Weak opinions, strongly held

Manu Moreale writes about the ratio between consuming content and creating it:

I believe people should consume less content and produce more. Finding an output for creativity is important. But it’s unreasonable to expect people to stop consuming content and replace that consumption with creation because the ratio will always be inevitably skewed towards consumption.

It’s a good post and while I’ve never tried to measure this ratio for myself, I like the way Manu blogs about it. I’m going to take that topic and expand it in a slightly different direction.

It also matters what we consume. If we read too much social media, what happens is that most of the consumption is headlines and opinions, not the facts behind the headlines. It’s retweets, short quotes, and TikToks, not longer blog posts and stories.

It’s usually obvious when reading all the takes on the internet who actually knows something and has formed their own opinion, and who has been influenced by whatever the current consensus is on social media. Starting with other peoples' opinions is like reading a newspaper’s op-ed first and then the front page. Everything we read afterwards will be influenced by those opinions.

When I quit Twitter in 2012, I essentially threw away any audience I had built and started over. I could feel the loss of community. But I also began to notice that my ideas felt just a tiny bit more unique. Not earth-shatteringly original, but definitely my own.