Author: Rahul

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Social media addiction techniques

This post describes well the interaction design principles perfected by social media services to build anxiety, fear of missing out and dopamine rewards: https://medium.com/swlh/user-engagement-is-code-for-addiction-a2f50d36d7ac

Ultimately, the writer asks:

When looking back at this era of humanity future humans will say, “How could they have just scrolled and scrolled all day? Didn’t they know what it was doing to them?” Social media is the new cigarettes. Everyone does it, it’s addictive, it’s harmful, and you should quit.

There are no pathbreaking revelations here, just well known ones laid out as plainly as can be for you and me to see.

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The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, April 2021

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March home screens)

Other than the wallpaper, nothing changed from last month. This marks three months of relative stability. I still get mixed up between the App Library search box and the Spotlight search box, and I wish iOS would merge both of them, though this is unlikely.

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Startups

Out-capitalised, out-executed

I read an instructive Twitter thread about how one startup that focused on organic growth and profitability was out-executed by another that decided to raise a lot of money at the beginning.

Usually these stories are about one startup using its money to unfairly subvert the other. In this case, the startup that raised capital, Asana, was simply able to market better, hire better, build better, and eventually even design better.

Today the startup that wanted to grow organically, the ‘right way’ operates as a slimmed-down cash-conscious team out of India; the other is Asana, the well-known, now-public company.

I have seen this play out up close a few times. When a new market opens up, speed is everything. And capital buys you, above everything else, speed.

When you tell a target segment you’re thinking about their problem, when they realise that you’re the one that’s doing something about it, you build up mindshare and – importantly – trust.

That means you can get away with a pretty basic product that chips away just enough at their problem. Now that you have actual customers to understand the problem in detail, your product can get better quicker, and that leads to more customers, which sets your flywheel in motion.

Capital is the biggest determinant of whether that flywheel’s going to spin for your product or for your competitor’s.

End note: In the same thread, the writer describes situations in which an organic-growth approach has a shot at working:

Also read the Jan 2020 post on the possible sunset of the Capital as Moat model. This makes the opposite point to this post, but it’s for a very different stage of a company:

The Capital as Moat model
Categories
Startups

What it does, not what it is

There’s much to like about this post by entrepreneur David Sacks. Titled ‘Your startup is a movement’, draws comparisons between successful startups and successful political campaigns – having been written around the time of the 2020 USA presidential election campaign.

One section that’s stayed with me, though, is articulating the problem. This part hit home:

Many founders are like bad politicians — they are “policy wonks.” They just want to talk about their features. I’ve got news for you: Nobody cares about your features. At least not yet. First people need to understand the problem you’re solving. Then they need to understand your solution. Only then will they be interested in your features. 

I’ve been guilty of this more often than not – and not always in the context of startups. Because I’ve understood the problem landscape, I think that merely describing a solution will make its merits and demerits self-evident to someone who’s given this a lot less mindspace – which is all my prospective customers.

Finally, my rational mind rebels against this even as my common sense knows this to be true:

As marketing guru Christopher Lochhead has pointed out, if you speak more articulately about the problem than anyone else, people will assume you have the solution. 

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Daniel Frank/Unsplash)

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Real-World Crypto RG.org Writing

Crypto dot rahulgaitonde dot org

The Whatsapp group I started on bitcoin, cryptocurrency and decentralised finance now has over 200 subscribers across 14 countries.

Now, all of the past posts from the group are now available at Crypto.RahulGaitonde.Org. I will continue to add new posts here as they are published on the Whatsapp group.

Unlike the group, I have left comments open here – if there are ever discussions on posts, WordPress has moderation tools; Whatsapp does not.

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Investing Personal Finance Real-World Crypto

How India could regulate crypto investments – Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed three ways in which the Indian government could apply existing regulation to cryptocurrencies instead of simply banning them outright:

One, cap the amount that people can invest in cryptocurrency. Two, set a high minimum to invest in cryptocurrency to place it out of reach of new, vulnerable investors. Three, limit access to only accredited investors who have a certain minimum income or net worth.

Each of these three are discriminatory in some way. One caps the amount of upside. The second and third limit investment and potential upside to those who already hold significant capital. Far from democratising access, each of them perpetuates the gap in investment opportunities.

I’d rather that investing in crypto, and alternative assets in general, require taking a test. After all, the question is whether or not the investor understands the investment and its risks well enough to make an investment decision.

This is not unlike a drivers’ license, which requires you to take a test to prove you can be responsible for not just your own safety (as is the case with investments) but that of others too.

Drivers’ license tests also show that India is capable of administering tests at scale, nationwide, throughout the year.

You don’t need to rely on the transport police infrastructure, though. The capital markets regulator’s National Institute of Securities Markets, or NISM, administers a range of tests for mutual fund distributors, PMS distributors, investment advisors, registrars, valuers, among others at centers nationwide in a number of languages. The government could require the capital markets regulator to expand this infrastructure to prospective investors too. The marginal costs are a lot lower than setting one up from scratch.

Education democratises access to opportunities. Capital requirements restrict it. To me it’s clear which path the government should take.

(ends)

(Featured Image Photo Credit: maxime niyomwungeri/Unsplash)

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Investing Personal Finance Real-World Crypto

How India could regulate crypto investments – Part 1

The government in India is expected to table a bill that, among other things, bans “private cryptocurrency”, making it “one of the world’s strictest policies against cryptocurrencies“.

One of the companies I advise, a tech-enabled wealth management service, has offered alternative assets for a few years now. Those include securitised debt, digital gold, P2P lending, settlement financing, portfolio management services, among others. I’ve gotten to see how they have been regulated – or not.

And I wonder if India’s government, central bank and capital markets regulator could apply some variation of these existing regulations to cryptocurrency, especially when held or traded as an asset.

The government could cap the amount of Indian rupees invested in cryptocurrency across all crypto exchanges. This is like P2P lending, which was initially capped at INR ten lakh, and expanded to INR fifty lakh subject to a few net worth criteria. The RBI controls the toll gates to crypto – the on ramps to transfer money from a bank account to a crypto exchange to buy crypto. That makes it possible to enforce these limits.

The government could set a minimum amount to hold in cryptocurrency. That puts it out of reach of the most vulnerable small investors who the government ostensibly wants to protect. This is like portfolio management services, whose investment minimum was recently doubled from INR 25 lakh to INR 50 lakh.

It could restrict investment in cryptocurrency to accredited investors, a qualification that’s well known in the USA but which the capital markets regulator has only just proposed. So instead of investment minimums or caps, the investor needs to have a certain minimum net worth or annual income. As of this writing, the qualifications are so strict, only a few tens of thousands or very low hundreds of thousands will quality.

(Part 2 – while each of these three are workable, I describe what I’d rather do)

(Featured Image Photo Credit: naraa .in.ub/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Investing Products and Design Real-World Crypto

Virtual real estate NFTs

(Also posted earlier this week on my crypto/DeFi Whatsapp channel).

We have discussed NFTs or non-fungible tokens before, mostly in the form of digital art and collectibles. Not only do some of them sell for millions of dollars, they can also be re-sold on secondary marketplaces for gains.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that we’re now seeing pieces of virtual land inside games being sold as NFTs.

In some games, players can buy digital deeds for real estate in the form of an NFT, which proves the authenticity of a certain plot in a specific game.

The real estate will appreciate as more players join the game and scarce land is sold to other players who require the plots for certain tasks and missions.

It’s not just buy-and-hold. Those ‘assets’ are being put to ‘productive use’:

Players can then rent out their land to other gamers, charge others for using it or even sell it—either within the game or on a third-party exchange such as OpenSea.

that real estate, too, can be sold for large sums:

A group of people last month paid $1.6 million for Citadel of the Stars, a large kingdom in the unreleased fantasy role-playing game Mirandus

virtual world The Sandbox sold about $2.8 million worth of land in a pair of well-received sales that now have the company valuing its digital properties at about $37 million.

The sale of properties in games that are not even released reminds me of Bollywood/other Indian movies, which start making money through sale of music weeks before the movie’s release.

that real estate, too, can be sold for large sums:

A group of people last month paid $1.6 million for Citadel of the Stars, a large kingdom in the unreleased fantasy role-playing game Mirandus

virtual world The Sandbox sold about $2.8 million worth of land in a pair of well-received sales that now have the company valuing its digital properties at about $37 million.

The sale of properties in games that are not even released reminds me of Bollywood/other Indian movies, which start making money through sale of music weeks before the movie’s release.

We’ve heard news for years from governments who have wanted to tokenise parcels of land, even apartments. The current Indian government’s think tank also recognises real estate as a major area for the adoption of blockchain (Blockchain: the India Strategy, January 2020).

Innovation in virtual worlds made from scratch will always be faster because they have fewer messy problems. That said, there’s a lot for governments to learn from them about distribution and market mechanisms – if they choose to. For instance, governments could require new real estate projects to list on their real estate blockchain, just like the unreleased games that sold plots of ‘land’ as NFTs.

The smart contract could abstract the chain of ownership from the actual chain of transactions on the blockchain. That is, as the government understands the ownership history of the plot of land on which the new project is being built, the on-chain record history can grow ‘backwards’.

At the same time, the chain of ownership of that plot could also grow ‘forward’ as it is sold repeatedly.

Both the backwards and forwards additions to ownership are immutably recorded on the real estate blockchain. The abstraction means you don’t need to wait for the definitive ownership history of each plot of land to be determined before you list them on-chain.

Categories
Product Management Products and Design Startups The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Failure to empathise

On a new feature in Slack via which anyone on Slack can message any other Slack user, across companies:

When Slack introduced the feature today, it hadn’t implemented any features that can help someone who gets harassed. There is no block button or built in mechanism to report the message to Slack or your company’s Slack administrator.

https://twitter.com/44/status/1374737695444901891

Slack reacted:

… “we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages. We are taking immediate steps to prevent this kind of abuse”

– Slack Says Letting Anyone Message Anyone With Few Limits Was ‘a Mistake’

This is a failure to empathise, a rather basic failure when designing products. Gmail took off in its early days in large part because it decimated spam. That is a fifteen year old lesson. Twitter’s issues with harassment and spam are an ongoing lesson.

At Slack’s scale, one should expect product managers to consider the potential for harassment. For information overload. For ambiguity. For bias.

If Slack – or any other company – consciously builds and promotes its products to be used by organisations of all sizes, across all industries, globally, they cannot also dismiss or discount these as incovenient or unnecessary.

These considerations will slow down design and development, they will make the product somewhat less agile and they will increase monetary costs.

That’s the price of making a product that widely available.

You expect that with the increase revenue from this scale, you hire the best product, design and engineering talent to build efficiently while also considering everything above.

(ends)

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design

Firefox’s assertive privacy intervention

We saw how Firefox implemented measures to block so-called supercookies that misuse how browsers cache images. These caching is to improve performance, but supercookies encode tracking information in images to track people across websites even when cookies themselves are blocked.

It’s a war all right

Today, I learnt that Firefox is taking another, more assertive step to blocking tracking through removing specific parts of the information that sites add to the link when pointing visitors to other websites:

referrer URLs can expose an extensive array of other sensitive info, including but not limited to Internal hostnames for government and enterprise entities that most likely should not be public.

Malicious actors could then pull sensitive info like internal names from their web servers’ access logs or their analytics software if they can trick a target into visiting a site hosted on servers under their control.

– Mozilla Firefox adopts new privacy-enhancing Referrer Policy

Now,

Mozilla has announced that it will introduce a more privacy-focused default Referrer Policy to protect Firefox users’ privacy, starting with the web browser’s next version.

The new user privacy protection feature against accidental leaking of sensitive user data will be introduced in Firefox 87.

With that update, Firefox will apply the new default Referrer Policy to all navigational requests, redirected requests, and subresource (image, style, script) requests, thereby providing a significantly more private browsing experience.

The new Referrer Policy simply drops specific parts of the referrer URL. This sounds simple, but this is the fist time that I’ve seen a browser actually intervene and edit a URL to remove information – not add it.

The Supercookies update was defensive in nature. This is a lot more assertive.

In my view, the time for debating whether a browser should be a neutral application or not is long past. Trackers on the web are widely used and aggressively collect browsing metadata to build visitor profiles. Websites push ads, videos, subscription popups and popunders to the point where they drain your attention. The act of simply browsing the web is an experience akin to harassment and surveillance.

Everyone needs technology that’s on their side, works to protect their privacy and attention. We should start with the web browser. That is what Firefox is doing,

(via Michael Tsai)

Update: I just came across this. The same release also includes “Smart Block”, which

takes an additional step to improve the rendering on pages that embed third-party trackers—instead of just pulling the script and leaving a “hole” where it used to be, Smart Block replaces it with what Mozilla describes as “stand-in” scripts. These stand-in scripts function just enough like the original trackers to restore the intended page-rendering sequence and results without actually leaking data to third parties.

– Firefox 87 is out today, adds Smart Block for improved private browsing