The death of value-based content

and how to stand out in the sea of slop

Note shortly after finishing this newsletter:

Many of my thoughts in this newsletter have already been changed the more I push against them in my head. I really want to strengthen these, but I do think it’s worthwhile to publish my thinking so you can compare against the next set of ideas when I write about this again.

You can watch the video version of this newsletter on YouTube here.

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“Value-based content is dead.”

I’ve seen this take circulating for months now. And on the surface, it makes sense. AI can generate a “how to” post in seconds. Educational content is everywhere. The barrier to entry for sharing information has dropped to zero.

But if value-based content were actually dead, it would mean that it is no longer “value-based,” because value doesn’t die. The content that changes your behavior, that you save and come back to, that you send to a friend still exists. It’s just getting pushed out with AI generated BS.

What people really mean is that basic educational content is dead. The “5 tips to grow on social media” posts. The surface-level how-to threads that anyone can write (or prompt AI to write for them).

Value as a whole hasn’t disappeared. Just like with skill acquisition, it’s abstracted up a layer into the domain of personal narrative, original thought, and taste. It’s the kind of content that can’t be replicated by typing a sentence into ChatGPT and hitting enter.

This is surprisingly good news if you’re just starting out.

Because while everyone else is racing to produce more volume, praying they win the algorithm slot machine, the actual opportunity is in the opposite direction. It’s in the depth, context, and perspective that only you can provide.

I – The psychology of value

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

– Anaïs Nin

Most “value-based” content feels interchangeable.

Anyone could post it and nobody would know the difference.

There’s no energy signature that is yours.

The fault lies in how creators are taught. Be objective. Share facts. Teach proven frameworks. They feel like if they don’t do “what works” they won’t make it, but they aren’t experienced enough to know what works.

Value isn’t objective. Value is perception, and perception is shaped by the goals someone is trying to achieve.

Two people can read the same book and walk away with completely different insights. A student trying to pass a test will notice different sentences than an entrepreneur trying to build a business. The information is identical. The value extracted is not.

Your audience is composed of individuals with unique goals, and those goals determine what registers as valuable to them. This means you can’t create “objectively valuable” content. You can only create content that’s valuable to someone with a specific goal and those someones are randomly scrolling social media and have a brief window in which they can be exposed to your content. Expecting one great post to just magically appear in front of the right people is silly. It takes 6-12 months to see any form of traction start to pick up.

The broader the goal that your content helps people achieve, the more likely it is to spread to more people. A more specific goal results in a more niche audience, which is great, but it may be more difficult to get in front of these people. That’s why people recommend doing high-ticket products or services at the start and focusing on manual outreach, because it’s easier for you to just find and target those specific people.

This means you have to pick. You must have a perspective. You must share what you think rather than what you think you should think because some course taught you to think it.

The reason “value-based” content is dying is because anyone can ask AI to generate it on the spot. It doesn’t require taste or personality because it has been templated and frameworked to death.

That said, that doesn’t mean AI is the cause.

The person using AI is the cause, and I believe most people will be using AI for content in the future, which makes some people upset (for now, let me know how you feel in a year or two).

This is where the labor question comes in.

Writers get angry when other writers use ghostwriters. “They didn’t actually write it.” But readers don’t care. James Patterson’s audience cares about the story, not who typed the words. Patterson provides the vision, the direction, the taste. That’s where the value lives.

A film director doesn’t manually operate the camera. They don’t build the sets or mix the audio. But no one questions whether Spielberg “really” made the movie.

Value lies in the distinction between labor and direction.

Content is moving the same way.

From content creator to content director.

The people who resist this are the ones who’ve made labor their identity. They can’t separate the typing from the thinking, so they assume no one else can either.

But your reader only sees the output. And if the output is good (original, opinionated, and shaped by taste) they don’t care how it was made.

Create the content you want to see in the world, because guessing that’s not more generic AI-generated posts that sound like everyone else.

II – The slop spectrum

We live in a world without taste because taste requires judgment, and judgment requires hierarchy. We’ve been taught to reject both. Taste is slowly cultivated over time through exposure, repetition, comparison, and the willingness to say This is better than That. The modern world wants everything to be flat, interchangeable, and instantly gratifying. Real taste excludes. To have taste is to believe in an objective reality. To turn one thing down in favor of another. To say no to inclusion.

– Lobo on X

There was plenty of slop before AI existed.

The generic how-to threads. The recycled tips repackaged with a new hook. The “value-based content” that said nothing original and helped no one change their behavior. That was human slop. We just didn’t call it that.

The variable that separates slop from signal has never been who created it or what tool was used. It’s taste. And taste requires discernment. It’s the experience that allows you to say what should and shouldn’t belong.

Most people won’t do that. It’s easier to produce content that offends no one, excludes no one, and says nothing.

Slop exists on a spectrum.

One one end, you have slop and on the other you have art.

Artists all have their panties in a bunch right now because people using AI have the audacity to call themselves “AI artists.” But it goes both ways. We don’t call food “stove art.” We don’t call books “word art.” Art is something that transcends the norm. Art is as subjective as value. Not everyone who draws cool looking doodles on a page creates art. Most of it is closer to slop when we look at the entire spectrum.

Most “artists” don’t create art. Most “AI artists” don’t create it either. But there is absolutely a way to create something with AI that moves the soul of another. If you deny that, you are blinded by ideology. That said, it’s not easy to do.

Pertaining to content, on one end, you have content generated with zero personal context. You type a generic “write a thread about productivity” and publish whatever comes out. No vision. No curation. No taste. No ideas of your own. The AI is guessing based on the average of everything it’s been trained on, which means the output is, by definition, average. It’s fine if you’re just trying to speedrun an audience that doesn’t care about you, but I’m assuming most people reading this want “being a creator” to resemble something meaningful.

On the other end, you have signal. Content that could only come from you. Your experiences. Your opinions. Your taste applied at every decision point.

The spectrum in between is determined by how much personal context you pass off to the AI.

Think about it like directing a film.

If you hand a camera to someone and say “make a movie,” you’ll get something generic. But if you provide the script, the shot list, the color palette, the pacing notes, the references (if you make every meaningful decision and use the crew to execute your vision) the film is yours. The labor was distributed but the taste wasn’t.

The same applies to content.

Most of the famous creators you love and watch daily have teams of people in charge of the production. Hormozi probably just sits down and records the script that was given to him, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable, and it doesn’t mean that some of it isn’t art.

The more context you provide like your past writing, your notes, your curated ideas, your specific opinions on what works and what doesn’t, the further you move from slop toward signal.

To do this, start by creating an idea museum.

If you already have content, go back through it. Pull the best lines, the ideas that resonated, and the frameworks that landed. Put them in a document. That’s your context library. That’s what you pass to AI when you need help executing. You would be considered a bad leader if you didn’t pass off all of the knowledge you have to a team member to succeed at the project. The same applies here. Sometimes you are going to have to get your hands dirty and go in manually if it you need to.

If you’re just starting out, do the same thing with other people’s content. Save the posts that stop you mid-scroll. Save the ideas that make you think “damn I wish I wrote that.” Collect the paragraphs from newsletters that change how you think. Build a museum of taste. Over time, you’ll notice patterns. Naturally, your mind will take the same shape, and you will notice your own ideas starting to emerge.

That’s how you develop this skill. Exposure, repetition, comparison, and the ability to curate would should be made vs what shouldn’t.

The people afraid of AI are the ones who never developed taste in the first place. They were producing human slop, and now they’re competing with machines that can produce slop faster.

III – How to provide your unique form of value

You will never have access to another person’s state of mind, and they will never have access to yours. This is the essence of human uniqueness.

– P&P

Volume never mattered.

Everyone said it did. I can hear Alex Hormozi and Gary V (all respect to them) screaming “Post more! Publish more! The more content you put out, the more chances you have!”

It can obviously work, just like anything can, please don’t be one of those people who comments the exception, but it never really made sense to me, because when I tried it, my ideas started to suffer, and ideas are really the only thing that matter in this game. You can produce a hollywood level YouTube video, but if the core idea followed by subsequent high signal ideas are not there, then the video will not do well. Personally, I’d rather create the minimum amount of content to be consistent and post that across all platforms without worrying about repeating myself.

As an example, my newsletters have always been unconventionally long. They range between 2500-5000 words depending on the topic compared to 500-1000 words that marketers say is the sweet spot.

Years later and I can confidently say that was my edge. I wanted to nerd out for a long time in my newsletters and videos, and since the ideas were pretty good, they stood out compared to everyone else’s.

With AI, everyone can produce more volume. Thousands of posts scheduled in advance. Content calendars filled for months. The algorithm slot machine spinning faster than ever.

But more volume just means more noise. More people praying for a viral hit without realizing the lottery was never the real game.

What’s actually happening is simpler.

AI is accelerating the death of average content. The baseline is rising. And the things that have always mattered are mattering more. Originality of thought. Novel perspectives. Opinion over fact. Storytelling. Singal.

Let me explain that last one a bit more, because I’ve said it a few times.

Your brain notices important ideas. When you read something that clicks, something that feels true in a way you hadn’t articulated before, your brain releases dopamine. You feel a spark of excitement. You want to share it, save it, come back to it.

That’s signal. It’s your brain hinting at what is valuable to you.

Signal is the thing AI can’t manufacture. Because AI doesn’t get excited due to a sequence of uncountable events since birth that have led to the mind deciding that something is important enough to notice. AI doesn’t have a mission (aside from the one it is assigned) that frames your mind to notice what aids in the achievement of that mission. It doesn’t have taste. It pulls from the average of everything it’s seen and produces the average of everything it’s seen unless instructed to follow the personal process that you’ve reverse engineered by though reflection.

You, on the other hand, have a specific path you’re walking. A specific future you’re building toward. A specific set of problems you’ve solved and are solving. That’s your mission, and your mission determines what registers as signal to you.

In my eyes, the best route to take is mission-based over topic-based. I’ve discussed this before here.

Topic-based is the traditional approach. Pick a niche. Pick a target audience. Become the “go-to” person for that topic.

It works. But it boxes you in and is incredibly easy to replicate. If you fail or want to pivot, you’re starting over from scratch. That doesn’t sit well with people who know that they are going to change over the next 6-12 months. This path is anti-continuous learning, anti-polymath, and anti-human.

Mission-based is different.

You’re not building authority in a topic. You’re leading people toward a transformation. And anything that moves people toward that transformation becomes fair game for your content.

When I have a clear mission, like helping people become “future-proof” (*cough* the name of this newsletter *cough*), that is when my best work was born. Ideas flood in because I have a filter. Anything that helped people become valuable, adaptive, and free is worth writing about. And that can be anything from philosophy to business to psychology to daily routines. Things I like writing about.

Creating in alignment with a mission is taste applied to content strategy.

The ideas that excite you (the ones that make you stop mid-scroll and screenshot) those are signal. Lean into them. Write about them. Don’t water them down because you think you’re “supposed” to talk about something else.

Being a content creator is more meaningful now than it’s ever been.

The internet doesn’t have to devolve into a sea of slop you don’t want to see. If it did, no one would log on. People are hungry for signal. For original thought. For creators with missions they believe in.

IV – How to actually grow on social media (from zero)

Now, I know it’s bad taste to talk about growing on social media on social media. Nobody wants to be the person who grows by telling people how to grow.

But surprise surprise, there is value there. People want it. If you don’t want it, that’s fine, you don’t have to continue reading if you don’t want to.

Every time I talk about this, I feel like it goes over people’s heads because when I look at how they implement what I talk about, I do not see this anywhere.

And that’s unfortunate, because it’s the most important part.

You cannot rely on the algorithm alone.

Everyone is competing for the same thing. Everyone is posting content and praying it goes viral. Everyone is playing the slot machine. Everyone is hoping the algorithm gods smile upon them.

And yes, sometimes it works. Sometimes you strike gold. But you can’t build a business on sometimes.

Actual growth is slow and steady with occasional spikes when the algorithm decides to favor you. The spikes are a bonus, not the strategy. It’s better to act like they’re never going to happen.

If you don’t want to rely on the algorithm, you need to work to get your content in front of other people’s audiences. That means people sharing or interacting with your content, but if you understand psychology and incentives, doing that as a beginner is as hard as winning the algo lottery.

That means you have to network.

I know people are allergic to that word. Many get into social media because it feels like something they can do alone. No boss. No coworkers. Just you and your keyboard.

But you still have to develop your social skills. The internet doesn’t change human nature. It actually amplifies it. It scales it.

For over 150,000 years, humans lived in small, close-knit groups. Survival required social cohesion, trust, and cooperation. Those who were more loyal to their tribe had a better chance of surviving. They hunted more effectively, defended against predators, and supported one another through hardship.

This is how your brain is wired.

Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist, found that humans can only maintain about 150 stable relationships. You can observe this number in hunter-gatherer tribes or military units or modern business teams. When we try to build alone, we’re fighting against thousands of years of evolutionary programming.

Social media is no different.

Every creator you follow is in a group chat with other creators. They talk strategy. They share each other’s posts. They help each other grow by using basic traffic mechanisms like replies, quote posts, reposts, DMs.

Some groups engage with each other’s content every morning. Others share posts in a private chat and everyone reposts. The specifics vary, but the principle is the same: tribes grow faster than individuals.

If you think this sounds fishy or weird, I get it, but good luck in business if you aren’t wiling to form alliances, find mentors, and play the multiplayer game.

These groups are where I met lifelong friends, business partners, and even co-founders.

It’s kinda like finding a group of friends to play video games with. You party up and strategize how you’re going to win.

Start by commenting on posts from people you genuinely enjoy. Not for engagement. Not as a “growth hack.” But to seed a relationship. Say something worth saying. Add to the conversation. Be a person rather than a bot farming impressions.

Then DM them like you would anyone you’re trying to meet. Not the LinkedIn corporate pitch. Not “Hey! Love your stuff! Let’s hop on a call!” Just be normal. Act like you’re texting a friend. Talk about something specific they wrote. Listen to a podcast they were on and comment on something that resonated. Tell them how what you do relates to what they are doing. Share an article that you think they would also like and leave it at that.

Tribes form with shared interests and mutual benefit.

Aside from building a tribe, the other method is leveraging authority.

Quote other people’s content with your own insights so they feel compelled to follow you or share you with their audience. Write longer pieces where you discuss someone else’s ideas. Bonus points if they have a decent following, because it benefits them to share something that makes them look good.

You can write about an idea from Naval or Huberman, tag them, and even if they don’t see it or repost it, other people recognize the name. They’re more likely to read because they already trust the source you’re referencing.

You’re borrowing credibility while adding your own perspective. That’s how you grow without waiting for the algorithm to save you.

My last tip is this:

Create the content you want to see in the world.

If there were any “best strategy” to follow, it would be that.

Why? Because you are the niche. There are people like you who can benefit from what you’ve achieved. There are people who are at a similar level as you who want to join you on your mission.

If you create for your past, present, and future self (paired with the strategies we discussed) you shouldn’t have a problem making this work.

– Dan

You can watch the video version of this newsletter on YouTube here.

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