)

Kyle Chayka: The internet right now feels like it has fewer centers of gravity than it has in a long time. Instead there are many, many planets of various sizes. You don’t have to be on Twitter, in fact, you might be better off without it. But you also don’t have to be on Threads, unless you want to know what was happening 2 days ago. Reddit has gotten a huge boost in traffic, due to being prioritized by Google’s search algorithm (perhaps not unrelated to its A.I. licensing deal with Google earlier this year). But Reddit is for niches, when you know the specific arena of content you’re looking for and there are active communities of randos discussing it. There’s no Gawker-style blog keeping a day-to-day general-interest gauge on what the chattering classes are obsessed with, and the surviving media institutions are too competitive to really highlight good work across the ecosystem. The most universal reference point might be Wordle. Maybe NYT should just put its headlines on there?

There is a competition going on for authority online — not just authority in a particular subject matter, like politics or finance, but the authority to provide a comprehensive view of what matters on the internet, pointing out what to pay to attention to. Twitter is far too broken to play that role. TikTok is too news-averse. Instagram is too ephemeral. What has emerged instead is a huge, disaggregated constellation of individual social-media presences, email newsletters, and subscription podcasts, each offering their own version of a worldview. Want to know what to think about? Wait for Jamelle Bouie to post a video, or John Ganz to write a Substack post, or Ezra Klein to record a new episode. (Or I guess subscribe to Bari Weiss’s The Free Press if you’re through the conservative looking glass.) These voices aggregate news narratives and opinions in the same way that the Twitter feed used to, omnivorous and heterodox. 

Chaos is a ladder in this media moment and many are trying to climb it. Few are salaried columnists, who have less motivation to be experimental; the most interesting have built their careers entirely amidst the instability. I think what many of them do can be described by the word “aggregation” (complimentary). A few weeks ago, Delia Cai of the newsletter Deez Links texted me something like, “Aggregation is now a monetizable service.” (One of Delia’s most popular recent newsletters is simply a collection of Tim Walz memes.) After that, I started seeing other examples pop up. Oliver Darcy, formerly of CNN’s media newsletter, is starting an aspirationally authoritative daily newsletter on everything from politics to media and tech called Status. “I don’t think there’s one product out there that does exactly what we do,” he told the NYT. (Puck and Semafor have similar offerings, with much larger staff.) Status just put out its first issue.

Responding to the announcement of Status, Janice Min, the previous editor of The Hollywood Reporter and now CEO of the Hollywood newsletter company The Ankler, said, “People will pay for the convenience of not poring through internet sludge all day and having someone clarify what they need to know.” Exactly! No one wants internet sludge. They want clarity and bullet points, which is why you can charge for aggregation. Emily Sundberg’s daily newsletter Feed Me, which I would summarize as covering the arena of ‘cool NYC business lifestyle,’ works on the same principal. Emily recently wrote: “Feed Me is a newsletter that is partially made up of rounding up news links from elsewhere on the internet. I know it’s a service that many of you appreciate paying for because you tell me.” Anne Helen Petersen, the proprietor of the newsletter / community Culture Study, wrote in a four-year retrospective that her audience appreciates aggregation: “And while I have a sense of what you, as readers, immediately gravitate towards — hilariously, it’s often just access to links and recommendations — I don’t feel beholden to replicate stories that have done well in the past.” (Shout out also to Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs, OG newsletter source of Twitter aggregation, which is currently on hiatus.)

The center of gravity is missing, so we seek out any foothold, any source of a perspective. Emily Sundberg just did a smart Feed Me post on the homogeneity of Substack, which is the backbone of this burgeoning layer of media (along with Patreon and other DIY-enabling services). On any platform, everyone copies the forms of content that succeed. With Substack’s newsletters, that means a lot of diary entries, gossip, travel recommendations, and lists of things that writers like or don’t like. (That pattern, however, is also as old as the tenth century Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon.) If you look at any one Substack newsletter in comparison to its peers, it does appear banal and repetitive. But they are not experienced as a landscape; they are experienced individually. Each one is its own tiny world. You tend to pick one and stick with it, going to it for everything from fashion recs to Marseilles itineraries. Only sickos like journalists constantly shop around and thus run into the homogeneity. ¹

“Aggregation theory” circa 2015-2016 was Ben Thompson of pioneering newsletter / tech worldview Stratechery’s phrase for, basically, how huge digital platforms like Amazon and Facebook hoard their customers’ habits and attention, then dole it out in paid marketplaces that make them tons of money: 

There is a clear pattern for all four companies [Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google]: each controls, to varying degrees, the entry point for customers to the category in which they compete. This control of the customer entry point, by extension, gives each company power over the companies actually supplying what each company “sells”, whether that be content, goods, video, or life insurance.

Google doesn’t produce information, it just mediates access to it, and then sells ads on that traffic. But this version of aggregation theory worked out better for selling home goods and distributing music than it did for news media. In the years since then, most digital platforms have turned against news (which is to say, concrete, verified information about reality). There’s no universal marketplace for journalism or commentary, save perhaps a halfhearted sideline like Apple News.² In the media industry, the new aggregators are very small scale, individual creators, or very large, like the NYT. The NYT homepage and app now function more like Twitter, but a self-contained Twitter written and produced entirely by the professional newsroom. There are dozens of little bits of content, 4 separate stories on every major subject to choose from, and sidebars of constantly updating Opinion takes on the news. (NYT also posts TikTok-esque vertical videos of its reporters on its homepage and app, as does WSJ.) It aggregates everything you need. This is what the menu under the Arts section of the NYT website looks like: 

What to Read, 100 Best Books, “new songs and albums” — it’s a recommendation center. It promises ongoing guidance for what culture to consume, for what matters. 

The New Yorker, my employer, is offering more of this kind of aggregation as well. Its homepage is made up of curated packages of stories that present an authoritative glimpse of the day’s storylines: “what you need to know.” 

Publications, whether massive or tiny, are platforms now. Audiences will choose a small number and become very loyal to them. Thus news publications will perform more and more aggregation as a service. As the rest of the internet gets overtaken by bots and AI-generated content and oligarch-owners livestreaming megalomaniacal presidential candidates, the self-contained publications controlled entirely by professional humans win out. We actually need more aggregation. Substack newsletter directories and link dumps don’t cut it. I actually think a Gawker-esque website of short blurbs, a place where everyone can congregate and bounce off the same subjects, would kill right now.

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Previous media thoughtz on One Thing: 

Voice, taste, trust, scarcity: The values that publications need to keep in mind while competing for readers in the new, messy ecosystem.

The internet’s distribution problem: Why digital media companies should want consumers to intentionally seek them out instead of finding them through feeds.

Notes on format: Our editorial strategy for this newsletter, or why a publication should be like a great neighborhood restaurant.

1. Side note: This is why Substack acting more and more like an app, with views across the platform, means that more readers will encounter more homogeneity. It actually works counter to individual proprietors’ needs to drive subscriptions. As one commenter on Emily Sundberg’s post on homogeneity narrates: “The past month I’ve been doing the exact same routine when i open up the substack app: open a post that i think would interest me, read the first paragraph, realize all the words are blending together with every other culture essay i’ve ever read. Close the app.”

2. Substack is certainly an aggregator in this way, but the content across the platform is not vetted and suffers from the company’s lax moderation standards.