We are training a culture of passive consumers who don’t create. People are attracted to activity and action. The next generation is inundated with creation through their phone. They don’t see the space to create. They sit at home alone wondering why they are alone. The reality is because they are consumers not creators. You must produce.
I think a lot about something I've heard game devs say. Something like "players will always find a way to optimize the fun out of the game".
Controversial example: in Breath of the Wild, your weapons break really fast. But, they only break while fighting enemies and looting places, so you almost always end up with more/higher-powered weapons. It's the game's way of always giving you new weapons that have different quirky properties to keep combat interesting. But players don't like that friction and uncertainty: it's probably the most hated on aspect of the game. Players want to keep their same weapons the whole time, and miss out on the constant variety.
I think that in the same way, we've optimized the fun out of life. We collectively tend to avoid uncertainty and friction. We let yelp/google maps reviews tell us what restaurants are good. We watch movies at home instead of trekking all the way to the movie theater. Get food delivered and even dropped off at the door so we literally don't even have to speak to another human at all. We've been optimizing the fun out of life, and we didn't realize it until it was bad enough to be called a "loneliness epidemic"!!
Yes, addictive consumption is bad, and apps shouldn't be designed for that. And as long as they are, we should try to find ways to undo the damage and help people heal and recover from content addiction, and find alternatives to it.
But that's not to say that consuming is inherently bad.
Consider that a conversation is genuinely an interactive, dynamic, mutual event where you both are both consuming and creating content. One person creates a topic out of recent memories or recites a joke, the other person hears it, and enjoys it. This is an act of consumption. It's not wrong or bad or harmful or blameworthy. It's the other end of creation, a necessary part of it.
In your ideal world, where we have people endlessly creating, who would consume what they create? We need both. We need platforms to share our creations, and to consume the creations of others. Real life has been a neglected platform for this, especially for countless lonely people who have no one to interact with.
This is the strategy for all companies that have lots of risk in their business. The media industry has a lot of risk. Too many failed projects can sink a studio. The only way to guard is to increase in scale across different types of media and channels so your environment is diversified
It’s no different from vail buying up all the ski resorts because they have such global reach they can diversify income streams across a wider set of mountains that have variable quality in winter and there for one bad winter doesn’t sink the whole business because they own so many - the ones that have a good year offset the ones that have a bad one
Same thing with media. A wider range of projects from a wider range of talent increases the chances of discovering the next hit show or gold mine movie property and offsetting all the projects that fail.
The other thing to remember is bigger companies turn slower and adapt to disruption slower. So it also opens up an opportunity in 5-10 to disrupt.
Yeah, I might have overthought the description. Basically - it's a random word generator, with additional features to be able to extract some signal from the noise.
First, an ability to highlight a subset of the generated words. You get a bunch of random words, then highlight which ones you want to concentrate on.
Simply trying to select the words in your head doesn't have the same effect. Brain is too lazy for this. But when they are differentiated and combined visually - you start getting the combined associations.
Second, a shortlist of words. These will get prioritized during a word batch generation and act as a glue. I've noticed that some words are more effective in terms of thought provokation than others.
Take "yesterday" for example - pairing it with random words allows you to jumpstart a retrospective: "yesterday coffee", "yesterday tree", "yesterday interactions". And then you can get more specific - "yesterday interactions cynical" etc. Gives you angles which are hard to come up with on your own.
A better description would probably be - "random word combinations for introspection".
Thanks for the feedback. I've updated the README providing why someone might use the package but it's based on my perspective. If you have anymore thoughts on the package feel free to contribute and open a pull request
This tool assumes you have a competent marketing team that actually makes a website with good copy that makes it clear what your product or service is :)
Not the case for my company. Competitors were mostly right but it ranked a bunch way lower than they should be and ranked some non-competitors higher up
