Shallow theory
The internet is incredibly vast in the surface but almost shallow in technical depth and high quality output.
The rule of of the 1% states the following:
In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an Internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk1.
A Corollarie statement that I would like to do to is that:
Only 1%2 of all the actual posters are good at publishing and promoting.
Why 1%?
Recently, there was a technical report from Huggingface where they trained an AI model to detect which parts of the Fine-web dataset are of high quality.
Fine-web is a massive dataset composed of a lot of the internet text. When I mean a lot it’s made out of 93.9 TB lots of text. But even then, most of it is just trash. So, to differentiate which parts are good and which ones are trash, they trained a binary classifier to detect which webpages have good information.
Out of the 93.9 TBs of information, only 8% of the total data was worth something. That is roughly 7.5TB worth something to train AI models on.
The problem is the following, even after we only get 7.5TBs of data, I promess you that a lot of it is still not good. I think a lot of it is still not a high quality value of art or a technical expert explanation of a subject.
We can still have what seems to be a lot of data but in reality it’s the same high quality resources passed around each other. So even if we just grab a terabyte of text from all of the fine-web, we suddenly realize that it is still an enormous amount information. The internet is still incredibly big, but what I’m trying to say is that the high quality outputs are kind of small in proportion.
The problems of communication
The internet, requires you to have two skills: the knowledge and the skills to communicate it. You have to be good at the two of them because the medium is part of the message.
This is why follower/subscription count don’t matter if you want deep conversations or high impact. What matters is the activity of the people that surround you. It is better to be tiny and have deep conversations than being massive with low engagement3.
Most people hate communicating their ideas. It sucks to write things down if you don’t have a habit of doing it. If you decide to just talk, you have to be good at communicating your ideas IN REAL TIME, that’s even more difficult and just a select few are good at it. This is because you have to create a habit out of it.
The most difficult part in all of this is that you have to be capable of releasing high quality outputs in a consistent way. Because you have to generate of proof of your value. That’s the hardest part, its a marathon and you have to like the pain to keep on going and pushing yourself.