Episode 053 - Ash & Katie, Bytes #11 - Patreon's CEO on the "Future of Creativity on the Web", the demise of Deviantart and what this tells us about the wider internet, and an analysis of a tweet about cheeseburger salad

The eleventh in our new series, Bytes, where Ash and Katie discuss 3 (or 4) things from the latest Digital Works Newsletter.

In this episode we'll be discussing some of the links in the newsletter that went out on May 30th.

We talk about:

• Patreon CEO, Jack Conte's SXSW keynote "Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web"
• A Slate article on the demise of DeviantArt
• A viral tweet about cheeseburger salad (and accompanying analysis)

You can sign up for the newsletter at thedigital.works.

You can now buy Catchup Passes to watch recordings from the first Digital Works Conference. Passes cost £75 and are available until 9th August 2024: thedigital.works

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:34

Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and today's episode is episode 11 of Bytes. Bytes is our regular short-form series where we look at three or four things from the most recent Digital Works newsletter, and joining me today and for all episodes in this series is the person who puts that newsletter together, my colleague Katie. Today, we'll be talking about the things that were included in the newsletter that went out on Thursday May 30th, about the things that were included in the newsletter that went out on Thursday May the 30th, and the three things we'll be discussing are a presentation at South by Southwest by Patreon CEO Jack Conte, titled Death of the Follower and the Future of Creativity on the Web, an article in Slate by Nishish Parwar about DeviantArt, titled the Tragic Downfall of the Internet's Art Gallery. And, lastly, we'll be looking at a viral tweet about cheeseburger salad and some accompanying analysis from Matt Capon.

Speaker 1: 1:42

The first thing that we are going to talk about is a video that you shared from a presentation at South by Southwest from Jack Conte, who is the CEO of Patreon, and his presentation is called the death of the follower and the future of creativity, and I think this is interesting because it touches on a few things that we heard at the Digital Works Conference and that our friends at StoryThings have been saying over the past year or so, and that is that if you are a content creator in inverted commas of any type it feels increasingly important to be focusing on building direct connections with your audience, and the period where you could perhaps rely on social media or other sort of ways of traffic being driven to you are probably changing, if not completely going away. But, katie, what did this 45 minute presentation from Jack Conte have to tell us?

Speaker 2: 2:52

It's interesting for a few reasons. It's a useful reminder of how the web has changed from what it originally originally started at. I think he refers to a sort of read-only internet and then the excitement around web 2.0, where, you know, people could get involved in the internet and interact with it and put comments up and create content and share that content, and that was really exciting at the time. But actually now what's happened is, because of all the sort of algorithmic changes, the ability to grow an audience online and sort of keep hold of that audience, as it were, on social platforms is like super hard. And so he was really saying you know, just sort of mapping out how much it's changed over the last few years in terms of a lot of these sort of creators of content have built these audiences and then the platforms have kind of taken those audiences away, as it were. I mean, obviously, to a degree there's a little bit of a. Well, he would say this, wouldn't he, because he's patreon, but it is um.

Speaker 1: 4:02

The way that he summarizes what's changed and where we are now is, I think, really insightful and useful to think about from the perspective of if you're an organization creating content and, you know, putting it onto these platforms that have algorithms like what does that mean in terms of your direct to audience relationship, and related to this, I saw a newsletter from story things one of their attention matters newsletters that came out today, as we record this 20th of June, and that newsletter was saying that sort of gone are the days of being able to build one big audience on a single platform and actually, if you're looking to build audiences online now, you need to be building numerous small audiences. And I think that tallies, it feels like, with some of the things that Jack is saying in this presentation, but for cultural organisations, that possibly feels like a lot more work. How would you say cultural organisations should be thinking about this shift.

Speaker 2: 5:02

It's very hard, isn't it? I mean, you know there are examples of arts organisations and museums that use platforms like Patreon in a very effective way, but it requires you to have within your organization people with the expertise to really versus. You know, I think up until now, organizations, for the last 10 years and longer, have been so hardwired to think about. You've got to understand the algorithm and you've got to create content that speaks to the algorithm and really, in a way, this is saying, actually you need to understand what audiences are interested in first and then, you know, kind of think about ways to reach them, which could be platforms like Patreon, could be things like newsletters, actually, which obviously have had a huge resurgence as well the last few years.

Speaker 2: 6:09

But, yeah, it is tricky. It's yet another example of arts organizations having to, you know, spend more time thinking about what they create, why they're creating it, who's it for. You know, what kind of things do they want from you as a museum, as a theater, as an art gallery? It's a challenge, but it's certainly, you know, I think it's something we have to be very mindful of, because it's not going to go back in time to how it was. It's only going to become more of an issue.

Speaker 1: 6:36

The algorithms our second thing is an article in slate by nitish power that's titled the Tragic Downfall of the Internet's Art Gallery, and this is about a platform called DeviantArt, and I would imagine if you've been present on the internet for more than 10 years, you will have come across DeviantArt at some point. It's a platform, a community of artists who share their artworks on the platform. It's a community in the true old internet sense of the word, I think. But this article in Slate talks about let me read a part of this Once a vibrant platform for artists, deviantart is now buckling under the weight of bots and greed and spurning the creative community that made it great.

Speaker 1: 7:40

And this all links, it seems, to DeviantArt being acquired by Wixcom, and some of the new commercialization tools that have been introduced to DeviantArt since the acquisition have caused the platform to be flooded by bots, to be flooded by AI-generated artworks, and it feels like a really clear and sad example of, well, the inshittification that we see across the internet of communities and the sort of value of the community being completely disregarded in a rush to monetize these platforms. But, katie, what does this article tell us? What does the demise of DeviantArt tell us?

Speaker 2: 8:27

Yeah, it is. It's not happy Ricky to say it is quite depressing because what Deviiant art did in in those sort of early days was allowed a whole bunch of usually sort of unknown or early career artists, illustrators, creatives of other kinds to build a sort of profile for themselves and then, in doing so, translate that into a career, into well, into income, into revenue. And the problem now is that you know you've got AI bots crawling all over these things, just you know stealing the content and then that being used to churn out kind of replicant type material. And it's both indicative of a wider issue around AI and the internet and the impact of that, but also just on a sort of practical level. It's a real shame that those sorts of routes into the creative industries are being closed off because of how the internet's changing, I suppose.

Speaker 1: 9:31

Yeah, and I mean you and I have both been active sort of on the internet at large for decades, sadly, and it does feel that the types of vibe for want of a better word that places like Deviant are enabled are becoming fewer and further.

Speaker 2: 9:48

Between that sort of connection and the sort of joyful weirdness of some of those communities just doesn't seem as possible to find and to build on the very big social platforms that are coming to dominate how so many people spend time online appeared in Gnome Mag, which was we Need to Rewild the Internet, was covering a similar type of topic around the fact that, you know, the internet is now sort of dominated by a few large tech companies and that leads to a loss of diversity and innovation in the ecosystem, and how it might be possible to encourage kind of more diverse platforms to restore that kind of original internet dynamism.

Speaker 2: 10:41

I don't know if it's possible or if you know that's where things like going back to Patreon become quite interesting, because maybe that's the only way to do it now, through using a platform where you are directly speaking to an audience. But it's hard because what a lot of those platforms enabled was you to build that audience in the first place. So it is tricky because it's kind of a bit chicken and egg, isn't it? If you want to build a profile for yourself, use the internet as a way to kind of kick off a creative career. I think it's much more challenging now than it used to be. I mean, even to the extent of things like blogging, and you know in the sort of 2000s and how blogging kickstarted the career of numerous amazing writers and journalists, and Twitter did it to a degree as well, and again, you know really that's not as possible as it used to be. Yeah, it's interesting times, but not necessarily in a good way.

Speaker 1: 11:52

Our last thing after our slightly gloomy second thing. Well, our last thing is not gloomy. It is a series of tweets about a tweet from a guy called Matt Capon and he had a tweet which was poking fun at Marks and Spencer's cheeseburger pasta salad and that tweet went pretty viral, ended up being featured in a lot of local and national news websites of local and national news websites, and it turns out that Matt is actually a visiting lecturer at City University on journalism and social media and he then did a thread which sort of analyzes and unpacks the tweet that he did. That went viral, which I think is well worth a read. That he did that went viral, which I think is well worth a read. You know, if you're interested in the dynamics of how these things can happen. I think he does a really digestible and sort of insightful analysis over the thread that he produced. But, katie, you know you have a background in comms, you have a background in social media. What do you think about Matt's tweets and then his analysis?

Speaker 2: 13:05

I'll tell you one thing I'd never want to eat cheeseburger-flavoured pasta salad. That sounds gross. I think it's a funny sort of throwaway thing, but I think there's a couple of things in it that are interesting. I suppose what it demonstrates is actually, if you know what you're doing is quite not easy, but there are ways in which you can make content go viral by following certain rules in inverted commas, and obviously this is a demonstration of that.

Speaker 2: 13:31

You know, in this case he's doing it with something pretty silly, but of course actually you know, particularly with x, as it is now the whole kind of nefarious means to sort of highlight content that's inflammatory or you know, in some other way designed to provoke arguments or you know, kind of.

Speaker 2: 14:16

But it also shows you that you know for all that these algorithms are complex and are, you know they they're hundreds of signal, thousands of signals that they're looking at. Actually, like he says sort of quite early on that the key to social media content is to appeal to three levels of emotions to elicit engagement, and that's visceral, behavioral and reflective, and actually that's like a really nice summary of social media. So it sort of shows you that for all their sophistication, they're actually not that sophisticated and you know that's maybe positive, because if you can, you know, use this sort of principles that he's talking about, then potentially you know you might be able to get your stuff in front of a wider audience. But of course the flip side of that is it's a lot of these unsavoury types are using it, you know, for not so positive means.

Speaker 1: 15:05

Great, I think we will end there. Thanks for listening to this episode of Bytes. You can find all episodes of the podcast on our website at thedigitalworks, where you can also find more information about our events and sign up to the newsletter. Our theme tune is Vienna, beat by Blue Dot Sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark Cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.