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While Internet-first Platforms advocated for and built on the article format, they themselves continued investing in new content Formats.
Internet-first platforms — Apple, Twitter, Google — have launched mobile-first formats. Google built cards in its material design. Tweet embeds are mobile-first. Finally, iOS has widgets. In WWDC 2020 Special Event Keynote, Craig Federighi of Apple introduced widgets as, “Widgets help you get information at a glance.” He goes on to describe them as beautiful and data-rich. Additionally, they now came in different sizes so users could choose the one that best fits their needs.
On the other extreme, Internet-first Platforms built highly immersive formats like Mix-media Immersive Scrollytelling. For example, Facebook invested in Facebook 360 videos and Oculus Virtual Reality. Google built Web Stories and Apple is pushing for Augmented Reality with every passing release.
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Often there are entire chunks of information — evidence, example, explanation, description, FAQs — in long-form text that support the core argument but isn’t core by itself. We recommend putting such text in our Content Toggle Block.
Why this matters:
- It gives your audience the agency to pick-and-choose the parts that are relevant to them.
- This is backed by research. In this insightful paper, Shirish Kulkarni demonstrates that inverted pyramids are a legacy of earlier communications technologies like the telegraph. However, that isn’t the best way to write in the digital age.
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CopiedWhat is the difference between reading news on your website versus on Apple News or Medium?
For the same article, broadly the reading experience across all publishers and aggregators (like Google News) and social media platform is similar. With this, individual publishers have lost their power to create Owned Identity and Competitive Differentiation for themselves.
Candid Communication lost out. Over the last two decades, the only way to monetize your Owned Media got intertwined with the Digital Advertisements economy and the page-views metric. This meant there was no valuation (financial or otherwise) of the inherent intellectual information in the piece, because the ecosystem couldn’t measure it — in effect, a well-reported piece of journalism or research competed with a funny cat video!
We now serve platforms, not users. Publishers started optimizing their platforms for SEO, not user experience. For example, a website optimized for SEO will publish 50 stories across 100 days for an evolving topic instead of building an one upgrading explainer that provides a coherent narrative.
CopiedIn his blog, author Robin Sloan recommends that to avoid Context Collapse, writers should declare their assumed audience at the top of any piece of Posts, informing readers who the intended audience is and acknowledging that others may read it but might need to exert additional effort to fully comprehend it since it was not specifically written for them.
He goes on to say that the assumed audience can change over time and thus it is important for writers to keep revisiting this note and adapt the note to changing cultural and societal norms. Below are two examples from his blog:
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