“Social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, where we all understand that it works, but not  how it works.”

—KEVIN SYSTROM, cofounder, Instagram341

"社交媒体正处于牛顿时代之前的时刻，我们都明白它的工作原理，但不知道它是如何工作的。”

—KEVIN SYSTROM，Instagram 联合创始人 341

Our online social spaces are littered with the artifacts of our creative endeavors. Today, “content” is better understood not as a thing we set out to make—as an automaker might exist solely to produce cars—but, as a friend wrote in an email to me, as “an externality from [our] existing social systems.”342 Content is a snapshot of our civilization.

我们的在线社交空间到处都是我们创造性努力的成果。今天，"内容 "被更好地理解为不是我们要制造的东西--就像一个汽车制造商可能只是为了生产汽车而存在--而是像一个朋友在给我的电子邮件中写的那样，是 "来自[我们]现有社会系统的外部因素 "342。

The history of software gives us insight into how our attitudes toward content are changing. In the twentieth century, code was bundled into physical formats—a book, a floppy disk, a CD—which made it easier to price and sell. As code became liberated from these formats, and eventually distributed under open source licenses, it became harder to directly charge for. With millions of lines of code freely available today, the focus has shifted from what developers make to who they are.343

软件的历史让我们了解到我们对内容的态度是如何变化的。在二十世纪，代码被捆绑成物理格式--一本书、一张软盘、一张CD--这使它更容易定价和销售。随着代码从这些格式中解放出来，并最终在开放源码许可下发布，它变得难以直接收费。今天，随着数百万行代码的免费提供，重点已经从开发者的工作转向他们是谁。

Python developer Shauna Gordon-McKeon once posed a hypothetical question to me: “Take a platform you love. Would you rather lose access to all the past content your connections have posted, or lose the connections themselves?”344 Her point was that the value created on these platforms doesn’t lie in the content itself so much as in the underlying social graph. Our relationship to content matters less than our relationships to the people who make it. As a result, we’re starting to treat content not as a private economic good but as the externalization of our social infrastructure.

Python开发者Shauna Gordon-McKeon曾经向我提出了一个假设性的问题。"拿一个你喜欢的平台来说。她的观点是，在这些平台上创造的价值并不在于内容本身，而在于潜在的社交图谱。我们与内容的关系不如我们与制作内容的人的关系重要。因此，我们开始不把内容当作私人经济物品，而是当作我们社会基础设施的外部化。

Platforms have helped bring about this shift more quickly. By reducing the costs of production and distribution, they’ve made it easier for creators to function as one-man operations. Stratechery’s Ben Thompson calls this the “faceless publisher” model, wherein “atomized content creators, fueled by social media, build their own brands and develop their own audiences; the publisher, meanwhile, builds scale on the backside, across infrastructure, monetization, and even human-resource type functions.”345

平台帮助更快地实现了这种转变。通过降低制作和发行的成本，它们使创作者更容易实现单兵作战。Stratechery的Ben Thompson称之为 "不露面的出版商 "模式，其中 "原子化的内容创作者，在社交媒体的推动下，建立自己的品牌，发展自己的受众；与此同时，出版商在背后建立规模，包括基础设施、货币化，甚至人力资源类型的功能 "345。

What’s more, by bringing creators themselves to one place, platforms have turned content production into a status game. Eugene Wei calls these “status as a service (StaaS)” businesses, which flourished after Facebook’s invention of the News Feed, and other platforms’ launches of their own social feeds, “unleashed a gold rush for social capital accumulation.”346

更重要的是，通过将创作者本身带到一个地方，平台已经将内容生产变成了一种地位游戏。Eugene Wei称这些 "状态即服务（StaaS）"业务，在Facebook发明 "新闻源 "和其他平台推出自己的社交源后蓬勃发展，"释放了社会资本积累的淘金热 "346。

How, then, should we think about the production of content today, in light of platform-creator relationships? How does the “atomization” of production affect prior theories about how people produce, whether Coase’s theory of the firm, Ostrom’s common pool resources, or Benkler’s peer production?

那么，根据平台与创造者的关系，我们应该如何思考今天的内容生产？生产的 "原子化 "如何影响先前关于人们如何生产的理论，无论是科斯的公司理论、奥斯特罗姆的公共资源，还是本克勒的同侪生产？

By treating content as a commodity, we risk solving the wrong puzzle. Finding answers means returning to the essential questions. Chapters 2 and 3 looked at the social dynamics between creators and the communities that form around them. I suggested that one-to-many models, typical among online creators, are centralized communities, with hidden roles played by both platforms and the creator’s audience; these communities stand in contrast to the distributed, many-to-many online communities we’re used to.

如果把内容当作商品，我们就有可能解决错误的难题。寻找答案意味着回到基本问题上。第二章和第三章探讨了创作者和围绕他们形成的社区之间的社会动态。我认为，网络创作者中典型的一对多模式是中心化的社区，平台和创作者的受众都扮演着隐藏的角色；这些社区与我们习惯的分布式、多对多的网络社区形成鲜明对比。

Chapter 4 revisited the question of marginal cost. We tend to assume that content doesn’t incur significant marginal costs, thanks to platforms that now absorb most of the distribution costs for creators. However, it’s the maintenance of content that incurs hidden costs with time and use.