The feed that tells you nothing: aformation vs information

Scroll your feed for a minute and try to recall what you learned. Most likely, nothing. Dozens of posts passed in front of you and none told you anything you did not know before you opened the app. That is not a failure of the algorithm and not a lapse of your attention. It is how the feed is built.

I want to take that observation seriously, because it changes what a marketer is actually competing against. If you sell to a Russian audience, where the feed lives on Telegram, VK and Dzen rather than on Instagram or Facebook, the mechanics are the same as anywhere else, and the surface is different enough to matter. Both halves of that sentence deserve attention.

Information and aformation: the difference is one movement

The word “information” comes from the Latin verb for giving shape to something, for putting a form into it. Information in that literal sense is whatever changes your state: you knew one thing, now you know another, something has shifted. Real information always nudges you a little off the spot where you stood.

What flows through the feed is mostly built the opposite way. It is a stream of what I call aformations: messages that add no new form and instead confirm the form already there. The Russian original of this piece coins the word as a pun, information with the shaping part cut out. You open the feed not to be changed. You open it to be reassured that you are still the same person. Your views are still your views, your circle is still your circle, your picture of the world is where you left it.

The feed does not argue with you. It recognises you. That recognition is its main job.

Sameness as a product, not an accident

The feed is homogeneous on purpose. It is easy to blame the algorithm for serving more of the same and sealing you in a bubble. But the algorithm only amplifies what a person already wants, and what a person wants is confirmation.

A uniform, repetitive feed is not a poverty of choice. It is an answer to a request. A person whose sense of self is shaky is looking for support, not novelty. The new is unsettling: it demands that you rearrange yourself, give up something familiar, let in the unknown. Repetition soothes. It returns the familiar again and again, and with every return the “I” becomes a little denser.

So a feed where everything is slightly identical is not a failure. It is a precise hit. It does exactly what people come to it for: it fixes identity in place through repetition.

The Russian case makes this unusually visible. Since Instagram and Facebook stopped being available in the country in 2022, a large part of daily reading migrated to Telegram channels. A Telegram channel feed is not ranked by an algorithm at all. It is a list of channels you chose, each delivering its posts in the order they were written. Whatever sameness you see there, you assembled with your own hands. There is no recommendation engine to blame. The audience builds its own mirror, one subscription at a time. VK and Dzen do rank algorithmically and add the familiar amplification on top. But Telegram is the cleaner experiment, and it shows the demand for confirmation existing before any algorithm meets it.

Text written in clips

The stream has its own grammar. Look at how people increasingly write online. The text is assembled not as an argument but as a montage. Adjacent sentences are not connected by meaning: swap them, move them apart, and nothing collapses, because there was no connection to break.

This is writing in clips. Each phrase is a separate frame, a separate flash, short and self-sufficient. There are no bridges between them: no “because”, no “therefore”, no “which means”. The thought does not unfold. It blinks.

A classic connected text leads you along a chain. One thing follows from another, the conclusion stands on its premise, the end follows from the beginning. Clip text does not work that way. It does not lead. It touches. It touches one emotion, then another, and each touch exists on its own.

Space such sentences out and the coherence does not suffer, because there is nothing to break. The fabric of meaning that holds an ordinary text together has been replaced by a rhythm of flashes.

Anyone who reads popular Russian Telegram channels will recognise the form at once: short lines, each in its own paragraph, with an emoji or a bold fragment as the only punctuation between thoughts. The format did not appear because Russians write differently from anyone else. It appeared because a channel rewards the post that can be consumed in the second between two other posts, and a connected argument cannot be.

A symptom, not a vice

It is easy to slide into grumbling: people used to read books and now they flick through clips, everything has gotten smaller. That view misses the point. The clip stream of aformations is not degradation. It is a response to a specific crisis.

It is a crisis of self-identity. When there are few supports left, when inherited roles have crumbled and choice is deafening, a person needs to keep confirming that they exist at all and that they are precisely this. A connected text is no good for that. It demands effort, leads somewhere unknown, might shake something loose. A stream of uniform flashes suits perfectly. It does not load you and does not argue. It simply repeats you back to yourself.

So what we are looking at is neither a reader’s flaw nor a platform’s malice. It is the reinforcement of what already exists through repetition: the mechanism the psyche reaches for when it needs stability rather than growth.

For a company entering Russia from outside, this matters more than it would at home. A foreign brand arriving in a Russian feed is, by definition, the unfamiliar. It cannot be recognised yet, because there is nothing in the reader’s history to recognise it against. If the whole environment is tuned to recognition, the newcomer starts with a handicap that no ad budget removes on its own. Finding out what the reader already recognises, in their words and their situations, is the job of customer research done before the first post, and it is the step foreign teams skip most often because they believe they already know their product’s story.

What this means for anyone who writes

Here is the conclusion for anyone who creates communication. If your text is addressed to a person in a feed, you are not competing with other texts. You are competing with a stream that demands nothing and confirms everything.

The first move is to decide honestly what you are offering: aformation or information. An aformation will slot into the stream and earn a flicker of recognition. The person nods and scrolls on, because you said what they already thought. Information will slow them down, at the price of resistance, because you are asking them to move.

The second move is to understand that confirmation is neither free nor meaningless. Sometimes it is exactly what you need: to fix a person’s belonging to their cohort, to give them back the feeling of being among their own. That is a legitimate task and repetition solves it. A brand that has been in Russia for years and wants to keep its existing buyers close can run on recognition for a long time and be right to do so.

But if you want more than recognition, if you want to change something, you will have to bring form: the very movement the stream lacks. And then the point is to avoid disguising information as aformation and instead give the person a foothold from which stepping into the new is not frightening. Recognition first, then the shift. First “this is about me”, then “I did not know that”.

In practice, for a Russian audience, that order dictates the shape of a post or an ad. The opening line has to be recognisable: a situation the reader is already in, phrased the way they would phrase it in their own language and their own register, and that is rarely the way your English brief phrases it. Only after that hook can a claim that actually moves them survive. Reverse the order, and the unfamiliar claim arrives before any recognition, and the feed does what feeds do: it scrolls past. This is where translated communication fails most often. It is grammatically correct and carries no recognition, so it reads as information without a foothold, which is the one thing the stream reliably rejects. Deciding what your brand confirms and where it pushes is a brand strategy question, and in a feed environment it is the question that comes before tone, visuals or posting schedule.

There is a second local consequence. Because Telegram delivers posts in order and without ranking, frequency is the main way to stay in view, and frequency pushes writers toward clips. A brand can accept that and fill its channel with flashes. Or it can post less often and make each post the connected kind that leads somewhere. Both are choices. The mistake is to make the first choice by default and then wonder why the audience recognises you and never moves.

A stream in which nothing flows

A river carries water from source to mouth: something arrives, something leaves, everything moves. The feed looks like a river but is built differently. Hundreds of messages rush past, and at the exit is exactly what was at the entrance. There is motion and no displacement.

Perhaps the soberest thing you can do is to ask yourself, from time to time, after another scroll: was I just taught something, or was I just shown myself again? The answer to that question separates those who use the stream from those the stream uses.

For a marketer writing into a Russian feed, the same question turns around. Is this post going to teach the reader something, or show them themselves? Neither answer is wrong. Choosing without knowing is.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Лента, которая ничего вам не сообщает