The expression “unhealthy cash crowds out the nice” refers to Gresham’s Regulation. It implies that as soon as lesser-quality and counterfeit foreign money begins to be traded, individuals hoard the good things and solely commerce the poor substitutes.
Social media platforms fall right into a lure like this after they search to develop. For instance, in the beginning, Substack had a really excessive sign to noise ratio–loads of good concepts and so readers had been glad to count on that an electronic mail from them or advice from the platform was worthwhile. It didn’t get put within the spam or promo folder, as a result of it wasn’t spam.
However now, having run out of the highest-quality content material, the positioning is making it simple for hustlers to import huge lists of electronic mail addresses and shortly develop (or seem to develop) their lists. I’m getting unsolicited and undesirable”subscriptions” usually, and the best factor to do is simply ship all of their messages to spam. Which hurts the unique good foreign money. As soon as the unhealthy “cash” reveals up, it attracts extra unhealthy cash.
The identical factor occurs when trusted sources begin padding their content material with AI slop, or when a small enterprise inserts a couple of low-value, high-margin gadgets into their sampler pack.
Consideration is treasured. Belief is much more so.
Whenever you commerce them each for progress, it’s inevitable that you just’ll fade away.
