Living Next Door to Moloch

Why Content Is Terrible Now

My RSS reader has 823 unread items.

500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

My inbox contains nineteen newsletters I genuinely wanted to subscribe to but will never actually read, and every platform I visit feels like standing in a stadium where everyone is shouting simultaneously.

The content industry has stumbled into a coordination failure of brobdingnagian proportions. Everyone produces more content because everyone else produces more content, and the Nash equilibrium of this game is a world where infinite noise competes for zero attention.

We are, collectively, a grinding, screaming machine that converts human creativity into an undifferentiated roar, and nobody can figure out how to turn it off.

The Red Queen

It’s 2010. You’ve written something good. You put it on your blog, maybe share it on Twitter, and there’s a reasonable chance people will see it. The signal-to-noise ratio is tolerable. Attention is scarce but not impossibly so.

It’s 2025. You’ve written the same quality piece. But between 2010 and now, approximately forty million other people also decided to become writers. Each of them is producing content at higher frequencies than you ever imagined possible in 2010. The platforms that distribute your work are algorithmically tuned to extract engagement, which means they favor volume and controversy over quality and insight. To maintain the same visibility you had in 2010, you need to produce five times as much, promote ten times as hard, and optimize relentlessly for whatever metrics the algorithm currently rewards.

So you do. May God forgive you, you do.

And so does everyone else.

And now we’re all producing five times as much to maintain the same visibility, which means the noise floor has risen again, which means next year you’ll need to produce seven times as much.

This is a Red Queen situation. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Evolutionary biologists borrowed this metaphor to describe arms races between predators and prey, in which both species evolve faster and faster merely to maintain their current relative positions. The content industry has recreated this dynamic in just two decades.

Garrett Hardin would recognize this

The classic paper on coordination failures is Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin asks you to imagine a pasture open to all herders. Each herder benefits fully from adding another cow to the pasture, while the costs of overgrazing are distributed among everyone. The rational choice for each individual herder is to add more cows. The result is that everyone adds more cows until the pasture is destroyed and everyone starves.

The content economy is a commons, and attention is the pasture. Each creator benefits fully from producing more content (more chances at virality, more surface area for discovery, more fodder for the algorithm, more opportunities to catch lightning in a bottle), while the costs of the resulting information overload are distributed across all consumers. Creators who unilaterally reduce their output lose share to creators who don’t. The pasture keeps getting more crowded.

In Hardin’s pasture, the grass eventually runs out, and the system collapses. Physical limits impose eventual constraints. In the attention economy, there are no such limits on the supply side. You can always produce more content. The limiting factor is human attention, which is fixed, but the system lacks a mechanism to register it. It registers engagement, and engagement can be manufactured through volume and manipulation, even as genuine attention approaches zero.

The economist Thomas Schelling spent much of his career studying coordination problems. He identified focal points, those natural convergence points that help people coordinate even without communication. If two people need to meet in New York City but can't agree on a specific location, they’ll probably both go to Grand Central Station. Focal points allow coordination to emerge spontaneously.

The content industry has no focal points. There’s no natural Schelling point where everyone agrees to stop the madness. The platform incentives, the career incentives, the ego incentives, and the pure economic logic of attention capture all point in the same direction: more.

The publish or perish analogue

Academia discovered this dynamic decades before the internet. The “publish or perish” culture emerged in the mid-20th century as universities sought quantitative metrics for tenure decisions. If your career depends on publication counts, you publish more. If everyone publishes more, the bar for tenure rises. If the bar rises, you need to publish even more. The result is that the average scientist now publishes roughly four times as many papers per year as scientists did in 1960, while the average quality and replicability of papers have demonstrably declined.

The academic version is contained within a relatively small population of researchers, and even so, it’s a distorted scientific culture beyond recognition. The content version encompasses anyone with an internet connection and the aspiration to be heard. The dynamics are the same; the scale is vastly larger.

In 2010, there were perhaps 50,000 podcasts. By 2024, there were over 4 million. Average podcast consumption has roughly tripled in that period. So the number of podcasts increased 80-fold while listening increased 3-fold. The average podcast now reaches fewer listeners than it did in 2010, despite being more professionally produced and better marketed.

If you want your podcast to succeed, you need to produce more episodes, promote more aggressively, and hope that the others give up before you do…

Why nobody defects

The maddening thing about coordination failures is that everyone can see they’re happening, and nobody can stop them. Every content creator knows that, in aggregate, having everyone produce more means nobody gets heard. But knowing this changes nothing about your individual incentives.

You’ll write one piece per month instead of four, but you’ll make it truly excellent. What happens? Your subscribers forget you exist. The algorithm stops surfacing your work. Your open rates collapse because people’s inboxes are so overwhelmed that anything not constantly demanding attention disappears. Meanwhile, your competitors who maintained high volume continue to occupy mindshare. You haven’t reduced the noise; you’ve removed yourself from consideration entirely.

This is the tragedy: individual virtue is punished. The content creator who says “I’ll only put things out when I have something genuinely valuable to say” is making a noble choice and a strategically terrible one. The system selects for the opposite.

What the platforms want

Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, Twitter, and their descendants are attention brokers. They make money by capturing attention and selling it to advertisers, or by taking a cut of transactions enabled by that attention. From their perspective, more content is purely good. It gives users more reasons to open the app and stay.

The platforms have no incentive to solve the coordination problem. They profit from it. Every additional creator competing for attention is another supplier helping drive down content costs while boosting engagement. A world where creators produced less but better content would be a world where users had less reason to compulsively check their feeds. That’s a world with lower revenues.

This isn’t a conspiracy; the platforms aren’t twirling their mustaches and laughing at creators’ misfortune. They’re optimizing for their objective function, which happens to be perpendicular to the creators’ collective interests.

The paradox of curation

If there’s too much content, maybe we need better filters. Algorithmic recommendation! Editorial selection! Trusted reviewers who separate the wheat from the chaff!

But curation faces the same coordination problem one level up. There are now so many curators that you need curators of curators. Newsletter aggregators. Podcast recommendation podcasts. Twitter accounts that exist solely to retweet other Twitter accounts. Each layer of curation adds more content to the pile it was supposed to reduce.

Is there any way out?

Historical examples of solved coordination problems mostly involve either coercion or sufficiently small groups in which repeated interaction enables cooperation. International fishing rights are managed through treaties backed by enforcement mechanisms. Local grazing commons in medieval England were managed through village councils, where everyone knew everyone. Neither model translates to the content economy. You can’t enforce content reduction through treaties, and the “village” of content creators numbers in the hundreds of millions.

What if platforms deliberately limited posting frequency? What if they surfaced content based on quality metrics that penalized volume? What if they created artificial scarcity through posting quotas?

Platforms won’t do this voluntarily for the reasons already discussed. And any platform that tried would simply lose creators to platforms that didn’t. The coordination failure applies to platforms, too.

The depressing conclusion is that we’re probably stuck. The equilibrium is stable. It will continue until some external force disrupts it: perhaps AI-generated content becomes so prevalent that human content becomes worthless entirely, or perhaps attention fragments so completely that the concept of “audience” dissolves altogether.

Neither scenario sounds particularly appealing.

Living Next Door to Moloch

In 2014, Scott Alexander wrote an essay called “Meditations on Moloch” addressing these coordination failures, borrowing the metaphor of Moloch from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” Moloch is the god of negative-sum competition, of races to the bottom, of systems that grind everyone down while benefiting no one. “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!”

The content industry is Moloch’s temple, and we’re all making offerings. We do it because everyone else is, and refusing to participate means being outcompeted by those who don’t refuse.

The only individual response that makes sense is a strange acceptance: participate in the system while recognizing that your participation makes the system worse, and hope that whatever you create provides enough value to specific people to justify the cost of adding one more voice to the cacophony.

I’ve come to believe that most coordination failures don’t get solved. They get lived with and eventually made obsolete by some unrelated technological or social change that nobody predicted. The content flood won’t be drained by a clever innovation. It’ll be made irrelevant when we find something else to drown in.

In the meantime, I’ll write this essay and add it to the pile, knowing full well that most people who could benefit from reading it never will because it’s buried under ten thousand other things demanding their attention. And you, having made it to the end, will probably not remember it by next week because forty other things will have pushed it out of your mental cache.

That’s Moloch in action.

That’s where we live now.

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