Even if only one percent of readers pay any attention to what others have scribbled there on the wall it is still there for those who choose to read on and have a place to discover what others may think about the subject. If you’re not interested, simply don’t scroll down.
A very good piece that intersects with a lot of what I’ve written (and sometimes put online) about comments. The comments to his post are also very much worth reading.
Some people say journalism is in decline. They say you’ve become too politicized, too focused on sensationalism. They say you no longer honor your duty to inform America, but instead actively try to divide us so that your corporate overlords can rake in the profits. I don’t have a joke for this, I’m just letting you know what some people say.
In case you need more, this is kind of Kimmel’s thing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=joXYj2IoKXs
a lot of my own Wired story, last month, can be read as a push back against the IPO culture which Andreessen, almost more than anybody else, has managed to create.
“Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist,” I wrote in that piece, and Andreessen is Exhibit A if you want to look for such a person. His first company, Netscape, lost the Browser Wars and ended up getting sold to AOL. His second company, Loudcloud, was (to be charitable) too far ahead of its time, so it “pivoted” into something called Opsware; eventually Andreessen managed to sell it off to HP. His third company, Ning, was even less successful, and ended up buried somewhere in Glam Media. None of them exist today in any recognizable form; none of them ever made much money; and none of them even really made it as far as building anything approaching a permanent income stream.
The Netscape IPO, in 1994, was in its own way revolutionary. It broke the rules by going public without ever having made any money…For the first time, people in Silicon Valley understood that you could make enormous sums of money just by timing the markets — buying in at a low valuation and selling at a high valuation — even if the underlying company never made any money at all.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/26/the-problem-with-marc-andreessen/
Go read this article now. It’s the best thing I’ve read in a long time.
Bebo: 850 million dollars to 0 million dollars in less than two years. There’s betting the farm and being wrong, and then there’s just burning a giant pile of one billion dollars in a field.
Pets.com: a mere 300 million doggy dollars down the litter box.
The sock puppet toy was the last item available for order on the Pets.com site at the time of its shutdown in 2000.
Broadcast.com: pictures, videos, words and not even numbers are suited to take this one on. It seems like a practical joke that went horribly wrong, a stunt that backfired, a Springtime for Hitler attempt that never materialized, a drunk dial in the middle of the night that somehow cost 5.7 billion dollars. I’m not sure 5.7 trillion dollars would have seemed any crazier for a deal like this.
The glaring exception is Yahoo’s famous purchase of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com in 1999, which paid nearly $10,000 for each of their 520,000 monthly active users, ten times any other startup. (Broadcast.com skewed the chart so much, I had to leave it off.)
http://waxy.org/2012/04/instagrams_buyout_how_does_it_measure_up/
The word you were looking for there is infamous, not famous.
–
Kevin Systrom:
When Mike and I started Instagram nearly two years ago, we set out to change and improve the way the world communicates and shares. We’ve had an amazing time watching Instagram grow into a vibrant community of people from all around the globe. Today, we couldn’t be happier to announce that Instagram has agreed to be acquired by Facebook.
http://blog.instagram.com/post/20785013897/instagram-facebook
You had me at “change the world.”
Linus Torvalds:
I guess I won’t have to worry about the kids education any more.
–
Who turns down a billion dollars? What does the second million will really mean after the first? The 400th after the first 399? I went to lunch recently and was handed back the equivalent of a penny which I intentionally tried to overpay. If you’ve put yourself in a position where there’s no way to know what your value is then you probably made a wrong turn some place very long ago.
“My bubble indicator is the way you tell you’re in a bubble is suddenly the people who are expensively-educated conformists show up in your industry.”
Reminds me of that old catchphrase from a little company of my youth, “Think similar.”
It also made me think of this,
They think the grosses are proof that people are happy with what they’re getting, just as TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.
…
Part of what has deranged American life in this past decade is the change in book publishing and in magazines and newspapers and in the movies as they have passed out of the control of those whose lives were bound up in them and into the control of conglomerates, financiers, and managers who treat them as ordinary commodities. This isn’t a reversible process; even if there were Supreme Court rulings that split some of these holdings from the conglomerates, the traditions that developed inside many of those businesses have been ruptured. And the continuity is gone. In earlier eras, when a writer made a book agreement with a publisher, he expected to be working with the people he signed up with; now those people may be replaced the next day, or the whole firm may be bought up and turned into a subdivision of a textbook-publishing house or a leisure-activities company. The new people in the job aren’t going to worry about guiding a writer slowly; they’re not going to think about the book after this one. They want best-sellers. Their job is to find them or manufacture them.
…
The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all. They operate on the same assumptions as the newspapers that make heroes of the executives who have a hit and don’t raise questions about its quality.
Pauline Kael – Why are movies so bad? Or, the numbers.
The New Yorker, June 23, 1980
If you’re not a subscriber to the New Yorker, you can get one year’s access to the entire issue that article appears in for six dollars. Yes, six dollars, despite the cover of said article’s issue advertising the price as one dollar. If you’re handy, and not willing to pay, (and I’m almost sure you’re not), you can probably acquire the article by other means. It’s 6500 words, and probably not worth the price, but I think looking at the issues raised through the lens of what’s happening with technology in 2012 is very interesting.
So, I joined Facebook today And I. FUCKING. LOVE. IT!!!!!
8 years have gone by, old friend. You’ve changed and I have as well. You’re now no longer that scummy place littered with ads and annoying people from my childhood. You’re no longer a place people go almost exclusively to stalk people who don’t love them while you, Facebook, Inc., stalk all your users to push the proper flavor of sugar water to accompany their long, dark stretches of chair-sitting (oh, who are we kidding, bed-laying) while doing said stalking.
You’re now a hotbed of radicalism, art, meaning, love, friendship, music sharing and virtual plant sharing. You’re everything anyone could ever want in college-kid-created-database-cum-social-network/internet-replacement.
I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I now see that I was in the wrong. All you ever cared about was doing the right thing, no, excuse me, BEING the right thing, and I just refused to see it. I couldn’t bring myself to letting me love you, to give myself to you completely. Oh, foolish youth! But how lucky I am, now seeing the light on this spring day in April, to see you’ll still have me, after all these years, warts and all. I know what you’re thinking, that you could have helped me contract those warts years earlier if I’d just have given you the chance. And then you would have bombarded me with drug and doctor ads to cure those warts if I would have only understood that you put ME first, always and forever. Everlasting love, you said, but I couldn’t hear it. I wasn’t a believer.
Well, honey, you win. You’ve finally won me over. I love you and I’m so glad you’ll still have me.
xoxo :) ;) (; (:
Love, kisses and hopefully more,
From WikiPedia: Dungeon — A dungeon is a room or cell in which prisoners are held, especially underground. Dungeons are generally associated with medieval castles, though their association with torture probably belongs more to the Renaissance period. An oubliette is a form of dungeon which was accessible only from a hatch in a high ceiling.
There are no second class citizens in a dungeon. Just prisoners. As far as I can see, one is more likely to be trapped in the BRanch dungeon than any other place since you need to be invited and then locked in through your comments. Thanks, but no thanks. As far as our comment section, pretty arrogant on your part to think that our readers and those who are commenting here are second class citizens. They are vital and very important part of our community. Hopefully when running your community, you are going to find that out soon enough.
http://gigaom.com/2012/03/28/are-conversations-better-when-they-are-open-or-closed/
(Om’s remarks come from the comments section to the post listed above.)
Ira Glass: We did factcheck the story before we put it on the radio. But in factchecking, our main concern was whether the things Mike says about Apple and about its supplier Foxconn, which makes this stuff, were true. That stuff is true. It’s been corroborated by independent investigations by other journalists, studies by advocacy groups, and much of it has been corroborated by Apple itself in its own audit reports.
0:41-1:03, This American Life #460
(emphasis added, as it will be below. The following quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from the same episode of This American Life.)
Apple really cares about improving things when it comes to their products, you can see it with every yearly iteration. What about the yearly iteration of other things?
Charles Duhigg: So in 2005, Apple created what was called the Supplier Code of Conduct. And the Supplier Code of Conduct said that these are the standards that we expect anyone who’s making an Apple product to abide by. One of those, and in fact that one that’s probably most violated, is that they said that no one should work more than 60 hours per week that’s working inside a factory that’s making an Apple product.
We know from Apple’s own audits and the reports that have published that at least 50 percent of all audited factories, every year since 2007, have violated at least that provision. More than half of the workers whose records are examined are working more than 60 hours per week.
From the newspaper that signed on to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” let’s now explore “harsh work conditions,”
Charles Duhigg: So I think when we talk about the conditions inside where Apple products are made, we can sort of put them into two buckets. There’s basically harsh work conditions; people being asked to work shifts that are too long; people being asked to stand or sit in backless chairs; people being asked to work in plants that are still under construction. Or, people living in dorms that are provided by the companies, Foxconn and others, where they say that those conditions – the living conditions – are harsh. Workers have told us where they are live in dorm rooms where there’s anywhere from 12 to sometimes 20 or 30 people stuffed into a single apartment. So, it’s very, very crowded, very unpleasant conditions. That’s the first bucket of issues.
Shit, what’s an extra 20 or 30 hours a week, amirite? It’s just time, after all. “Overtime.”
Time matters. A lot. Like international treaties a lot:
I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?
- Donald Rumsfeld
Nothing to see here! No sweatshop here! All we’ve got is some “harsh work conditions,” that’s all. Things are merely “very unpleasant.” Y’know, like cleaning a really dirty bathroom!
Nothing like working that 24-hour shift to go back home to your apartment you’re sharing with 30 people. That’s totally just “how ‘developing’ nations work.” Why hold people to “Western standards” when you can stuff 30 people in a room and work them 24-hours straight!
Language matters. On the proper way to refer to a spade:
Some in the US press have been hesitant to call enhanced interrogation torture because as Paul Kane of the Washington Post explained, torture is a crime and nobody who engaged in “enhanced interrogation” has been charged or convicted.[68]The New York Times terms the techniques “harsh” and “brutal” while avoiding the word “torture” in most but not all[69] news articles,[70] though it routinely calls “enhanced interrogation” torture in editorials.[71] Slate magazine terms enhanced interrogation the “U.S. torture program.”[72]
Following NPR‘s controversial ban on using the word torture[73] and Ombudsman Alicia Shepard’s defense of the policy that “calling waterboarding torture is tantamount to taking sides”,[74]Berkeley Professor of Linguistics Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out that virtually all media around the world, other than what he called the “spineless U.S. media”, call these techniques torture.[75][76] In an article on the euphemisms invented by the media that also criticized NPR, Glenn Greenwald discussed the enabling “corruption of American journalism”:
This active media complicity in concealing that our Government created a systematic torture regime, by refusing ever to say so, is one of the principal reasons it was allowed to happen for so long. The steadfast, ongoing refusal of our leading media institutions to refer to what the Bush administration did as “torture” — even in the face of more than 100 detainee deaths; the use of that term by a leading Bush official to describe what was done at Guantanamo; and the fact that media outlets frequently use the word “torture” to describe the exact same methods when used by other countries –reveals much about how the modern journalist thinks.[77]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniques#Public_positions_and_reactions
There’s little wonder that the New York Times didn’t create a stir when it reported on conditions in China. Some might say it’s because the reporting wasn’t particularly sensational or noteworthy, that it showed that the situation on the ground wasn’t particularly bad. Maybe so, but no one’s going to listen to an organization that’s discredited itself, lost moral standing, practiced irresponsible journalism and become increasingly irrelevant or suspect to insiders in many fields it covers and to most of the public more generally. Other organizations? Sure, because you really see those organizations making a splash all the time. I’m sure you all knew about Kony before that video went viral too. Is lying wrong? Yes. Was telling the truth making a difference? Maybe. Slowly. Maybe.
Here’s what it looks like to a lot people: all of a sudden a Mike Daisey monologue goes viral and factories conditions maybe start improving. Pressure gets ratcheted up. People start talking about making Apple products in the US or other places. People start caring.
I know we’d all like to think the truth should be enough, but sometimes, maybe, it’s not.
But enough of that, let’s continue with more from the show:
Charles Duhigg: The second bucket, which is much smaller, is actually safety and life-threatening issues. And what we know about those conditions are isolated incidents that either injured or claimed lives. So, one of the best examples of this was last year within a seven-month period there were two explosions inside factories where iPads were being produced that killed four people and injured 77 others. Both of those explosions were caused by dust that’s created through the process of polishing the aluminum that makes up the case of the iPad. Prior to those explosions, there was a report released by this group SACOM, or Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior.
…
Ira Glass: Yeah, you write in your article– you point out that the second explosion happened seven months after the first one. And you quote a man named Nicholas Ashford, who’s a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, which advises the US Department of Labor. He said, “It’s gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected.”
He said, “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”
Nice to hear that the explosion bucket is “much smaller.” Well, I would fucking hope it would be much smaller! Sometimes people have a hard time hearing how they come across: “Well, sure, there were only 91 instances of underage workers out of hundreds of thousands. That’s nothing as a percentage!” Yeah, I would hope so! We don’t say, “Oh, listen, we’ve got 500 workers here, a few get raped a year. Nothing we can do about it. It’s like less than one percent!” Who talks this way and doesn’t know how they sound?
Finally, let’s get back to what Ira Glass seems more than a bit concerned with in this episode: Ira Glass
Ira Glass: But to get to the normative question that’s kind of underlying all the reporting and all the discussion of this, the thing that we all want to know when we hear this is like, “Wait, should I feel bad about this?” As somebody who owns these products, should I feel bad? And I don’t know that I feel so bad when, when I hear this.
Charles Duhigg: So it’s not my job to tell you whether you should feel bad or not, right? I’m a reporter for the New York Times, my job is to find facts and essentially let you make a decision on your own. Let me, let me pose the argument that people have posed to me about why you should feel bad, and you can make of it what you will. And that argument is there were times in this nation when we had harsh working conditions as part of our economic development. We decided as a nation that that was unacceptable. We passed laws in order to prevent those harsh working conditions from ever being inflicted on American workers again. And what has happened today is that rather than exporting that standard of life, which is within our capacity to do, we have exported harsh working conditions to another nation.
And lest you think I’ve got some anti-Apple ax to grind, listen to this grubby Apple hater:
I think Mike Daisey got Apple and other companies more attuned to the issue–to do the most they can to make corrections. That’s my impression about what has happened. His method succeeded.
- Steve Wozniak
So what is “evil”? Can a company be evil?
When an entity exists in an ecosystem, and acts within that ecosystem in a way that is short-sighted, behaving in a way that is actively destructive to the healthy functioning of that ecosystem and the other entities in it (including, in the long term, themselves) — yes, I believe that that is evil.
“So South by Southwest is so ridiculous that FedEx had people there, mostly girls, wearing jackets full of batteries with usb ports, like positioned around their clothes…And she would say things like, ‘You can jack in to me for ten minutes…I can walk with you anywhere you wanna go.’ People were leading their battery girls around.”
37:14 – 37:45
http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/16/2877638/the-vergecast-022-03-16-2012
Advertising: there’s no rule that says things have to be taken to the gutter, that’s just what tends to happen.
You can’t get “informed consent” in a country without real personal freedom. These arguments are pathetic—they’re structurally nearly identical to the ones made in the 19th century justifying slavery. The fact that workers take these jobs because they feel they have no economic, social, or political choice, and this is the only path, is not an endorsement of the current system—it’s actually a condemnation.
http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/2012/02/david-pogue-is-only-competent-to-review.html
(emphasis added)
The issue has never been wages. Any talk about wages has always been ignorant at best and intentionally misleading at worst. Pulling out some 15-year old Krugman piece only makes you sound like a horrendous asshole shouting, “Here, look at me! How can I be racist, here’s my black friend! Some of my best friends are black!”
Serious talk about labor has always been about the lack of hope, not money. It’s been about conditions that are unconscionable and governments that cannot or will not guarantee the basic rights any decent people would demand of the treatment of others.
Conditions and wages are not the same thing. Working conditions and the country you live in aren’t the same things either. Not only are employees producing Apple products suffering from poorly enforced working standards, they have no reasonable expectation of changing the situation. In fact, they live in a country that doesn’t respect their right to petition the government for better enforcement of existing laws or the enactment of new ones. Nor does said government respect their right to explain their grievances to journalists or directly to the public at large without fear of reprisal.
Factory work can lift people out of wretched situations. No one, NO ONE, who is on the side of equitable labor standards disagrees with that. NO ONE.
That’s why this is so disingenuous for Mr. Pogue to print it this way. It’s one thing for the writer of the letter, who probably isn’t following this situation closely, to be worried that what people are agitating for is the shutting down of factories.
But the fact is that no one has ever been talking about that in this entire debate. In fact, the only time it comes up is as a fear-based talking point, built around the delusion that the very people who want humane working conditions are actually trying to take away jobs.
My kneejerk response is to be cute for you, to be entertaining and witty, and, most of all, to be appealing. This urge to be appealing is a terrible encumbrance to the creative spirit, because it is not about being objectively appealing or complexly appealing, or appealing in ways that point to any kind of meaning.
What we do and create most often ends up being about meeting the perceived needs related to what we think people want and not what their needs actually are or what our own needs might be within that experience, so we are often left creating toothless pap that can be easily digested by the broadest community we can imagine and no one in particular. We try to appeal to the things a community of hundreds or thousands might all agree on like we’re all Martha Stewarts selling boring sheet sets. We erase ourselves, and we erase the actual individuals who take part in what we do.
http://www.schmutzie.com/weblog/2012/2/25/we-can-become-known.html
via: http://gigaom.com/2012/03/10/7-stories-to-read-this-weekend-13/
A truly wonderful read.
I often feel Apple ads are about putting those lily-white imaginary pasts that never came true onto devices so we can purchase them and finally make our dreams a reality.
The dark underside Norman Rockwell never broached too deeply in all those pictures was the inequality, racism, sexism and injustice of the time. Now we can’t look at those pictures without seeing those things. Everyone knows what the flip side of Apple’s beautiful world is. And like the 1950s, most people would rather not talk too much about it. What will we see when we look at Apple’s pictures 50 years from now?
Abandon all hope. You’ll just be wasting your time if what you want to do is engage with people who don’t want to engage with you.
The whole idea of comments is based on the assumption that most people reading won’t have their own platform to respond with. So you need to provide some temporary shanty town for these folks to take up residence for a day or two.
- Paul Bausch
That is simply not correct. And it’s offensive.
Fly-by-night posts (on your own site) in response to another post are the same thing as fly-by-night comments to a post: meaningless linkrot that no one besides you will ever see. They represent the same lack of attachment, commitment and seriousness that people hate about fly-by-night commenting.
They make me think of this:
Last week Instapaper released a new bookmarklet. It’s nice. It saves articles that have been split across multiple pages.
However it doesn’t work in the way I want the Instapaper bookmarklet to. So I’ve made my own. It’s above. You put it in your bookmarks. When you find an article or web page you want to read later, you click it. And it saves it for later.
There’s one difference. Mine doesn’t save the page, it just pretends to. And that’s good enough.
Don’t believe you have to or should start your own site. Don’t try to email people who aren’t interested in communicating with you. Don’t comment (if you even can) if you think no one wants to talk. Open up your favorite text-typing program, type your message and then click on save. Make sure you set the save folder to Trash. This way your thoughts have just about as good a chance of being engaged with by the author than if you send your message into a contact black hole (twitter handle-only pages and completely contact-free pages have abandoned even these black holes and taken the idea of one-sided “communication” online to dizzying new heights.) Sure, the probability of contact is slightly lower, but the advantage is you have absolute certainty about the final outcome of your response. No more waiting games, no more resentment, no more linkrot no one will ever read; just piece of mind and a little bit more RSI.
In summary, the rulemaking record establishes that the specific cognitive abilities of young children lead to their inability to fully understand child-oriented television advertising, even if they grasp some aspects of it. They place indiscriminate trust in the selling message. They do not correctly perceive persuasive bias in advertising, and their life experience is insufficient to help them counter-argue. Finally, the content, placement and various techniques used in child-oriented television commercials attract children and enhance the advertising and the product. As a result, children are not able to evaluate adequately child-oriented advertising.
…advertising directed at young children is per se manipulative. Such advertising aims to promote products by convincing those who will always believe.
Irwin toy ltd. v. Quebec (Attorney general), [1989] 1 S.C.R. 927
From: http://tech.branch.com/how-do-blogs-need-to-evolve
Paul Bausch:
And I think if other people realized the value of their not-friends, they’d be writing at least some of the time outside of Facebook. We can’t know ahead of time who we want to hear from about any post.
Actually, Evan Williams already does know who: not you.
I’ve never much cared for comments. Probably because I don’t care what most people have to say, either about something I’ve written or something I’ve read. Of course, I care a lot about what some limited number of people have to say.
–
From http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/25/2721249/5-minutes-on-the-verge-jason-kottke
Jason Kottke:
What writers do you try to read every day?
I don’t read anyone consistently aside from Gruber. I see and read so much stuff that even with great engaging writers, there’s a sameness to much of their work that doesn’t interest me…until they really knock something out of the park, and then I’ll hear about it from someone I follow on Twitter or Stellar.
Would advertising be a potential revenue stream?
Potentially. Anything is on the table.
That’s perhaps a little ironic for a product known for stripping ads toward the end of making “the Web a more pleasant place to read.” Are you suggesting that advertising could be pleasant?
Of course advertising can be pleasant. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been around for two hundred years! I think if a balance is struck where the reading experience is respected then there are all sorts of possibilities. Also – relevance helps. I’m into tech. Show me tech stuff, not soda ads.
http://www.candlerblog.com/2012/03/06/richard-ziade-interview/
I am shocked, shocked to find advertising going on here.
1. If you make a product that strips ads off content and you can’t find a way to sustain that product without putting ads back on the content you probably took a wrong turn somewhere important.
2. “Of course advertising can be pleasant. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been around for two hundred years! ” has to be one of the strangest statements I’ve heard in a long time.
3. ‘Pleasant’ is one of the weasel words like ‘tasteful.’ These words connote some sort of ugly compromise being propped up with a euphemism. They make me think of this:
Readability? You’re readable enough, Hillary.
A piece of art junked up with advertising might remain tasteful, but it will never be beautiful.
I’ve already got advertisers sitting between me and the content, Readability. I’ll take a pass on even more.
Oh, and give me a break with the “show me tech stuff.” Apple’s not buying ads for you to see because you already buy their shit. But you know who is? Less successful computer makers whose products you chose NOT to buy. The ones who produce things less popular and thus need to advertise more to get more buyers. The exact ads you don’t want to see. Tailored ads didn’t make anything better in the past because the problem wasn’t with the ads, but with advertising itself (something you’d think the maker of an ad-stripping product would understand.)
Still want tech ads? Try listening to any tech podcast with ads. Any one will do because they all have the same ads. Subscribe and you’ll hear your hosts talk about Carbonite, Audible and Netflix every week per show for the rest of your listening life, regardless of whether you’re a customer or not. Enjoy!
There is no winning with ads. You want to be served far fewer ads than advertisers want you to see. You want information (not marketing not from them) when you do decide to buy or when you want to hear about new things. They want to constantly tell you about ONLY their new thing (and only its good qualities) and drown you in ads that eventually create the desire in you to buy. These two positions are diametrically opposed. They cannot be bridged. The center cannot hold.
Shoving more ads at people who want content for free (and free of ads) doesn’t solve any problems, it merely multiplies them. Can’t wait for the ad-blocking extension for my new Readability app.
If a woman writes about family and core values and the connections between people it’s considered women’s fiction. If a man does it it winds up on the shortlist for the National Book Award.
…
For a woman you’re going to get something in the parenting section. Or you’re going to get something in the style section. It’s just really archaic. I just think if there’s not going to be a conscious decision about who you’re reviewing, think about what you’re saying.
15:44 – 16:00, 22:50 – 23:05
One woman from a company called Chickboss explained to me how she was working to pay fair wages to impoverished Guatemalans to make jewelry and such for sale, in order to raise their standard of living. It was an unambiguously noble business plan. The fact that she had to leave Guatemala and come to Hollywood to stand in the GBK gifting lounge and hand free necklaces to Frankie Muniz and Penelope Ann Miller says something very strange about the way modern capitalism works.
I didn’t just keep posting to Twitter and Facebook for nothing. There was just enough feedback to keep me posting continually. The key to Pavlovian training is the eventual randomness and pace of the rewards. The pigeon will keep tapping that button until the pellet comes out, even when it happens more and more slowly – in fact the pigeon will increase its effort as the pellets slow. Same thing with status updates?
…Is everyone posting to Twitter and Facebook simply because everyone is posting to Twitter and Facebook?
If you’re commodity content to your friends don’t be surprised when they don’t notice when you disappear.
The seldom-mentioned corollary of having a large number of “friends” is that those same “friends” of yours probably also have a large number of “friends” who will drown away your absence. It’s easier to have ten of ten total friends notice when you’re gone (100%) than to find ten out of a million (.001%) who actually care.
We take a generation of incredibly smart people who have been rigorously trained to deliver amazing code, running on a massive computing engine, and when confronted with a human being trying to learn something, they try to distract him with games. Can you imagine Google in charge of textbooks? In my children’s time, textbooks will be immersive experiences, complete with Google’s avatars whispering “Psst! Math is hard, let’s play games instead of studying.” Can you imagine Google making eyeglasses? They would obscure anything educational with virtual billboards for dating sites.
…
the whole point of having values is that sometimes you don’t do the most expedient thing or the most profitable thing or the easy thing. That’s what makes them values…http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-internet-made-me-sad-today
Google (and the Internet) make me sad almost every day.
–
Google’s biggest innovation in the ad space in the 10+ years they’ve been in it? In the face of ad click-through rates which never left anything asymptotically approaching zero, Google spat in the face of one of the few cultural touchstones common to the entire Internet-using population of the world. People inquire into the new defining characteristics of our new common internet culture that unites us in a world still divided by class, gender, nationalities, religion, language and a variety of other criteria. I’ll give you a clue, and it’s more than just our ability and desire to kill time talking about and doing nothing: it’s our universal, (not near-universal) distaste, dismissal and ignoring of advertising sprayed across our retinas from screens in front of us. Find me a person who says they like ads, click on them, find them useful or beneficial to society and you’ve either got yourself a crazy person or someone who works for an advertising company (probably masquerading as something else.)
So, what did Google do in response to the fact that NO ONE was clicking on ads and it became increasingly clear that no one EVER WAS going to click on them? They put ads right on top of the Youtube content you were watching and with Zizekian inversion jujitsu “forced” you to click on them in order to actually see the content. Did you catch that? Because if you didn’t I can assure you this is some serious ninja kung-fu action. To get rid of the thing you always wanted to avoid touching like the plague, Google started “forcing” you to do the one thing you wanted more than anything NOT to do.
People “choose” free services with ads like they “choose” the jobs they hate. What anyone with half a brain realizes is that people aren’t “choosing” ads, but are rather “choosing” not to pay. No one is “choosing” to have their data sold and let companies do with it as they please.
…people say that something’s gotta pay for all these great services we have on the Internet and it’s your data is how it’s paying. But I think there are a lot of people who disagree with that and say that people should have a choice of whether or not to reveal their data and to be tracked. And it’s not just that I’m seeing an ad. You know, you turn on the TV and you see an ad, but it’s that they’re collecting data about me in addition to showing me an ad. And that’s what a lot of people find unacceptable. And so it should be the consumer’s choice and that if there’s some services that really require money in order to make them work perhaps they can give you a choice that you can use the service for free and provide data or maybe you pay a small fee to use the service.
16:03-16:53
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201202242
(emphasis added)
Regarding Path:
Um, I mean it didn’t really bother me once again, because there’s other platforms doing this, right? I just, I felt a bit bad because I know Dave Morin and I know the whole team. And the first question was more like: is this going to influence their company in the long run?
41:52-42:09
Not willing to let any grass grow under its zeitgeisty, metaphoric feet, today the Times notices “Female Comedians, Breaking the Taste-Taboo Ceiling.” Have you heard of this Sarah Silverman person? Because apparently she is rather raunchy. And lest you find yourself wondering how you woke up in 1998, and if so, whether Dawson’s ever going to hook up with Joey, let me assure you, this story actually ran in the New York Times in November 2011. Coming next, a piece on how people are using emoticons. Oh, wait.
(Yup, that’s a link to a readability-formatted copy of the article because I cannot in good conscience recommend you to a Salon article otherwise. I tried linking to a print view previously, but there seem to be some problems with that. If Salon dies from the lack of advertising revenue that comes from having a user-hostile site I won’t want for a wink of sleep. The quality people there will find work elsewhere, hopefully for less horrific employers, or better yet, themselves.)
“When I saw these sanitary napkins, I thought ‘Why couldn’t I create a low cost napkin for [my wife]?’” says Muruganantham. That thought kick-started a journey that led to him being called a psycho, a pervert, and even had him accused of dabbling in black magic.
He first tried to get his wife and sisters to test his hand-crafted napkins, but they refused. He tried to get female medical students to wear them and fill out feedback sheets, but no woman wanted to talk to a man about such a taboo topic. His wife, thinking his project was all an excuse to meet younger women, left him. After repeated unsuccessful research attempts, including wearing panties with his do-it-yourself uterus, he eventually hit upon the idea of distributing free napkins to the students and collecting the used ones for study. That was the last straw for his mother. When she encountered a storeroom full of bloody sanitary napkins, she left too.
Analyzing branded napkins at laboratories led to Muruganantham’s first breakthrough. “I found out that these napkins were made of cellulose derived from the bark of a tree,” he said. A high school dropout, he taught himself English and pretended to be a millionaire to get U.S. manufacturers to send him samples of their raw material.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679008/an-indian-inventor-disrupts-the-period-industry
People who have imbibed from their culture that men and business are important and women and the home are slightly distasteful and irrelevant spending their time on inventions applicable to one and not the other….Obviously, I don’t consider business a male bailiwick and the home the kingdom of woman, but a whole lot of people do, and a goodly number of them have a massive influence on the allocation of R & D funds and the political narrative than I do. Right this very second, here in the US, we are having an actual, serious, if incredibly stupid, conversation about whether or not women should have easy access to birth control. We are having this conversation because significant humans in our government believe women should not have access to it at all. I’m super excited about that, because it means it’s 1965 and we’re gonna go to the moon soon.
…Most of us are cooking in kitchens quite recognizable from 40 years ago. The Roomba in the corner of my living room is about the only chore-class object in my house that that same grandmother would not have used in cleaning up after my parents.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/life-with-and-without-animated.html
This post is fantastic:
http://adrianshort.co.uk/2011/09/25/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it/
As with smoking, it’s easier to not start using the social web than to stop.
You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak.
(emphasis added, image source: http://fyeahsmokeonthescreen.tumblr.com/post/933465916/kevin-spacey-as-keyser-soze-in-bryan-singers-the)
And the third best freedom? Steve Jobs’ “freedom from porn,” of course.
It SHOULD feel dirty promoting yourself on places like Twitter. Twitter is talking. It coarsens and cheapens our discourse to promote ourselves in person to our friends. Twitter is no different, except someone else records it, doesn’t give you a record, then monetizes it. And you get “served” ads during the whole process. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was…
Spamming random people (traditional advertising) is bad enough, but we’ve somehow become accustomed to spamming our friends and people who somehow “like,” “follow” or “friend” us. We’ve even created solutions, first Twitter (uni-directional relationships), then FB’s algorithmic and manual “ignoring of your friends’ updates” and then Google’s Circles (a combo of the previous two created with almost no innovative element to speak of) to combat all this without just stopping it ourselves, asking others to stop it, or directly stopping “following/liking/friending” certain people.
–
The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void.
But, I don’t blame the Zucks of the world. I blame the standards organizations and the open web community for not rising up and fighting at an even more rapid clip. Why we need to have people like Shuttleworth bring anything “open” to the mass market is just plain sad. The closest we have to that elsewhere in the consumer-facing sphere is Mozilla, and even I use Chrome at this point. I want to use Firefox. I want to love Firefox. Maybe someday again, Firefox.
So, what i meant was: the “open web of free and independent websites” needs a marketing budget or at least a new marketing strategy. Maybe something like they’re trying with baby carrots.
(image source: http://www.babycarrots.com/)
Switching to the open web needs to be as simple as getting your friends off of IE and onto Firefox or Chrome. It has to be better, cleaner, backward compatible with all the old things AND have the side-effect (that your friends don’t actually care about) of not being in the pocket of someone like FB. We need something like an “eat organic” movement for the open web. Not “I support open standards” or “This page is xxx compatible” ugly-ass buttons on your sidebar, but rather something with bite. Organic food didn’t take off because they were “healthy.” They became popular because there were enough articles and marketing behind it to make it trendy. Smoking, despite overwhelming and conclusive evidence it could kill you, didn’t see declines in popularity till there was a nationwide multi-decade movement to viciously attack it in public, and more importantly, in front of children ad nauseam. Promoting the open web will probably need to be somewhere between these two extremes.
And if it’s not interoperable with the old services then it has to be straight-up better, since it can’t be cheaper than free and people don’t give a shit about open/privacy/(insert whatever good thing you care about here). (I define giving a shit as DOING something about something, not saying “I value privacy” when someone asks you a question.) I think we’re more likely to be successful with a movement to let us pay for FB or Twitter than getting people off those kinds of services. But, just look at how most publicly-held corporations respond to their owners’ (shareholders’) demands. You think it would be any better with users demands?
So, let’s all stop saying nice things about Twitter. If we openly spew venom in FB’s direction, why not Twitter? Because they haven’t put ads in stream yet like FB? Is there any doubt they will soon with no option to opt out?
If current standards are insufficient to the needs of the open web to thrive successfully, or sufficiently user-hostile to prevent greater adoption, then the standards community and the community of the open web just have to work harder on something better. Judging by how awful Ubuntu is 8 years into that experiment (yes, embarrassingly, look-away awful. Look at iOS and try to convince yourself that Ubuntu is on the right track) I have low expectations.
Maybe if more people were working on things like making the email (y’know, actual open standards, remember those?) experience better (or god forbid extending it with new standards and options) like Sparrow (and Gmail before it), instead of making new Twitter clients they could sell for one dollar with slightly more perfect pixels, we would be getting somewhere.
Remember the time there was a guy, what’s that guy’s name, Bob Stupak or something like that? The guy who owns Go Daddy. And then he shows up, drunk, in the Super Bowl commercial with his shirt half unbuttoned. And he’s got drool all over his chin and he tells you to go register your website at Go Daddy or whatever. Couple of years ago he got caught shooting elephants in Africa. You remember when we were kids? When you and I were kids and they would say, “Hey, there’s two types of elephants: the ones with the big ears are African elephants and the ones with the smaller ears that look a little clipped are the Indian elephants.” And then you can tell the difference between the two. Well, now there’s no more African elephants because the guy who owns Go Daddy shot every elephant in Africa. And people got very upset about this because now there’s only one type of elephant left in the world. But that didn’t stop people from registering their domains with Go Daddy. Even though this guy shot every single one of the African elephants that was left in the world.
And the worst part is, this is the part that gets you, this is the part that will really put a lump in your throat: is that he shot them all from a helicopter. So it wasn’t even like they had a fair chance. You know what I mean? Like if you’re on the ground and you’ve got your little elephant gun and you’re down there on the ground looking an elephant right in the face, it’s like at least the elephant, if you miss, has a chance to stomp you. You know what I mean? Like, it’s like a fair fight. Like the elephant’s coming at you to stomp you and you’re going to try to shoot this elephant and take it down. He shot these elephants from a helicopter…It was a turkey shoot. And he shot every last one of them. And still people didn’t stop going to Go Daddy.
30:45-32:24
(note: John incorrectly says African Indians instead of African elephants at one point in the recording)
Further, the institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out. The “student-athlete,” just to name one. “Amateurism,” just to name another. Of course, people involved in Penn State football allegedly deceived people when it became plain that children had been raped within the program’s facilities by one of the program’s employees. It was simply one more lie to maintain the preposterously lucrative unreality of college athletics. And to think, the players at Ohio State became pariahs because of tattoos and memorabilia sales.
By an order of magnitude, the Penn State child-raping scandal is miles beyond anything that ever happened with the Ohio State football team over the past five years, miles beyond anything that happened with the SMU football team in the 1980s, and miles beyond anything that happened with the point-shaving scandals in college basketball. It is not a failure of our institutions so much as it is a window into what they have become — soulless, profit-driven monsters, Darwinian predators with precious little humanity left in them. Penn State is only the most recent example.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7233704/the-brutal-truth-penn-state
(emphasis added)
Institutions are people, my friend. It isn’t the institutions that are failing us, but rather the people inside.
In the end, the need for profit can only ever add unnecessary and unwanted side-effects to our medium of communication, whether it’s omnipresent and invisible tracking of everything we read and say, a visual landscape overrun with advertisements, or software that disappears and takes our data with it once we stop paying rent.
http://suratlozowick.com/blog/2011/12/notational-velocity-developer-zachary-schneirov-interview/
It got me thinking. The advice is just as applicable to individuals too, but harder to follow because most Facebook and Twitter denizens don’t have the resources or know-how available to a company, to establish their own presence outside the walled gardens.
Just as hardware prices have become ridiculously low, home networking speeds are fast with massive market penetration, each person owns a wifi router in their house and memory has become absolutely dirt cheap, companies have decided we have to store all our data on their servers and forever be pinging them for our stuff. DSL is set up as a consumption channel. We have ADSL, not SDSL. But even with our crappy asynchronous framework, we’re quickly approaching a point where we don’t even have to make things synchronous to have enough bandwidth to be our own servers. Who turns off their router at the end of each day? And if they do, why isn’t there some super cheap (or free) storage system that serves your pages/information/whatever (Dropbox, Skydrive, iCloud) when someone wants to get information from you, visit your blog, download your photos, whatever. We should have devices that make this one-click. It should be built into our computers, our OSes and our routers. (That’s where innovation is, not in making a prettier photo-sharing app.) I shouldn’t have to pay Dreamhost 70 bucks a year to serve things for me when I already pay 70 bucks a month to have a fat DSL or cable pipe come to my home. Want to use FB services? You keep that info on your server, which FB can access via an API. You hold your chat logs. You set your permissions. You store your pictures. (Have a billion pictures at super high res? Ok, pay someone else to host them.) Want some new service like Twitter? Pay 10 bucks and you buy a license or some code and install your own Twitter server at home. You set your permissions and interoperability with the network. Why are we all just clients and not equal nodes? Why isn’t mesh networking here? Why is white space not here?
We are so far from getting to any of these points that I couldn’t be more optimistic about the next 5 or 10 years in tech. Unfortunately, people are too busy pissing themselves for the next resolution size, the return of cd-rom magazines (because what Moby Dick and your 5th grade math textbook were really missing was embedded, zoom-able video clips and 3D charts that spin) or they seem more interested in making replacement knobs for their stove and regressing back to old models like “coding for an OS.”
Rian van der Merwe was kind enough to respond to an email I sent him in response to some of his reflections on commenting:
http://www.elezea.com/2012/02/find-your-voice/
He even updated his post to address my email.
However, when you ask people long questions, with multiple parts, they often end up answering the parts that were least interesting to you. Here’s the full email I sent him:
In your recent post about “finding voice”
You say: ”So forget about comments – it doesn’t matter whether you have them turned on or not. The real question is which one of the many available options you’re going to choose to start writing and owning your voice.”
What’s so important about finding our own voice? Comments and discussion can lead to arriving at some place you want to go. Do we care about the “voices” that led to the UN Declaration of Human of Rights, or the final document that was finally produced?
We want to get to the best ideas and thoughts and plans, but what does that have to do with individual voices? Writing on your own blog can bring you away from the discussion, pushing us all into little silos. I personally felt just that drive with my own blog.
I read a piece by John Battelle
and then chose to engage him in the comments. I was unsatisfied with his answer and chose to write a longer opinion about the problems with his piece on my own site
I’m not sure that this method really achieves very much OTHER than helping me to find my own voice. But in my opinion the important thing is that John is exposed to the flaw in his argument and others looking to talk about it (where else would they naturally go to talk about it other than his comments section?) would see this issue. That way they would be forced to think about it and wouldn’t waste time writing the same criticism. If someone goes to write that on their page, how is that helping things? Will I go to all the trackback sites? Should I? How do sites writing independently engage in discussion with each other and not duplicate the same arguments.
I’ve been writing tons of posts about this, and not publishing them, but there’s a little bit if you’re interested.
Rian’s response was:
“What’s so important about finding our own voice?” To answer, I’d like to quote Clive Thompson in The Art of Public Thinking:
The process of writing exposes your own ignorance and half-baked assumptions: When I’m writing a Wired article, I often don’t realize what I don’t know until I’ve started writing, at which point my unanswered questions and lazy, autofill thinking becomes obvious. Then I freak out and panic and push myself way harder, because the article is soon going before two publics: First my editors, then eventually my readers. Blogging (or tumbling or posterousing or even, in a smaller way, tweeting) forces a similar clarity of mental purpose for me. As with Wired, I’m going before a public. I’m no longer just muttering to myself in a quiet room. It scarcely matters whether two or ten or a thousand people are going to read the blog post; the transition from nonpublic and public is nonlinear and powerful.
To me, this is the least interesting aspect of my question. It wasn’t even really a question I was asking, more just of a rhetorical question to suggest individual voice isn’t that important. I’m interested in the issue of separating discussion from content. It affects not only the readership, looking to engage in discussion:
So let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that most people will put two and two together and will find responses to your posts on other weblogs. It isn’t going to happen for most. Period.
but also the author of the work:
It’s true, as Siegler and others argue, that readers can find other ways to comment: they can post a remark on Twitter with a link, they can do the same on Facebook or Google+, they can send an e-mail, or they can write a response on their own blog. But doesn’t that make it even harder for a blogger to find and respond to all of the thoughtful comments, since they will have to check all of those other sources? I think in most cases, bloggers who shut down comments don’t do this — they simply don’t respond.
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/04/yes-blog-comments-are-still-worth-the-effort/
If you’re interested in more on this, I’ve quoted these last two pieces in a recent, longer entry on commenting:
The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high quality sites, most of the web is chock full of popup ads and other interruptive come-ons. It’s nearly impossible to find signal in that noise, and the web is in danger of being overrun by all that crap. In the curated gardens of places like Apple and Facebook, the weeds are kept to a minimum, and the user experience is just…better.
Have you seen Twitter as used by the “broadcast class?” Facebook FEATURES Zynga games. Even MSFT never pushed pure evil shit like Farmville into people’s lives. The App store is a dense jungle of crap apps and games. It’s a miracle you haven’t run into them more often.
How is Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” bar with music that you clicked on once to enable and now pollutes your screen like any other cruft or chrome any different than ridiculous browser toolbars that companies have been pushing for years? Sure, ANY user could theoretically go into settings or uninstall or whatever, but what we all know from looking at other people’s computers is that shit stays on forever.
The weeds are kept to a minimum. And they’re much prettier. And they’ll copy your address book without asking. No biggie! THAT’S TOTALLY DIFFERENT THAN MALWARE!
Most things ALMOST ANYWHERE are crap.
To the extent that FB is the web inside closed doors it will simply replicate the web outside as there’s no way anyone, of any size can regulate a community of users and developers the size of the whole world. Smarter users or users who care to will always find ways around crap and suface the “high quality.” To the extent that FB is just IM and email 2.0 for many people, who really cares? People used to sit in Hotmail or AIM or MSN to chat or communicate, who cares if that’s now on FB’s servers? Does FB messenger somehow have less ads or less clutter than AIM? It probably has more.
Will Apple’s App store apps break my computer less than spammy websites that install malware? Probably, but it apparently doesn’t stop them from taking all my address book info and doing whatever they want with it. So, we have made progress. Malware can no longer steal my credit card info or delete my files or make my computer not boot. Now it can only do shitty things with SELECT info after not asking for it.
–
And another thing. John continues:
So, does that mean the Internet is going to become a series of walled gardens, each subject to the whims of that garden’s liege?
I don’t think so. Scroll up and look at that set of values again. I see absolutely no reason why they can not and should not be applied to how we live our lives inside the worlds of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and the countless apps we have come to depend upon. But it requires a shift in our relationship to the Internet. It requires that we, as the co-creators of value through interactions, data, and sharing, take responsibility for ensuring that the Internet continues to be a commons.
(emphasis added)
Wait, what? You mean like this value you mentioned a few hundred words prior:
No gatekeepers. The web is decentralized. Anyone can start a web site. No one has the authority (in a democracy, anyway) to stop you from putting up a shingle.
How can I live my life in the world of Apple (or someone else) when they won’t approve my App?
Well, I asked John about this in the comments to his post. His response:
As far as I can tell from research to date, if you do get in, you can share out. You’re right that if Apple says no, you’re hosed. Then again, Apple has let a lot of apps in that run counter to its dominance (IE other browsers, Google Voice, etc)
…
So, basically, we can “apply” those values to the walled worlds, unless we can’t. Just like the open web, but not.
And I’m a little concerned that we’re essentially doing Walmart, y’know, a thousand, a million times over with the new model in Silicon Valley where we’re telling people there’s all this barter and reputation economy and all this self-promotion you can get, but your career prospects are reduced because we’re making everything more efficient and we’re making advertising and promotion into the only monetized information economy components…And so it all becomes about ads or coupons or something like that. And, y’know, the usual response is, “Well, it’s not really for free because you get free tools or free promotional opportunities for yourself or whatever it is.” But the point is that the type of value you get is within this barter/reputation economy thing and the type of value that people who benefit from being close to the top server get is real money that involves finance and all the benefits of true wealth, which is different. I mean you can’t, you can’t really, you can do a tiny bit of finance and benefit off of reputation through something like Kickstarter, but it’s just little tiny, sort of Horatio Alger-type of events. It’s not a real economy. You can’t really scale that.
- Jaron Lanier
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/8903, 21:57- 23:12
“NightmareHost” is a term that’s been thrown around by upset customers since the very beginning. Pick a name like DreamHost and you’re pretty much asking for it.
Sticks and stones, right? Not this time. This is the first month where we feel like we’ve actually earned the title. And we’re just as… nonplussed about it as you are.
Nice to know a big, mature, 15-year old company is having its worst month now, 15 years into its existence.
…we have a duty to make it easier for people to own their own Mothership. To make owning and managing your own content and identity as easy as possible.
We’re not doing too well.
(Yes, this site is hosted by DreamHost.)
Let me say now that this is not one of those debates about civility online, and the rights of pseudonymous people, and whether it’s your fault you have such horrible commenters and such. I have different obsessions.
And let me also add that now I have touched elliptically on all of those topics, if this was G+ we’d end up talking about those topics instead, also.
This is an allied issue, which I still don’t think people pay enough attention to; which is that if you have seven thousand people following you, a good six thousand of those are going to be people you don’t particularly like. Even if you were Jesus, you can’t love those people. (And actually if you read the Gospels, you can see that Jesus is a pretty good example of this. He spends his whole time going WTF in the comment threads of his own parables. WTF, Peter, did you even RTFP?)
If they comment all over your posts, you will end up hating them, and shortly, mankind.
The problem, as ever, is — how do you pick out the other thousand? Especially when they keep changing?
I firmly believe that one of the pressing unsolved technological problems of the modern age is getting safely away from people you don’t like, without actually throttling them to death beforehand, nor somehow coming to the conclusion that they don’t exist, nor ending up turning yourself into a hateful monster. And that this problem invisibly creeps on people as their level of fame increases. And that the Internets continues to be amazingly good at randomly bestowing non-linear amounts of fame on people, in a remarkably well-distributed way.
http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2011/09/10/rss-died-for-your-sins/
(emphasis added)
via http://walterhiggins.net/blog/RSS-died-for-your-sins.html
I’ve really got to get back to this whole commenting stuff once I get off this extended open web kick.
This IS a serious unsolved problem. I think while there may be technological solutions, the underlying issues are basically personal and social. I think people first need to think about what and why they’re doing what they’re doing. Technological limitations (and social norms) in previous ages freed many people from thinking about many issues. Saying “I don’t scribble notes in the margin of your book,” is the kind of weird grandfathered-in stuff that gets into discussions of writing and existing online. That we keep on dealing with the exact same problems of following, filtering and fame in a way that never solves them reveals either a profound lack of refinement of our tools or a serious failure to come to grips with and think hard about what exactly people are doing (and want to do) online.
As career journalists and managers we have entered a new era where what we know and what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace, and that value is about zero.
- John Paton
(probably via this: http://www.cjr.org/essay/confidence_game.php?page=all)
Well, technically the dead-tree news business was charging you money, for their dead-tree version, and you weren’t paying for that one either.
If people won’t give you money to solve their problems, it’s not a real fucking problem.
- Jon Yongfook Cockle
Companies nowadays are solving problems for us that we don’t know exist and therefore won’t pay for. In fact, they may not even be problems at all! Maybe that’s why we wouldn’t pay for them. And don’t give me the Henry Ford line about people asking for better horseless carriages, because we do end up paying. We end up paying with our time and with our information. Say what you will about Apple, and even Microsoft, but you had to buy most of their shit to use it. Stuff like Goo and Foo just keeps on pulling you in deeper and deeper (Sign up here! Don’t worry, it’s still free!) without ever telling you to think for a second that someone HAS to be paying them big fucking money for all the free shit they give you. I don’t think we’ll see the consequences, aside from the spiritual and social effects of blanket marketing non-stop, (which we can already see now and have been around well before the internet), for a very long time. It’s hard to even predict what they’d look like this far out.
I hope it’s not something like this:
“When deep space exploitation ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.”
- Fight Club
One of the reasons why selling ads on websites is so often the business model for websites is because it’s really easy and your customers, rather users at that point, don’t need to do anything. They can just show up to the website. And everyone who just shows up, which takes no effort except one click, everyone who shows up makes you a penny or two. Where, if you were trying to sell something directly to customers for money, on the web they had to go through payment gateways, they had to type in all their address and billing information, they had to type in their credit card number. They might not trust you with their credit card number if it was a big deal. Y’know, the more barriers you put up there the more people will just say, “Eh, never mind,” and they’ll abandon buying your product.
So what changed with the app store is Apple already had everyone’s billing information from iTunes. If you used an iPhone, chances were good that you already had a credit card hooked up to iTunes. And so you could buy things just by typing in your password.
And Apple made it even more of an even playing field in that whether you buy a free app or a paid app, it’s the same process. You type in your password either way. So buying a paid app over a free one is no additional effort. And that changed everything. That for the first time brought very, very easy payment to the modern software world. That more than anything is why there is a business for paid apps of any reasonable size.
- Marco Arment
Planet Money: The App Economy, 7:08-8:40
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/31/146152273/the-tuesday-podcast-the-app-economy
The first thing that made things work was what Amazon and Apple discovered long ago: people will pay for things at lower prices and you’ll make it up in volume. Stop your crying.
While Marco is right and enthusiastic about Apple making things more pure for sellers and more easy for users, this is not something Apple or Amazon or Google or Facebook should have. This NEEDS to be something anyone can hook into. You shouldn’t have to rely on Square or Stripe or Paypal or credit cards. Maybe you’ll need banks, but you’ll certainly need a new type of system, with open and free specs for everyone, that can keep you from being a slave to holders of payment information. Instapaper does have paying customers, but only through Apple. 30 percent this year, 70 percent next year. TOS nice this year? TOS evil next year. Being able to sell things to people without having to piggy-back on someone else’s service, and be at their service, and without inconveniencing your users is something the open web NEEDS to avoid being the sick man of the Internet. And it has needed this for far too long. iOS is the micropayment system that never got implemented. Everything’s fine now with iOS, but everything’s usually fine at the beginning. (It’s only when you break a decades-long Microsoft-esque dominance with something like iOS that everyone can see how much things get held back.)
We do not need to replicate the credit card model online. And where the hell have been banks all this time? Where were they when credit cards ate their lunch?
The web is special and different. There are standards bodies that can actually get shit done in ways that governments sometimes can’t. The web is open and free and, more than anything, gives us a second go around to make things slightly better than last time.
Being a good citizen means more than just making money off the system:
http://gregmathes.com/rebecca-mackinnon-on-being-a-good-citizen-of-the-internet/
…if you pay no attention to how your own town is being governed or your own school district, and you make no effort to participate or to contribute to its being better, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t turn out as you would have liked. And similarly with the Internet is that people, y’know, the Internet will only be as good or as bad as we, all of us collectively, make it. And so we need to be engaged in its evolution, in its governance, just as we engage in the governance of our democracies.
- Rebecca MacKinnon, Spark 171, 13:07 – 13:46
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2012/02/spark-171-february-5-8-2012/
Given the state of political apathy in America, I’m not too optimistic about civic engagement on the Internet.
In the interview Rebecca seems also far more fatalistic about governments and companies being the powers that be on the Internet. I don’t know why that has to be. While governments seem to need a seat at the table, the standards of the Internet consist independently of the companies. I’m with Facebook and Google on this one, if you don’t like their terms of service then don’t use them. Either don’t use them, pass laws to make them change or develop and move to services that are free of corporate control and shitty terms of service.
Lots of talk about the New York Times opinion piece on privacy:
Data aggregation has social implications as well. When young people in poor neighborhoods are bombarded with advertisements for trade schools, will they be more likely than others their age to forgo college? And when women are shown articles about celebrities rather than stock market trends, will they be less likely to develop financial savvy? Advertisers are drawing new redlines, limiting people to the roles society expects them to play.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/facebook-is-using-you.html?pagewanted=all
via http://brooksreview.net/2012/02/weblining/, who quoted the less interesting paragraph directly above the one quoted here.
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At first this paragraph struck me. Everyone hates things that “limit people to the roles society expects them to play.” That’s like a cardinal sin in America. Then I remembered that Facebook has nothing to do with this.
The problem is redlines, not Facebook (or data aggregation.) Calling out Facebook for allowing advertisers to redline is like yelling at convenience stores for selling cigarettes. These advertising redlines that Lori is talking about, that bombard people and helps to shape (or limit) the range of things people think about, have been around for a long time.
What we should be concerned about is not Facebook, or new instantiations of these redlining policies, but about the idea in general. But because there’s lots money behind these strategies, it will be tough to get them to change. Until we make that kind of advertising illegal (if that’s even possible) or shunned (also pretty tough) there’s little hope of stopping advertising that’s potentially “limiting.” Offer companies a better way that makes them more money and they may take notice. Or move beyond a consumption-based advertising driven culture. It’s not that moral shunning never works. It’s worked well with tobacco. It’s worked somewhat well with the tech and gaming scenes being less horribly sexist sometimes. And it’s not that laws limiting advertising are impossible. Drug ads are barred in most of the world. The US has laws against alcohol ads at certain times of the day. It’s that money talks. And the more there is the louder it gets.
or why Google couldn’t even do what it said it originally wanted to do after going public.
Yahoo launched a service the other day to help us search for apps.
Twitter has no meaningful or useful search.
Facebook search is somehow even less useful than Twitter’s.
Google Plus is ruining traditional search.
Apple’s attempt at searching for iOS apps (on iOS devices or through iTunes) is a joke.
The app marketplace on mobile phones is growing year after year across all platforms.
Where is the one search company that was supposed to help us search the world’s information? Off launching its own Bing of the 2010s.
Instead of adapting to the marketplace and helping us find the things we need across the expanded ecosystem that includes the web, the private-ish web and the mobile internet, Google has gone AWOL. It has decided it can’t get deals with companies so it has given up. If the open web is dead, as Google surmises, then traditional Google is dead too and it simply needs to move forward.
But let’s think about this. Why possibly could this once mighty and lovable giant of the web now be the company no one wants to partner with? In the quest for continued growth, Google has HAD to expand into newer and stranger markets to satisfy investors. Do investors want a company that answers to its mission or one that returns increasingly high profit numbers? We have met the answer and it is crap. Investors want an entity, regardless of what it does, that returns increasingly higher revenue growth numbers. Period. The lesson to learn from this? Don’t go public if you care about a mission.
I’m not just talking about electric cars. I’m talking about things like Maps and Youtube and Android. It’s no wonder that it’s pretty fucking difficult to get companies like Apple to share their App store data with you so that you could crawl it and make it searchable when you’re trying to build a platform to destroy them. It’s no wonder Twitter and Facebook don’t want to give you data when they both understand that you’re actively trying to defeat them. And we’re all worse for it.
We didn’t NEED Google to do Maps or Blogger or Youtube. All these services were private things swallowed up by the Googlenaut in what was probably an early understanding of the eventual AOL cross-pollination/social-networkization of everything. To big corporations, the odd years were when the free and open web reigned supreme. The normal times are when services like Prodigy, Compuservere, AOL, MSN and later Twitter, Apple, Facebook and Google dominate people’s networked world. B to B, not B to C. And good heavens no C to C!
We don’t need Google to do self-driving cars. Maybe Google research will create something just unimaginably awesome. But then again they might be like Microsoft research who has pretty much been wasting literally billions of dollars picking their noses. Sure, they drive incremental improvements in productivity and usability and stuff like that, but no jetpacks have come out of there and it’s safe to say they never will (unless they’re featured in one of their “future” videos.) What we need Google to do is use all that engineering talent and minimal clutter ethos to help us search through and find the information we want. Somehow along the way Google lost their way, believing machines were always the answer (people there have famously went on about machine shit when it’s just clear to everyone that they’re just wrong) and that by bitching in public about how everyone was leaving the open web and not “sharing with them” something would change. Well, it ain’t gonna change. You can’t be a competitor to everyone and eat your cake too. It turns out with everyone scared you’re going to step onto their turf they’re less likely to negotiate deals with you. They’d rather give users of the Internet (including themselves) a shittier life experience, with things that integrate less or are proprietary (FB’s -graph initiatives) than deal with you. Some have called this type of problem a strategy tax. I call it the public tax. You give up your ability to achieve your mission (or at least say you fought the good fight) when you go public AND decide you’re going to care about satisfying your investors. And if you think Plus Your World is the right direction then you’re fucking crazy.
Search is broken. Useful search is over. Thanks, Google.
On the “Spruce Gooses” of social software,
There’s all these things that, yknow, have surprised us, where people generate really amazing, crazy stuff as a group. And I think, yknow, there’s more of that in the future. We just have to be careful not to squash it before it has a chance. And I think sites like Facebook kind of squash it because they’ve already predetermined, like, yknow, what are these very specific ways people are going to interact. And there’s not a lot of room for surprise there. That’s why, and you see it, it’s such a culturally, like, empty place. Everything that’s on there is from somewhere else.
- Maciej Ceglowski
http://tummelvision.tv/2012/01/07/tummelvision-91-maciej-ceglowski-of-pinboard/
55:47 – 56:16
Paul Robert Lloyd seems to have hit a sweet spot with the line:
Much like producing advertising campaigns for cigarette companies, working for Facebook has become an ethically questionable career move.
But I think the real kicker is the paragraph he has under that:
As more services require a Facebook account to use them, I wonder if it’s set to become the next Microsoft Windows; a popular piece of software that becomes the only choice available. Users of Windows eventually became pray to viruses and malware; will members of Facebook become equally vulnerable?
via: brooksreview.net/2012/01/facebook-arrogance/
which was via: patdryburgh.com/link/facebook-and-the-future-of-the-web/
(I guess I’m too slow for the web.)
–
Two things.
One: comments like that are least likely to influence the people who are likely to work there.
Two: Facebook is already malware. User-fuckin’-hostile malware:
Violation of reasonable user expectations is a big part of the problem. When you click on a link – you expect to be taken to where the link says it’s going to take you. There’s something about the way that Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is implemented that violates a fundamental contract between web publishers and their users. When you see a headline posted as news and you click on it, you expect to be taken to the news story referenced in the headline text – not to a page prompting you to install software in your online social network account.
That hijacking of your navigation around the web is the kind of action taken by malware. It’s pushy, manipulative and user-hostile.
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_facebooks_seamless_sharing_is_wrong.php
People are worried that Goo is off to become the next big Mo’, but Facebook beat them on the malware front. And without having to install even a single actual 3rd party program! Look ma, no hands!
Are 2011 and 2012 the years we’ll remember as the years the Internet went bad? Goo destroying search. Facebook destroying sharing. Twitter announcing full out censorship. (Don’t worry, you can still read all those censored tweets coming out of Laos written in Lao because you can TOTALLY READ LAO AND IT’S TOTALLY USEFUL FOR THE 99 PERCENT OF THE WORLD THAT CAN’T READ LAO TO SEE INFORMATION WHICH IS ACTUALLY ONLY BLOCKED TO THE FEW PEOPLE IN COUNTRY IT IS RELEVANT TO. THANKS TWITTER!) Do we get unapologetic in-stream ads from Facebook and Twitter this year? Would that be the cherry on top we’re all waiting for? Big smiles Sheryl, you’re a billionaire!
I don’t have any doubt that Hollywood is experiencing some problems transitioning to the new world, at least in the developed world. Given that, well:
If evidence of political corruption, racketeering, and attempts to control the marketplace through government activity reveal dying industries, then real estate is a dying industry too, as well as high finance and numerous others. Considering how pervasive political corruption is in the United States today, almost every single industry in the American economy is dying by Paul Graham’s reasoning, except for those few industries which are so new that legislation does not yet exist for them. Agriculture has been dying, by this metric, for at least a hundred years.
Speaking of historical perspective, the Catholic Church experienced a period of extraordinary corruption more than five hundred years ago, during which time popes waged wars, had mistresses, and in some cases even died from sexual exhaustion in the beds of married women. Logically, if political corruption and government thuggery are hallmarks of dying institutions, the Catholic Church must be a historical relic that ceased to exist shortly after this period. However, it kept going another 500 years, and in fact still seems to be around. Not only that, it built nearly every hospital and orphanage in Europe in a period which followed after its apex of corruption. There’s a good chance that when humanity colonizes Mars, there’s going to be a Martian archdiocese. This is just one of countless examples of an institution which failed to collapse under the weight of its own corruption.
Graham’s argument doesn’t just operate in defiance of historical precedent, but also in defiance of easily obtainable facts. Studios are seeing tremendous growth today; even though American audiences are shrinking, audiences worldwide are booming. Globalization has been very, very good to Hollywood. Many movies don’t even premiere in the United States any more. And as for history, the studios have always been brutally dominant, cynically exploitative, and extremely corrupt, and, despite Graham’s argument, were so even during their periods of greatest growth. Why else would writers and actors have unions?
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I lived in San Francisco during the late 90s, and during that time, I was acutely aware of a perceived rivalry between San Francisco and Los Angeles — but when I moved to Los Angeles in 2007, I discovered that nobody in LA had ever even heard of this rivalry.
(emphasis in the second paragraph added)
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/01/im-totally-against-killing-hollywood.html
The piece Giles is responding to from Paul is here: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html
Giles is right to say it’s stupid to want to kill Hollywood. He wants to get rid of the lobbying. Others, like Marco, seem to want to fix our campaign finance system. Others want a “lobby for tech” that will further push our horrible lobbying system forever into the future.
We already have solutions to these problems: elections. If you have shitty politicians taking money from shitty people to do shitty things then all you have to do is vote in less shitty people. You can work within the parties or outside them. Laws will be worked around. Amendments are impossible to pass, period. The best way to kill the lobbying industry, like Hollywood, is just to ignore it and do something else. You don’t need to kill Hollywood to have good content elsewhere. You don’t need to kill lobbyists to have a less shitty political system. You just need politicians who won’t take a meeting with them. The problem is not with the system. The problem is with the people.
(WWIC is short for Why wasn’t I consulted?)
So what kind of medium is the web if the boundaries are so unclear, and if the fundamental question is WWIC? This is from an interview with MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey:
What makes MetaFilter a success?
Matt: I’d like to think it’s intense moderation and customer service.
That is the point that I am trying to make. The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. “Intense moderation” in a customer service medium is what “editing” was for publishing.
http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html
This is part of what “feels” so wrong about publishing without comments and discussion. Yes, your site is your site. You get to control every single pixel. Good for you. But a webpage isn’t a book or a column or anything else from the old world. Forever closing your eyes and trying to pretend that you can fit square pegs into round holes won’t ever change that.
I never felt physically bothered when there was no “contact this author” button when I read an article or book offline. I never felt the need or want or desire or right to converse with them in public with their readers or contribute something to an article they wrote. But the web is different. It just is. We bring different expectations and it creates and engenders different feelings and expectations as well. Fleeing to silos like Twitter and Google+ and Facebook is a complicated issue I’ll have to get to some time in more depth. All I can say now is, you get no guarantee or expectation of permanancy or control from things you don’t pay for. Ads and corporate strategies for platforms you don’t have a say in both coarsen and cheapen your presence and contribution there at best and completely derail what you are trying to do there in someone else’s favor at worst.
I know, propose, inspire and build better tools. Complainers are a dime a dozen. It’s also important to get to the root of the problems, to research things before and problems that seem to re-occur. Now is still the research stage.
“Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular.”
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“The article threshold has often been discussed as if it was simply a new method of getting readers to pay, to which the reply has to be “Yes, except for most of them.” Calling article thresholds a “leaky” or “porous” paywall understates the enormity of the change; the metaphor of a leak suggests a mostly intact container that lets out a minority of its contents, but a paper that shares even two pages a month frees a majority of users from any fee at all. By the time the threshold is at 20 pages (a number fast becoming customary) a paper has given up on even trying to charge between 85% and 95% of its readers, and it will only convince a minority of that minority to pay.”
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core-users/
There is, I think, a hidden assumption in those who critique the internet overly, for allowing us hang out with people who are like us. I completely acknowledge that that is a real danger. It’s one of the greatest drawbacks and dangers of the internet: that we do as humans seem to prefer to hang out with people who believe what we believe, reconfirm what we believe. It’s just much easier, simpler and more fun to do that. That is a real danger, so I don’t mean to diminish that. However, it’s also important, I think, to keep in mind just how much agreement we need in order to have a simple conversation.
So, the old enlightenment ideal was you could take two people who profoundly disagree, sit them down, preferrably in a coffee shop, let them talk honestly and openly and both open to the other side, and if they are at it long enough and are good-hearted enough, well-intentioned enough, they will come to agreement. That ultimately we will come to agreeement.
First of all, I think the net shows that that’s not true: that we are in fact never, ever going to agree on anything. And the hope that we will, it’s a hope that we have to give up on. We are not going to agree on everything. Even things where other people are wrong, they’re just factually wrong, they’re not going to change, you’re not going to get them to agree. And second of all, that sort of coffee shop conversation is bascially impossible. In order for us to converse we have to be speaking the same language, be interested enough in the same thing, that we’re willing to converse, have enough assumptions in common that we’re able to meet and move forward. Conversation needs so much agreement. That may be unfortunate, but it is the way conversation is.
Spark 167, 38:54-40:44
(emphasis mine)
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2012/01/spark-167-january-8-11-2012/
During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”
- David Frum
http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/
Comments are your real audience, uninhibited. They are your co-worker telling you that your hair looks like crap today. That your idea makes them want to vomit and wonder how you ever got hired anywhere.
Perhaps people can’t handle the truth, vulgarity and viciousness online because we’re so used to not hearing it in our real life. Is public shaming when people say “Hey dickwad, your idea is horeshit!” at a Q&A after a speech really the only thing restraining people? If it is, that’s a sad statement about us as people more than it is about commenting systems.
I recently visited Gregg Tavares’ site http://games.greggman.com/game/
Noticed his RSS link was broken and wanted to email him to alert him of the problem.
Was quickly faced with a wrath so harsh that it is completely indescribable. You can see the screenshots below:
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3, Fight!
Maybe if we tailored our commenting systems such that they not only inspired fear into the hearts of commenters, but also took up enough of their time that only the truly interested would proceed, we wouldn’t have so many problems. Of course, after making it through the hoops some of those scare tactics and delays could be gradually adjusted. The point is I really like this setup.
I’m still doing research to make a post that will truly contribute to the commenting debate. Some shorter responses may follow, but a longer, genuinely useful one is going to take some time.
Published because, according to Dave:
“This should be a blog post so other people can read it and respond. I will give it some thought myself and will comment if I have something to say. Thanks…”
The following is slightly edited.
Hi Dave,
1. The most recent commenting controversy has sprung up following Matt Gemmell’s decision to turn comments off:Seeing as you go pretty far back in the blogging (and pre-blogging community) do you have any recommendations about key old links or people to contact (if you can remember) about older debates going back into the 90s about “what a blog is” and whether comments should be there? Searching back in time through Google that far back can be difficult. I’m trying to compile a very long list of posts about this as far back as it goes.2. You often talk about “posting a comment on your own blog.” I don’t know where this trope came from, but lots of others have taken this stance as well. The argument for this seems to be “you have no right to be on my page and exploit my popularity.” The drawback to me seems there is no central location for all commentary and discussion on a post. If people see comments as merely “feedback to the author” then comments will never make sense. Why wouldn’t you just demand email for that? If you see comments as an opportunity for people who are interested in discussing a specific post, with you as well, what else could replace comments? Where else would they go to find people interested in talking about that? Forcing people to post on their own site slows or almost prevents discussion. How will someone else interested in discussing your post ever hear about what I have to say (or vice versa) or have an opportunity to discuss it with me unless they meet me in the comments? How is that not putting an unfixable burden on your audience which just wants to discuss that topic with you and others? Am I missing something? Pingbacks? Trackbacks? Linkbacks?Alex at zerodistraction.com put it this way: “So let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that most people will put two and two together and will find responses to your posts on other weblogs. It isn’t going to happen for most. Period.”
From Anil’s post I linked to in the previous post
But as I reflected back on the wonderful, meaningful conversations I’ve had in the last dozen years of this blog, I realized that one of the reasons people don’t understand how I’ve had such a wonderful response from all of you over the years is because they simply don’t believe great conversations can happen on the web. Fortunately, I have seen so much proof to the contrary.
Why are they so cynical about conversation on the web? Because a company like Google thinks it’s okay to sell video ads on YouTube above conversations that are filled with vile, anonymous comments. Because almost every great newspaper in America believes that it’s more important to get a few more page views on their website than to encourage meaningful discourse about current events within their community, even if many of those page views will be off-putting to the good people who are offended by the content of the comments. And because lots of publishers think that any conversation is good if it boosts traffic stats.
http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assholes-its-your-fault.html
For what it’s worth, I read Ben’s site. I don’t read MG’s, but it’s nothing personal. Here’s Ben, quoting MG, adding his comment after:
MG Siegler:
If you’re saying something that you think is great, why would you want to do it as a comment on another site anyway?
Great question.
http://brooksreview.net/2012/01/commenting-debate/
MG’s original article: http://parislemon.com/post/15305835451/bile
Is this all some elaborate joke I’m not in on?
I can see why MG’s thinking about comments is shaded from his time at TechCrunch. Actually, no I can’t as MG appears to be someone with half a brain who has used the internet for more than the past few days and knows that “commenting” isn’t limited to the nonsense found on sites that have horrible commenting traditions (Huffpo, Youtube, TechCrunch.) Ben, however, should definitely know better. It’s not a “Great question.” It’s a question that should be obvious to anyone who’s ever used the Internet and wanted to comment on something. And as a purveyor of a website which often comments on other things, you would think some “great answers” to that “great question” would emerge pretty quickly. That’s why I feel like there’s some joke here I’m not getting.
Here’s some recent “decent answers” to that “great question.” With a bit of search I’ll be happy to look up some more great answers for anyone interested. I’ll be writing some more here too very soon as well.
http://ronoffringa.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/comments/ - Even MG found this one. Apparently it didn’t answer his rhetorical question.
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/04/yes-blog-comments-are-still-worth-the-effort/ - I particularly recommend this one. And it’s particularly fascinating that comments on GigaOm, a TechCrunch competitor, seem like they’re from another planet compared to the “bile” MG complains of.
The most compelling reason to have comments is that you actually care what other people think…
It’s true, as Siegler and others argue, that readers can find other ways to comment: they can post a remark on Twitter with a link, they can do the same on Facebook or Google+, they can send an e-mail, or they can write a response on their own blog. But doesn’t that make it even harder for a blogger to find and respond to all of the thoughtful comments, since they will have to check all of those other sources? I think in most cases, bloggers who shut down comments don’t do this — they simply don’t respond.
http://zerodistraction.com/blog/2012/1/5/weblogs-without-commenting-systems-are-closed-ecosystems.html - Alex doesn’t have comments, but at least he’s not stupid about it:
So let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that most people will put two and two together and will find responses to your posts on other weblogs. It isn’t going to happen for most. Period.
http://mattgemmell.com/2011/11/29/comments-off/ - Read the included letter about comments there. Hell, I’ll quote some of it here as well.
First from the letter:
On the other hand, one of the things you wrote in your post really struck me the wrong way. “I want to make it clear that this isn’t a means to discourage conversation; indeed, I hope the opposite it true.” No, turning off comments is unquestionably a means to discourage conversation…
The purpose of turning off comments is to discourage conversation. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that is what you want. But if you really want a conversation, don’t pretend that you are going to get one by turning off comments. You aren’t being honest with your readers or yourself.
And part of Matt’s response, though I still recommend you read his whole post:
I think there’s a distinction between a goal (or purpose, as you say) and a consequence. Switching off comments will inevitably reduce the number of responses, but I think that it’ll increase the average value of the remaining responses; that was my point.
I can honestly say that, no, switching off comments wasn’t a means to discourage conversation. There are easier and less conspicuous ways to do that, which wouldn’t raise controversy (such as moving to an all-moderated policy for comments, for example, or insisting on an externally-authenticated login like a Facebook account, and so on).
Matt seems to think turning off comments is superior to moderating comments. I think moderating comments takes time people don’t want to spend. Rian van der Merwe put it like this when he turned off comments, at least temporarily:
I’m not turning off comments to discourage
engagementdisagreement, I’m turning it off to help me sleep better and give me more time for writing…
http://www.elezea.com/2011/12/keep-writing/
Again, I think there’s little doubt that turning off comments discourages engagement of all sorts. It’s bad for lots of other reasons too, but I’ll get to that in another post.
Email – Discussion and conversation over email is not in the public. The value any blog post has is that it is in the public. The same reason your public post has value is the same reason comments in public have value. People can see them, they can be linked to, etc. Is this hard to get?
Twitter – Too many issues with Twitter to mention. I’ll just begin with the simple fact that like a blog post on “your own site,” the commentary/discussion/conversation is divorced from the source/context/whatever. That’s if it’s even made public to begin with.
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1. There’s a big difference between being honest and saying “I personally don’t particularly care what you have to say” and saying something silly like “If you’re saying something that you think is great, why would you want to do it as a comment on another site anyway?”
2. Comments aren’t for everyone or every site. But let’s not pretend all commenting is the same. I’d say, just as freedom of speech has exceptions for assholes (yelling fire in a crowded theatre), bile commenting hubs like Huffpo, TechCrunch and Youtube are the exceptions, not the rule, and that they share a huge share of the responsibility for their current mess. (Anil Dash had a little bit to say about this recently: http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assholes-its-your-fault.html ) Some people blame the dicks in the theater talking and taking phone calls. Some people blame the theater for not stopping that shit. The good theaters just make sure it doesn’t happen. And they don’t kick out all the people as a way to solve their problem.
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Oh, and because people always say you should propose solutions instead of just complaining and saying why you think you are right, here are some ideas:
Make your commenter approve their writing after a fixed amount of time to avoid things written in haste. It could be 5 minutes, 1 hour, or even one day. When they’re asked to approve it before it’s submitted to you they could be given a description of exactly what kind of comments are wanted. It could even be a checklist. If they still approve unsatisfactory things, you could block them.
You could have whitelist comment rolls. If someone has corresponded with you over email, or has submitted X number of decent comments, they can be approved for future comments.
You could limit comment length to something reasonable (and longer than Twitter length.)
You could have a moderator.
If you’re someone like John Gruber who sells ad space for thousands of dollars a week you could even be a job creator and hire a moderator (or group of moderators)
You could make those commenting approve comments in the moderation queue before they are ever put up if they themselves want to make a comment. Maybe you wouldn’t even have to force them. Your readers might just do it of their own volition if they want to have a discussion in the comments. You could even pair this with the whitelist idea mentioned above! If no one (or X number of people) approve the comment after a certain time (maybe 1 day) you’ll be given the top one in the moderation queue. If that doesn’t inspire others to want to go comment on that (and approve another comment at the same time) then maybe that entry shouldn’t have comments.
The possibilities are endless!
Second Crack should be considered an early alpha.
Fuck, yeah! You can consider it Cro-Magnon for all I care, I’m just pumped to finally be able to give this deathtrap a ride! And I don’t even like Markdown!
Even though I’ve run Marco.org with it for a long time, it’s still rough and unfriendly.
Strange, WordPress has been around for damn near a decade and it STILL feels that way to me.
Comments: Use Disqus or Facebook comments. Or just go without comments. Do you really need them?
I think it’s safe to say this is the perfect solution for a brand new site wanting to drown itself in all the magical goodness that is commenting online!
I am going to Git this shit out of this and you should too!
https://github.com/marcoarment/secondcrack
Thanks again, Marco!
via Ben Brooks! from this link： http://brooksreview.net/2012/01/secondcrack/
Boom!
The announcement of the first Huffpo book title by of course, a pair of tits above a picture of crazy Gary Busey announcing his GOP presidential endorsement.
Welcome your new Huffpo overlords!
Instagram seems to start with the oft-quoted recommendation for writers, “show, don’t tell.” It seems to want to make our biggest decision the answer to, “what hipster filter best defines you and this picture today, dear user?” It takes the Tumblr approach: I am a scrolling stream of pictures, therefore I am. It encourages disposability by making everything a moment to be glanced at for a second, to be something to be given a silly ironic filter (it’s not a boring park bench I saw, it’s a boring park bench in sepia.)
It’s a bridesmaid’s dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day, then tossed it. Like a Christmas tree — so special, then, bam — it’s abandoned on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it. Like sex crime victims, underwear inside-out, bound with electrical tape.
Fight Club
Well, we’re humans. We’re more than just walking eyes. We have mouths and minds too. We want to show AND tell. Photography pretends it can only be about capturing a moment, but no one ever said why? A picture is worth a thousand words, but maybe only a few hundred if can you write well. Will I read a hundred words? Sure, if it’s someone I care about and they don’t write ten times a day. Will it take away from me consuming thousands of people’s pictures I don’t care about and will forget about two seconds later? Hopefully.
Since when did we become so cold to our friends that we didn’t even want to bother to read a few words from them about their pictures or their day (blogs)? I suppose Twitter was supposed to solve these problems, but I find it hard to see why Twitter is any less user-hostile than RSS. Facebook solves everything, but the cost of solving everything is you solve everything poorly.
Back when content like this was found in books the layout of the books was somewhat like the layout of this site (still in construction). I don’t remember the Bible selling well because it had a pretty cover or sharing buttons sprayed all across each page.
The content came to you front and center because you were the customer and you were footing the costs.
Content on the web still costs money to produce, but you are no longer footing the bill. Content is now delivered around how the creator prefers, not how you prefer it. Creators used to care about making you happy. Now they care about making their customers (advertisers) happy. Their customers are happy when people get more “impressions” of their ads. This makes the creators happy because they can stay in business. Impressions go up when things get spread around more. So now there are buttons everywhere, fucking up the design/layout/flow/your_experience.
Instead of trusting their audience to install a bookmarklet (which they’ll never do) to enable something like sharing on LinkedIn, X by Y pixels of every page from site Z will always be filled with a crap button for sharing to that site.
This needs to go away and get out of your face and mine. I understand that being bombarded with stuff like that is the only way people are going to share things en mass like they are now, but it’s all going to backfire, in addition to being an eyesore. You cannot overload a medium forever and expect customers to stay. Radio and TV have done just as much to kill themselves as the Internet and things like iTunes have done.
There should be a universal sharing standard, something that can hide in the browser chrome, maybe in a corner, perhaps in the URL bar (that really doesn’t even need to be there in the first place.) It could replace or add functionality to the woefully outdated, underused and poorly designed/implemented Star (Favorite) button.
Of course, this will never happen. It’s far too much in everyone’s interest to just gunk up a page with shit design, distractions and ads to pay the bills. More people get jobs, more people get paid, more people get to read things (probably things that are produced by 1000 times too many people) and everyone gets a worse experience. I mean do we really need 700 sites on the internet writing the exact same story that comes out of the Verge, BGR, Engadget, Gizmodo, CNET, etc, ever 10 minutes? Do we really even need 3?
This is the problem I’m talking about:
Listening to the Vergecast is actually rather enjoyable
Scrolled down one page:
Sharing buttons aren't evil, but they can be
And this is how to do it better:
How things can be done if you just care a little bit about design, and your audience
This is a test post to try out the K2 theme. Here is a lot more text I need to write to test out the hyphenation features of css that I’m testing out on this website.
What is there to say? So much. So much that I seem to have almost nothing to say right now. What a shame. A shame, indeed.
