Colenso’s newest podcast is about Shit You Should Care About, (aka SYSCA) is the online platform taking the world by storm. Love This Podcast hosts, Maria Devereux and Beth O’Brien, have sat down for a chat with Shit You Should Care About co-founder, Lucy Blakiston.
The platform is run by three women in their early 20s. They repackage hard news, soft news, and culture into humorous and digestible pieces of content.
They have accumulated 3.4 million followers.
SYSCA offers an entry point into complex information from which people can start to learn. It’s a platform born from a skillset that Blakiston developed early, during her teenage exploration of fan culture. That’s one of the reasons SYSCA will never stay in one lane because in complex worlds of fandom everything in life relates, she notes. “I hate when people say, oh, you posting about Harry Styles makes you lose all credibility about every single other thing you’ve posted, because it’s not mutually exclusive, I can post about, the fucked up abortion laws in Texas and Harry Styles at the same time.”
When it comes to brands being successful in digital spaces Blakiston says that people can sense it when brands are just throwing money in the direction of eyeballs in an attempt to jump on the bandwagon. She believes that authenticity lies when a community is talking to its own community. “If you’ve got something great going on, or you are putting on a TV series based on a book I really love, or there’s a new artist we’re obsessed with, we’re happy to work with brands in publishing this great work, this great thing, this great artist. Where I draw the line is I don’t like selling people shit. I don’t like manipulating people into doing anything that you don’t want to do, because I don’t like when it’s done to me. And if I am the audience and i want everything I say to be true, I really stick by that.”
Beth O’Brien commented, “SYSCA is changing the way people enter information, but also how they view culture and community. Talking to Lucy was awesome, she’s awesome. Her insight into young people, STANS and digital community-building is immense. We were left with the sense that her team is fundamentally centred around cultivating trust. The care and time they put into achieving this in each post blew me away. If you’re a human in this industry and want to hear more about youth or knowledge culture, I would say this episode is for you.”
Listen to The Shit You Should Care About episode: