Like many others, I enjoy reading. I find it exciting to learn what others write about. You could say I am curious about what others have to share.
This way, I like to learn from the experiences of others or be entertained by an interesting story. I spend a good portion of my day doing this and from time to time, I also give something back to my fellow human beings by writing myself and publishing it.
Lately, while reading, some points have caught my attention that have occupied my thoughts and that I would like to share.
An incredible amount is being published
In general, I have the feeling that an incredible amount is published every day. I don’t mean specific formats or content, but simply the fact that something happens somewhere every day.
This is especially noticeable in IT security news. I can no longer keep track of the countless security alerts and emergency updates from the past months. Everything has been affected, from WordPress and 7zip to Windows and the Linux kernel.
The content is nonsensical and artificially drawn out
LinkedIn is my prime example for this headline. At the beginning of 2025, I felt that the content I was shown changed.
Instead of SAP Community News and interesting technological releases, today I see an overwhelming number of pseudo-social-critical posts that all follow the same pattern (AI?) and are unnecessarily drawn out.
Each of these posts ends with a “What is your opinion on this?” almost pleadingly demanding interaction with the post.
On Medium, it looks similar in my opinion. If you read there for a longer time, you notice how artificially inflated the articles are and that the topics repeat themselves regularly.
In search of craftsmanship quality
I recently happened to have our local newspaper in my hands and read a bit of it. I wouldn’t pay for it because I didn’t like the choice of words or the structure.
Unfortunately, this matches a letter I recently received as advertising from a major German party. The quality of the letter material and the writing style were questionable. At least for me, it leaves a bad impression.
Platforms have a dangerous dominance
Platforms like LinkedIn and Medium have the advantage of offering a lot of content in one place. It makes a difference whether you painstakingly compile your feed every day by visiting various blogs yourself (RSS?) or sign up on a platform where the feed is automatically generated.
Everyone appreciates this convenience. However, it is also risky because we leave it to the algorithms of each platform to select content for us.
In short
Below is a summary of the points:
- There is an oversupply, so one has to be selective, which takes effort.
- The oversupply arises partly because topics that appear nonsensical are published at unnecessary length and in bad quality.
- The dominance of large, centralized platforms determines what we consume. Independently run blogs struggle to compete.
Concluding remarks
Lately, I keep seeing a quote by Herbert A. Simon from 1971 that, unfortunately, applies entirely to our times (source: Wikipedia, article “Attention economy“):
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.