The argument against taste

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

Taste is having a moment.

Everyone on LinkedIn is posting about it, which means we have maybe six weeks before it turns into a complete buzzword and loses all meaning. I'll try to beat the clock.

The argument for taste in right now is basically this:

AI can produce infinite content, so the differentiator is whether a human with good judgment is steering it. It’s impossible to argue against that.

Taste—knowing what's good, what's off-brand, what's table stakes vs. new information, what’s a cliché, what actually serves the reader—is more valuable now than it was two years ago when being productive was the hard part.

I'm happy for Taste and glad she's getting her flowers. But someone has to take her down a peg or two before this gets out of hand.

Here’s where taste can get you in trouble:

Taste is often what stops you from shipping. It can be why you spent three weeks on a piece that needed four days. It can be why you refuse to do a “State of X” report, even though they clearly work. It can be why you rewrite a freelancer's perfectly fine draft from scratch because it doesn't sound like you. It can be why you refuse to write a listicle, even though listicles are what ranks.

I tried this when I joined Dock. I thought the best content—even SEO content—should be opinionated and distinctive, so I wrote a deeply considered, well-argued software guide that essentially no one found because I was too precious to format it as "20 tools ranked by use case." The day I caved and reformatted it, it started ranking. My taste (as great as I believed it to be) was costing me outcomes.

Here's the thing about B2B content marketing specifically: most of the channels we work in have successful formulas or patterns. YouTube, LinkedIn, and SEO all have games we must play. These formulas exist because platforms have optimized relentlessly for what makes people click, stay, and come back. You can have incredible taste and still get buried if you refuse to work within the structure those platforms reward.

Of course, taste still matters a lot. The goal of content is to genuinely help someone: teach them something, change how they see a problem, give them something they'll actually use. You can’t achieve any of that without taste.

The key skill is knowing where taste applies and where it doesn't. Article format, headline type, building backlinks (shudder)—these aren't really taste calls, you have to play the game. But taste has a place in the angles you take, the examples you choose, and the things you say that nobody else would say.

In B2B, great taste might not mean painting a Van Gogh, but coloring skillfully within the lines with crayons.

The content marketers I've seen struggle most are the ones who treat taste as a reason to resist what's working (or likely to work) for the business. The folks who figure it out learn to separate two questions: “What does this actually need to do?” and “How do I do that in a way I'm proud of?”

Cheers,

- Eric

✍ New on the Blog: AMA with Katie Parrott, Staff Writer at Every by Rachel Bicha

Katie is a Staff Writer at Every, where she runs Working Overtime—a column on how technology is rewriting the rules of work. She also contributes to a few other AI-related columns there (check out her articles here).

She did a recent AMA in the Superpath Slack Community—answering dozens of our questions about Every's AI editorial operations, how to use AI to help other writers do their best work, and her favorite AI workflows.

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🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Two Community Builders Compare Notes with Milly Tamati

We took a rare detour from content talk this week for Alex to chat about community building with Milly Tamati, founder of Generalist World.

Milly lives on a Scottish island with fewer than 200 people and once held the title "Director of Miscellaneous." She built Generalist World on a hunch that magic might happen when generalists got in a room.

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