Flow, Stock and the Open Web

Fifteen years ago, one of my favorite writers Robin Sloan wrote about the concept of “stock and flow” as they relate to digital media. His metaphor, borrowed from economics, distinguished between the ephemeral stream of updates (flow) and the durable lasting content (stock) that builds value over time. I stumbled upon this post again this week, probably through a bit of Mastodon flow, and reading it among today’s modern context feels both prescient and incomplete – prescient because Sloan astutely identifies the emerging tension between immediate engagement and lasting value, and incomplete in that he couldn’t have predicted how dramatically over the coming decade the pendulum would swing toward flow.

The intervening years have seen the rise and dominance of algorithms, short-form video, and endless streams of ephemeral content. These are the feeds we come to know and love1 . We’ve optimized our digital lives for flow to an extent that would have been hard to imagine in 2010. The “treadmill” Sloan described has become a high-speed conveyor belt, perpetually delivering new content while whisking away anything more than a few hours old.

I’ve noticed something interesting happening, though. As our digital lives have become increasingly dominated by flow, there seems to be a growing hunger for stock – for content with permanence, depth, and lasting value. You can see it. You can feel it. I don’t think it’s just a notion of nostalgia from elder millennials like myself; it’s an emerging & collective awareness that the endless streams often leave us feeling empty and disconnected from what matters. Even my Gen-Z kids tell me this.

In my mind, the open web is the natural home for stock media. While social platforms optimize for ‘engagement’ (read: time spent scrolling) and viral spread, the open IndieWeb creates space for content that develops and appreciates over time. Take this post as an example. It’s referencing a blog post from 15 years ago! When you own your platform, you’re free from the tyranny of flow. Your words can find their audience through myriad entry points, through intentional discovery, through the slow build of genuine connection rather than viral mechanics.

This matters because stock isn’t just about content strategy – it’s about how we think, how we create, and how we build understanding over time. When everything is flow, we lose the ability to develop ideas fully, to let thoughts mature and evolve. We sacrifice depth for immediacy, wisdom for novelty.

The open web provides the much needed infrastructure for digital permanence. Through evergreen protocols like hyperlinks and technologies like RSS, we can create connections between pieces of stock content that grow stronger over time. Unlike social platforms where old content effectively disappears, the open web allows ideas to find new audiences months or years after publication.

Now, we can’t reject flow entirely. As Sloan noted as early as 2010, we need both. But these times call for us to consciously rebalance. We need to recognize that some ideas need time to develop and that some conversations are worth having at a human pace rather than an algorithmic one.

I’ve personally experienced this rebalancing since moving my writing to this self-hosted corner of the internet. Free from the pressure to feed the algorithm, I find myself thinking differently about what I create. I’m more willing to let ideas develop over time, to revisit and refine thoughts, to build a body of work that has coherence and permanence.

The economics of stock and flow have shifted too. While flow still dominates attention economy, I think stock increasingly drives genuine interest and lasting value. In a world of generative AI, thoughtful, accurate, nuanced and human-created stock content has (and will) become more valuable, not less.

I believe we are entering a renaissance of stock media on the open web. As more people grow weary of the endless scroll, I think they’ll seek out spaces for deeper engagement and lasting connection. The infrastructure exists – through the basic building blocks of the open web. What’s needed now is a shift in how we think about creation and consumption.

Sloan was right about the importance of balancing stock and flow. What he couldn’t have predicted was how corporate flow would have evolved over those years. He also couldn’t have predicted how the open web would persist over the decades as a natural home for stock, providing both the technical infrastructure and the cultural space for media that endures.

  1. And by ‘love’ I actually mean ‘hate.’ ↩︎