🔥 Taste Gap: In Community #125

Your weekly spark at the intersection of community, culture, and commerce

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🔥 And now, for your weekly spark.

Most things that get made now are good.

Technically solid, cleanly built, and polished. That’s a problem.

Good stopped being rare a while ago. So it stopped being a signal. Now we’re in a strange place where quality is high, but memory is low.

Media mogul Ted Turner’s passing this week is a reminder of a time when we didn’t have infinite sources competing equally. You had fewer, stronger ones.

Cultural authority was centralized, and “good” wasn’t as easily achievable. 

The man behind CNN, Cartoon Network, and everyone’s favorite unexpected 90s eco-hero shaped what large audiences saw and what felt important. But that world  — where just a few trusted institutions determined taste — doesn’t exist anymore.

When everything has to survive across multiple distinct audiences, the incentives shift toward what some might believe is broadly understandable. And things can get flattened to feel safe and expected but not memorable or specific.

Broadly palatable becomes safer than distinct.

Our center of cultural authority has shifted away from a small, centralized (historically largely white, broadcast-driven) gatekeeping system into a distributed, majority-driven, multi-cultural internet — and that changes what “good” even means. Good is no longer what the center approved. Good is what survives across many audiences with different cultural filters.

👉🏽 So what happens?

Everything gets optimized for clarity across contexts, lowest common denominator legibility, and portability across audiences. More looks good, but less looks distinctive with a unique origin.

That’s the Taste Gap.

The good news: The top down approach has been rejected. Peer to peer proliferates.

Audiences are now majority-driven, global, and demographically diverse. Culture is shaped bottom-up through social platforms, diaspora communities, niche taste clusters, and algorithmic distribution.

So “taste” is no longer defined at the center. It’s formed in many centers simultaneously.

That’s what a lot of us are starting to feel without naming it. We don’t say something is generic. We just stop remembering it.

And then we disproportionately respond to the few things that still feel anchored — work that carries a consistent point of view, a recognizable tone, a shape that doesn’t flatten when it spreads, because it recognizes unique communities, stories, and experiences.

This is where culture, commerce, and community overlap.

Because what wins now is not just quality. It’s whether something still feels like it has a source. Brands, creators, and ideas that cut through aren’t just well made.

They’re identifiable. And that becomes the real filter.

Not better vs worse. Recognizable vs interchangeable.

Once you see that, you stop asking whether something is good and start asking something simpler:

🔥 Does this still feel like it came from someone real?

✅ Now Hiring

Is someone you know considering what’s next for them? Here are a few roles with people hiring across the network. I list roles here every week, so stay tuned and make sure to spread the word.

💥 Editorial Director — Hue (I’m hiring!)

ICYMI last week:

💥 Sr Director, Paid Social — Factor (multiple other roles across levels)

💥 Social Media Manager — Amtrak (other roles too)

And before you go, consider who else might value this newsletter and what’s coming up on YouTube. Make sure to fwd this newsletter onward to them too. They can subscribe here for more directly in their inbox.. 🔁 

In community,

Fahad