Category: Audience as Capital

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity

Screenshots show Donald Trump’s website is a donations-collecting machine, not a blog

Donald Trump has a new website. A lot of the coverage I have read is about how it is essentially a blog filled with tweet-sized rants (example coverage).

I think the most notable aspect of the website is how transparently and aggressively it is optimised to be a money-making machine.

Here is my experience (I am outside the US). This popup greets you when you visit the site.

Tapping on it leads you to this.

This is the same text and design that led people to unwittingly sign up for repeated donations from their bank accounts – in some cases until their account was empty [1].

The text is endearingly deceptive, panders to ego and assumes lack of attention. For example, “If you step up in the NEXT HOUR, we’ll make sure your name is the FIRST name on the list” with a large timer counting down from one hour. But also in the middle of it all, “The countdown has ended, but you can still donate below”

If you linger too long on the page, you get this other popup informing you that the ex-president wants to see you on the ‘top of the donor list’, whatever that means. Tapping ‘complete my donation’ simply dismisses the popup, but presumably you are now more likely to finish the transaction.

All of this is before you’ve even seen the home page of the site itself.

Anyway. You navigate back to the popup and dismiss it. Here is the actual home page:

There are three buttons on this screenful, and none of them have anything to do with what Trump has to say. They all have to do with money. Scrolling down, you get yet another contribute button.

The focus of the coverage, Trump’s new blog, is behind that tiny ‘Desk’ link at the top. It’s clear what Trump wants his supporters to click on.

So. Since ‘contribute’ is the main call-to-action, let’s tap on it. You’re taken to a page looks very much like the one you were taken to right at the beginning, complete with hard-to-notice default opt-ins.

Donating on the earlier page would put you on the ‘official donor list’. Donating here would put you on the ‘official founding member donor list’.

If you linger here, the same popup as earlier nudges you.

I couldn’t contribute because I am not “a U.S. citizen or lawfully admitted permanent resident”, so I haven’t experienced what happens after.

But if you navigate back and tap on the other major button, ‘Shop’, you’re taken to this store:

This is the checkout page:

When you check out an item, you aren’t buying it. You’re still donating. Even when you’re in the ‘Save American Shop’. I’m not sure if this is standard practice across USA political organisations.

I’m also not sure if the ten dollars for ‘shipping, handling and fees’ is normal. I’ve never bought items on a USA website. Seems somewhat high.

Finally, when you do tap on Desk, that tiny link at the top that is the center of all the coverage about Trump’s new online presence, this:

The first button, the first actionable click on the screen is the ‘Contribute’ button. Right alongside the post. Bolder than the actual text of the posts themselves.

One last thing. The privacy policy makes clear what the organisation can do with your data:

We reserve the right to use, share, exchange and/or disclose to Save America affiliated committee and third parties any of your information for any lawful purpose, including, but not limited to, as described in Section 3.

And what’s in section 3? All this and more:

This gives the organisation the ability to monetise your data, over and above the contributions you make to it.

So.

The site makes no pretence about who it is for. It doesn’t seek to convert; it’s for the faithful. Back in January, we had discussed this when several of Trump’s social media accounts were suspended:

Anyone who engages with Trump and his community on this [then-not-yet-live] website and forums is someone who has joined for that specific reason. No one other than news reporters covering Trump and his network will join.

– Where will the Trump community congregate after the Twitter and Facebook ban?

Because it’s for the faithful, the site doesn’t need to create talking points; the 24×7 news cycle of outrage creates them already. He knows that his opinions will be picked up by news websites and channels and social media personalities even if they are buried deep on his site. Why, those people have probably set up alerts for new posts.

The true utility of the people who actually visit those site, the ordinary right-wing USA citizen, is their money. That is what Trump’s website is for. And it has done a truly outstanding job.

[1] The donations infrastructure is by Winred, which describes itself as “the official secure payments technology designed to help GOP (ie Republican) candidates and committees win across the US.” Winred appears to have a monopoly on online Republican fund-raising.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Colin Lloyd/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

An example of why Reclaiming Attention is important to me

We just read about anxiety-inducing tactics by social media and games like FarmVille.

Growth hacking infects our attention

Today we look at a related but distinct issue: the use of “dark patterns” used by marketers on the internet.

Dark patterns are ways of designing emails, websites and other messages that confuse or manipulate people into taking an action other than what they intended.

The New York Times reported the use of such patterns by the 2020 Trump re-election campaign:

The Trump team repeatedly used phantom donation matches and faux deadlines to loosen donor wallets (“1000% offer: ACTIVATED…For the NEXT HOUR”). Eventually it ratcheted up the volume of emails it sent until it was barraging supporters with an average of 15 per day for all of October and November 2020.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out…It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

By October there were sometimes nine lines of boldface text — with ALL-CAPS words sprinkled in — before the disclosure that there would be weekly withdrawals. As many as eight more lines of boldface text came before the second additional donation disclaimer.

This was what it looked like:

The article does not do a good enough job writing about the cost to people’s financial and mental well being, the most important aspect of this story. The one that they do explore in some detail is this horrifying story of a person dealing with late-stage cancer:

Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help. What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

I often write about attention on this website. Stories such as this should indicate why this issue is important to me. A life that is spent navigating interfaces like this and dealing with the severe consequences of one false move is not a life of any great quality. We deserve better of the Internet.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else

A wonderful longform article by the New York Times writer Charlie Warzel about the perils of the attention economy. The article itself is centered on his conversation with the writer Michael Goldhaber, who predicted this over thirty years ago, before even the infancy of the web.

The need to reclaim our attention is a topic dear to me, and naturally so was this article.

It’s hard to quote one or two essential sentences by Goldhaber, so I’ve had to go beyond in order to do him justice. I think it’s worth your attention to read on:

Understanding attention scarcity

He was obsessed at the time [in the 1980s] with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention.

This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.

Understanding attention hijacking

“When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”

[In 1997] He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”

“Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

Politics and Attention

Most obviously, he saw Mr. Trump — and the tweets, rallies and cable news dominance that defined his presidency — as a near-perfect product of an attention economy, a truth that disturbed him greatly…

Living in a rural area, he suggested, means being farther from cultural centers and may result in feeling alienated by the attention that cities generate in the news and in pop culture. He said that almost by accident, Mr. Trump tapped into this frustration by at least pretending to pay attention to them.

he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online,

“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

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Audience as Capital Life Design Wellness when Always-On Writing

Mental health Whatsapp group

A couple of days ago I started a Whatsapp group about mental health, something that’s rather important to me.

Here is the link to the Whatsapp channel.

And here is how I describe the channel:

Links to articles and short commentary on living a less rushed, less stressful, less distracted life. A shared journey from surviving to thriving. From someone who’s been through the lows of burnout, depression and chronic pain.

On this site, we explore mental health in the context of technology under the tag Wellness When Always-on.

My first message on the channel referenced a quote I had linked to in a blog post from almost exactly a year ago:

Burnout as a workplace injury

This is the second Whatsapp group I have recently begun publishing on, the first one being one on bitcoin, cryptocurrency and decentralised finance, which now has subscribers from ~13 countries.

Cryptocurrency Whatsapp group

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Laura Ockel/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Products and Design Startups

Rewarding affinity, not transactions

We’ve discussed before the increasing population of what I call CoCoCo – content → community → commerce, and what’s also been termed Linear Commerce.

Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 1

Now, a recent Harvard Business Review article touches on this in the context of loyalty programs: “Want More Loyal Customers? Offer a Community, Not Rewards“

True loyalty is emotional and irrational and leads to customers feeling like they’re part of an exclusive membership group which then leads them to become loyal subscribers or consumer network participants.

as opposed to

some companies allow you to earn points for following them or writing a product review. This sort of bribery usually attracts the least loyal and least valuable audience — people mostly interested in claiming the reward not invested in the brand… [things like this] have more to do with an economic transaction than with true affinity for a brand.

I have been part of great communities, and they are everything that the first quote talks about. I’ve also seen such communities decline as the company behind the brand failed to convert this loyalty into commercial success. And I’ve seen referral rewards dressed up as loyalty programmes that ultimately attracted the sort of people the second quote describes.

At its core, the most influential customer-facing person at a brand need to be genuinely interested in engaging with customers and understanding what they want, in the context of the brand. Creating products and solutions does not automatically beget a community.

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Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

The last Twitter megapersonality – Part 2

(Part 1 – Deplatformization)

What’s new is the Trump episode demonstrated these companies’ herd mentality: first no one could afford to act against his social media accounts because it would mean losing eyeballs. And then all of a sudden no one could afford to keep his account standing. [2]

This means online personalities can’t rely of any of these platforms as an alternative to the others. Now that the platforms have acted in unison once – rather effectively – they’re likely to be more aggressive in the future. It’s like being cancelled, but by entire platforms.

So the next megapersonality isn’t going to be primarily on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or even Telegram. They are going to own their presence. They may publish and engage on all of these platforms, but their home, their fortress, is going to be an independent online presence.

Two types of such online presences will proliferate among influencers: One, state controlled or state influenced online media for national political leaders. The internet equivalent of state TV and Radio. China leads the world here.

Two, independent online properties. We discussed this earlier in the context of Trump’s options:

Where will the Trump community congregate after the Twitter and Facebook ban?

This Vox article shows how other right-wing personalities like Alex Jones have their own website and online radio show have an audience independent of social media sites. While they also have also suffered in their ability to reach people after being shut out from media platforms, they have survived, even thrived. For Trump, who hasn’t bothered spending any time investing in any platform his own, there is suddenly no way to reach out to his followers. Every political leader, every entertainer, every tech personality has seen this unfold.

Trump may have been the last Twitter megapolemicist, but it’s likely he’s going to run one of the first personal megaplatforms. I’m looking forward to how quickly it happens and what form it takes.

(ends)

[2] The point of this is not about right or wrong. For the record I think Trump’s Twitter account was a disgrace to online decency.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Harald Arlander/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

The last Twitter megapersonality – Part 1

‘Deplatformization’ is now a word in the tech world’s vocabulary. It’s what the Tech Giants did to Donald Trump. First one, then another, and then all of the herd followed last week:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises”.

And just like that, Trump’s vast influence was neutered. This site makes the case that after years of hand-wringing, the tech giants took action simply because it had become clear that Trump no longer held political power:

For years Facebook and Twitter were unwilling to enforce their own rules against those inciting violence, in fear of upsetting a substantial part of their userbase… Not only is this [deplatformization] too little too late, but needs to be understood as an admission of complicity… Could it be that after the electoral shake-up what used to be an asset became a liability?

One of the mega trends we explore repeatedly on this site is that of Audience as Capital. You can’t discuss that trend without recognizing the fantastic power now held by social media companies which, if user bases were populations, would be the world’s largest countries:

  • Facebook itself: over 2.5 billion active users
  • Youtube: over 2 billion
  • Whatsapp (Facebook): over 2 billion
  • Instagram (Facebook): well over 1 billion
  • Wechat: ~1 billion
  • Tiktok: ~800 million
  • Twitter: ~300 million
  • Linkedin: over 300 million

Add to this Google Play Store with about 2.5 billion users on Android and Apple’s App Store with over 1.5 billion iOS devices controlling app distribution. They took the right-wing-dominated social network Parler offline.

Further add to this Amazon’s dominance of online commerce, Stripe’s of online payment acceptance, the decades-old Visa-Mastercard duopoly of payments processing [1], and Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform’s cornering of the internet applications, including such basic internet plumbing as DNS. AWS took Parler’s infrastructure down too.

We have never before seen such global concentration of attention and distribution.

[1] Not to mention local leaders: China Unionpay and India’s Rupay

(Part 2: so what’s the future?)

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Willian Justen de Vasconcellos/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Where will the Trump community congregate after the Twitter and Facebook ban?

From the viewpoint of Twitter, Facebook, Shopify and potential other social media/commerce services, banning and suspending Trump’s account makes sense. It is pretty straightforward for these services to make the case that his posts/tweets violate their terms of service [1].

I’m stuck by how quickly and totally Trump’s influence has been curtailed. His options are now
(a) White House press releases, which he has until the week after next
(b) the group chat app Parler that is popular with the fringe right, but which was also banned by Google Play and has been given notice by Apple’s App Store,
(c) various subreddits, but Reddit has already suspended most of the popular ones
(d) other potential social networks (including, say, the group messaging app Telegram)
(e) his email lists
(f) his own website

Only with his email lists and his own website is Trump fully in control. [2] Perhaps he could set up his own Twitter-like social network on his site with Mastodon. He could set up discussion forums on his site with Vanilla Forums or Discourse. All of this over and above built-in comments on his blog. It is likely that sooner or later Trump or an organisation linked closely to him will set up this sort of infrastructure.

But what he gets back in terms of control he loses in terms of distribution. Anyone who engages with Trump and his community on this website and forums is someone who has joined for that specific reason. No one other than news reporters covering Trump and his network will join.

With an account on broad-based social networks like Twitter, your ‘viral’ messages find their way into the feeds of people who have nothing to do with you. In this way, at least, Twitter works for you, distributing your message in a way that optimises for discovery of your account. You don’t need to pull people in; the platform pushes them to you.

This optimisation is one the most common criticisms of social networks – with an algorithmically picked feed, at its best, you discover new interests, make new friends, understand things better. But at its worst, your feed makes you more anxious, causes more outrage, causes you to be more polarised than you otherwise would be. This is how polemical figures like Trump gain both followers and detractors.

What’s important is that both sides are equally important to his popularity. And there’s an inherent danger in having only supporters on a platform.

On Twitter (and Reddit/Facebook), there have probably been hundreds of thousands of online fights between supporters and detractors of Trump. However ugly they may have been, they have served as an outlet for rage and hatred, a valve for emotional steam stirred up by Trump and TV channels.

For a while, I imagine these online squabbles will continue. But if and when Trump or an entity aligned with him sets up their own online infra like we discussed above, it’s going to be an echo chamber that surpasses subreddits like /r/the_donald or on the chat app Parler. Some of the frenzy may be let out on social media, but the risk is that the majority will play out in the real world.

This is the main second-order risk I see with a ban on Trump’s social media presence. I’m not sure we’ve understood this, leave alone acknowledged it.

[1] Whether it was too late, or whether they enforce these rules arbitrarily or selectively is another debate, and not this site’s focus.

[2] That is, as long as he uses his own infrastructure for them, as opposed to something like Substack for email and a wordpress.com site, which could both be turned off.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Nareeta Martin/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital The Dark Forest of the Internet

The hijacking of subcultures

A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.

The sociopaths [when they show up in a subculture] quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.

Mops [members of the public; passive consumers of a subculture] are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators. At this stage, they take their pick of the best-looking mops to sleep with. They’ve extracted the cultural capital.

The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay. Somehow, not much of the money goes to creators. However, more of them do get enough to go full-time, which means there’s more product to sell.

– Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution, Meaningness.com
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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Gatekeeping and status-preening

The sociologist and writer Zeynep Tufekci on the reaction that one of her conjectures about the covid vaccine rollout received:

The third category of reaction, the most interesting from a public sphere point of view, was a version of “how dare I write about this”—given, obviously, that I am not an immunologist or a vaccine expert.

– Maybe Freedom is Having No Followers to Lose

She surmises about how the innate need for in-group and out-group identification is magnified first by social media and then further in uncertain times like this pandemic. But to me the most interesting part is at the end, which is also what the title of her post, is about when, on applying for an academic job, she heard back only either from the very top institutions or the bottom. Of the latter, she says

… the episode also gave me an appreciation for the ones with nothing to lose… They were in many ways the outsiders, but they didn’t have as many chips on their shoulders because they weren’t playing the game in the first place. They weren’t weighed down with the status-climbing because they didn’t have a chance. They were free. In many ways, the open nature of status-climbing efforts on social media has taken away some of that freedom and reconfigured it, and how to recognize its distorting effects is worth thinking about.