Most content platforms are full of content that sucks.
The tried and true way of ensuring quality content is to have an editorial team, paid creators on staff, strict submission policies, etc. Of course, that works (unless the editors suck), but it’s also a very tough business model, harder to scale, and kind of boring.
The dominant approach today is the opposite, or “long-tail” approach. A wide open platform where anyone can share any content, and the volume will be so high some % of good stuff will be in there.
YouTube, Facebook, Medium, Quora, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all adopt this approach, and employ various mechanisms for helping the cream rise above the massive milky mediocrity. Likes, comments, votes, etc. Sponsored content where creators can get some skin in the game and pay to get stuff to rise, incentivizing better content for ROI, etc.
Still, all the platforms mentioned still suck pretty bad when it comes to content quality. Twitter may be the exception, but it acts more as a filtered, personal curation feed rather than a platform for original content creation.
Go on Medium, Quora, Reddit, etc. and the vast majority of content is crap. It takes more work than most people would like to get the good stuff. Used to be, you’d go to specific blogs of creators you liked. You still can, but things are much harder to find without some kind of platform (still salty that Good Reader got nixed). It takes a lot of work to be the curator yourself.
You can add human monitors to the open platforms to reduce spam, bots, etc., but that gets mucky too. And controversial.
Yours.org has harnessed the power of Bitcoin Cash enabled real-time micropayments to lay the foundation for a pretty cool platform. Rather than “free” likes, votes and tips and comments cost real money. That’s a big step in the right direction, in terms of using automated, scalable mechanisms for incentivizing good content.
But there’s much room for improvement. It’s still really small, and most of the content on Yours is still low quality (IMO, it got worse when they removed the pay to publish requirement).
Here are a few off-the-cuff ideas for making a content platform not suck without relying on human editors:
- Pay for likes, votes, comments, etc. Just like Yours.org.
- Pay to publish. I think a larger amount, like $10 per post, could be excellent. It would require a large enough audience to where a reasonably popular article would be likely to earn it back and then some. But aspiring content creators who are serious about their craft would not balk at $10 to publish, compared with all the time and investment it can take to be heard elsewhere.
- To enhance reach and payout for successful content, create a deal with distributors (edited magazine/newspaper sites with large reach) where they’ll run the top post every week. So instead of submitting something to WSJ ed board and hoping they like it, you let audience reaction help it rise to WSJ.
- Similar deals with book publishers to publish collection of top posts in various topics, etc. once a year. Again, paying $10 for the chance to get into a high-profile publication or book might be well worth it.
- Grammarly integration so that posts with more than some small % of spelling/grammar errors don’t get published until fixed.
- Same for formatting. Block on publishing paragraphs too long, etc.
- 30 day ban if creator doesn’t reach minimum engagement/tip/vote level for most recent 3 pieces of content
- Niche topic areas with real power, rather than just one giant pool with need for least-common appeal. Subreddits do a decent job of keeping content curated to tight niches. Genuine unique, tight communities around tight topics, where you can be a top influencer within that niche even if your content has no mass appeal. Great tie-in to distribution deals too. Imagine a Gardening section with deals with Gardening mags, HGTV, etc. to get top creators wider distribution.
What are some other ideas to build a platform with consistent, world-class quality content?