1. Breaking out of the niche-prison.
I’m a man of many interests.
Unfortunately, the way the internet seems to work for content creators, is for them to pick a niche, bring immense value to that niche and then rack up followers who are into that specific thing.
This is wonderful for the consumers, who can follow multiple of these niched down content creators according to whatever they’re interested in. But this leaves little to no freedom for the content creators themselves to explore and expand their niche or, God forbid, pivot to a new niche or leave their niche.
The value of a content creator seems inseparable from the niche. Outside this niche, the creator themselves seem to possess little to no value. This creates very few creators and a lot of consumers. It is high time we shift away from the consumer economy and into more of a “creator economy” where everyone focuses on creation, bringing some amount of value to their interest communities, no matter how insignificant. But of course, as it stands, social media puts too much focus on the niche and not on the creator themselves, to allow for this creator economy to take off.
In a normal setting, like Youtube for example, I’d only be relevant if I consistently posted ideas and thoughts relating to technical topics like web3 or generative AI. I am, essentially, imprisoned to the niche and I’m permanently a technician. Now, here, if I try to express new ideas that are more managerial or entrepreneurial, I instantly lose value because the algorithm does not like jacks of all trades. Consumers will then tend to not take me seriously and then proceed to leave. And us creators, we cannot blame them. They signed up to an expert in generative AI, not to the person themselves.
Try making a channel posting videos on all of your thoughts and interests, you will realize pretty quickly that the algorithm will, sooner or later, force you down to a niche very, very soon. You will have to zone in on a singular topic or interest to be able to garner more viewers and followers. There seems to be no way around this in conventional social media.
Enter the concept of a “hypertext garden”. Ideally, this is a cumulation of all of my thoughts, which include all of my interests. This is a convoluted yarn of content floating in the internet that is truly, and unabashedly, a complete representation of myself. Here, I have complete freedom to be not just a technician, but also an entrepreneur and a manager. And so much more if I want to. This hypertext garden is different from conventional media in one key way: it places the value on the content creator themselves, and not on the niche/s they are interested in. People who arrive at your garden know clearly what they are looking at: you. They’ve signed up for you as a whole, and not for a subset of your knowledge. They will not be leaving if you pivot from one interest to another.
If they are interested in technical Jheyanth, they can happily filter my garden using my tags and folders to arrive at the content they need. And if they want the knowledge that manager Jheyanth possesses, they can do the same thing to arrive at the subset of content under the manager tag in my garden. All of my niches can peacefully coexist in one place, without me having to compromise anything.
2. Serendipity of understanding
We are all very highly evolved pattern finding algorithms. Evolution has geared us that way. The very way that our human brain works is to find patterns in seemingly unrelated things. By creating this digital garden with full freedom of all niches to coexist, it allows you to drawn the learnings of one niche into another with just so much as a backlink pointing that specific piece of content in the different niche.
Here, I can casually link patterns together which make so much sense in my head which would totally not be possible in conventional social media. Like, for example, the relation between the population density of foxes and rabbits in a forest and an RLC circuit in electrical engineering have a common pattern in my brain: the presence of a system-defining differential equation which can be tweaked with PID coefficients. You can see how conventional social media fails to accommodate the linkage of such unrelated topics together because the algorithm will go crazy trying to find a target audience who happen to be interested in both forest animal population dynamics as well as an electrical engineer.
But if any normal human being going through my thoughts on systems design comes across both these examples (which I have backlinked in my digital garden very conveniently), even if they aren’t the definitive “target audience” of the niches of both of these examples, it still aids their understanding of the concept more, and opens up more avenues in their minds as to where else this pattern or concept is applied in nature. They serendipitously make new conceptual connections through the back-linkage of multiple niches.
Pitfalls
Of course, building a digital garden comes with its own pitfalls. With unmatched freedom and individuality comes little to no reach. People are primarily consumers at the end of the day, and they want content to consume. They will most definitely find someone who has niched-down into their interest much more easier to find and favourable to consume than someone who has a lot of views on a lot of topics. They are also impatient, they don’t like having to search for what they want, and them having to search for your knowledge on their topic and maybe sometimes even get disappointed on your views on their topic may be a factor that might discourage them to use your digital garden in the first place.
Future
I envision a future where people have their own little balls of content like this. A future where the people matter as a whole, and not just as someone related to a niche. To bring this to life, I suggest the idea of an AI aggregator of sorts, something that crawls through the gardens of many people to bring forth the knowledge that a consumer might require. This aggregator is better than an indexer as it does not cherry pick the content you need, rather, it analyzes the competency of the person in the niche and then retrieves and delivers their entire garden, their entire brain on a platter to you to peruse regarding your niche.
Conclusion
In essence, building a digital garden is possibly the best way to get started on building a knowledge and content base spanning all of your interests, with you, the creator, at its centre. It’s an elegant way to break free from the shackles of niche-imprisonment and introduce an unprecedented level of serendipitous content consumption in your audience.