Consumption Amidst Abundance

Dr. Robert Cialdini came up with a concept known as the scarcity principle of persuasion. It says that the more difficult it is to obtain a product, the more valuable it becomes.

Let's apply the scarcity principle to our content consumption on the internet. If you're reading this, there's a chance you truly care about the sources of the content you consume online and you want it to be of quality.

This morning, I was thinking of how it's different to read a Twitter thread vs. reading a blog on the same topic. Honestly, I prefer blogs over Twitter threads because of readability and focus.

Let's talk about focus...

If you were to learn about marketing and you read a Twitter thread and a blog about the same, how different would it be?

That is the question in my mind right now. With the abundance of content on platforms like Twitter, it's hard to focus on a thread even if it's written by a great writer and a thinker. In a sense, it becomes one out of a million others and you have a lot to compare it to in the real time.

You have 10 different ideas coming up with one scroll in your feed and that creates so much noise that focusing on a quality Twitter thread becomes undesirable.

On the other hand, if there's a blog on the same topic, I'd be more focused in reading that cause at that point of time, there's no clutter and my mind dives into the words in front of me and because it's a blog, all the words are related to each other. Even if I skip a part of the blog, I'm still in the same zone of learning the same thing which is unlikely to happen on platforms like Instagram, Twitter.

This isn't just to share an observation but to make you question of ways you can solve this.

How to make ourselves focus on specific content in between this abundance? (that too, in a frictionless manner)

It could be a tech product idea, a system of content consumption, design ideas.

- Ritik Sahni

What do you think about your own behaviour when consuming content online and if you have any ideas on fine-tuning the process, feel free to share!