I often find myself mulling over social-media-related self-hatred. It’s Tuesday night, and I’m on my phone, scrolling away, not really looking for anything in particular, just something to provide a momentary sense of accomplishment. It’s kind of like gambling. The more I scroll, the more likely I am to continue to play the social media game to make all my wasted time of not finding anything meaningful, worthwhile.
But why do so many of us get into this trap? Social media, and more generally, content, consumption is all about achieving some form of goal. Some goals, like information search, may result in more specific content consumption, while goals of entertainment usually aren’t very specified.
On top of that, the platforms themselves are aligned with their own goals. I think I would rarely go to Netflix to watch a documentary on a topic I was researching. I’d rather go to youtube instead. Similarly, Instagram may be great for exploration of visual content, but if I want to cook a certain dish, even though Instagram has a lot of cooking content, I think a food blog would be my first stop.
But most of the time, our tastes rarely vary. And the cost of trying something new seems exponentially greater in magnitude than watching the same chick-flick type of film. Since we only have limited time to devote to content, we have to maximize the enjoyment from it. But then how do you discover new things?
How do you find things that you don’t even know about but you might end up loving more than reading Harry Potter for the 35th time (although those books consistently have a high marginal return).
In Artificial Intelligence, specifically in the field of Reinforcement Learning, we need to balance exploration and exploitation. Reinforcement Learning, if you haven’t heard of it, is the field responsible for those goofy virtual humanoid-learning-how-to-walk videos. The humanoid needs to learn how to walk so it will try a bunch of things that provide the most benefit. If it finds something that works well, it’ll EXPLOIT it and perform that action more. But it will still try to EXPLORE new actions which might end up providing more benefits.
Consuming content has the same problem. We are trying to accomplish some goal, and sure, we can do the same thing over and over, but there has to be a balance with exploration. Similarly, too much exploration, and you end up regretting all your life decisions.
Goals of Content Consumption
1.Knowledge
One of the most simple forms of content consumption. We can search for what we want by basically Googling the query. But those tasks are usually well defined and so, exploitation works really well there. The other end of the spectrum is knowledge for design and creation. When it comes to novelty, we will rarely find inspiration by consuming the same ideas.
Sure, novelty is very contextually driven. You have to be in the right state of mind to have that “Eureka!” moment but experience from content plays a big role. I love books and ideas about behavior, but nowadays, most content is just a repeat of the same ideas. To get inspiration, I might have to EXPLORE more, and then tie obscure ideas together with ideas of behavior to be able to come up with my own ideas.
2. Entertainment
We like what we like. I have probably watched shows like “The Office” several times now. Why don’t I just watch something different? It’s a few things actually. If I start a new series, I have the opportunity cost of the enjoyment of watching something I know I like. I weigh that cost very heavily since I feel like my time is very valuable (eh …).
The value of exploration comes from providing higher marginal returns on something you’ve never tried before. Spotify tries to help us with their “Discover” playlist curated specifically for each of us. A sub-optimal solution is to constantly scroll through your Facebook or Instagram feed, looking for interesting posts.
How to Balance Exploration and Exploitation
When we are young, we devote a lot of energy to exploring. The world is new and there are so many toys to play with! As we age, we reduce exploration and continue to exploit the things we know we enjoy.
So how can we explore more and still come out ahead? We want the originality and excitement of being caught off guard by novel ideas but the cost of random exploration is a bit too high.
1. Improve Exploitation by curating your content
You’re always going to be bombarded with content. With improved network speeds, streaming all forms of content has no cost to you besides the time it takes to consume it. But it is also possible to rebalance our portfolio of content. Let the unsubscribe button be your friend. If you find no value in the content, get rid of it! Whether it’s purging your Instagram or Twitter accounts, FOMO might get in the way but think of it in a different way. by removing noise, you’ll be improving the likelihood of experiencing content that you might actually like.
2. Develop Systems for content to come to you
Exploration is inherently difficult because it involves some level of uncertainty. We don’t even know where to start because we don’t know what we don’t know. Looking for novelty becomes this huge pain because you have to actively search for it. Instead, try to create systems where you can reduce such friction. This can be in the form of curating your “likes” and “genres” of interest so that the recommender systems can provide you with content you might want to explore.
3. Exploit Exploration by going down rabbit holes
Alice wasn’t too afraid, and it seemed to work well for her. We get afraid of investing time in new topics for fear of slowing down our progression of a goal. When we do find something interesting but hadn’t anticipated it, leveraging the interest to continue exploring might be the best way to actually open ourselves to better ideas.
I had grown tired of using my dollar-store knife for all my cooking needs, and it was time I finally invested in a proper chef’s knife. I started by Googling “Best Affordable Chef Knives” and fell into the rabbit hole of the culinary sub-dimension. I started to spend hours watching videos of different knives, how to use them, and how to maintain and sharpen them.
It can be a difficult decision to invest the time and possibly money in a rabbit hole, but if you do happen to fall into one, it’s best to see where it might lead.
Exploration and exploitation don’t just apply to content consumption but anywhere we have efficiency as a concern. When learning how to do something, you figure out how to do it one way, and the cost of exploring another way to do it becomes high. Like switching between windows and iOS. Maybe that’s why as we age we become reluctant to learn new technology.
If we want to effectively live with the internet, we need to be able to consume content effectively and to our advantage. There are multiple players on the web, all with their own goals. We have to ensure their goals don’t define how we end up learning and enjoying the content.