Category: The Dark Forest of the Internet

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 2

(Part 1)

But it means so much more to be a viable alternative to the internet giants of today, particularly with regard to being a good steward of public information and interpersonal communication.

Imagine a neutral paid subscription service for the following:

  • Contacts, calendar, reminders/todos
  • Documents
  • Notes
  • Photos

Now imagine that neutral service expanding to include

  • A secure email service and client a la Protonmail
  • A private 1:1 and group messaging service a la Telegram
  • A private video-calling service – there is no good privacy oriented provider today. Telegram has claimed it will add video support later in 2020
  • Collaborative documents, such as that available with NextCloud Hub if you self-host

Let’s talk about self-hosting. Mozilla could improve upon the Nextcloud concept to bundle domain, hosting and productivity/communications right out of the box. We saw a few months ago how web hosting companies could be the new internet giants if only they could be more imaginative of their own role in the internet. Mozilla could be that web host.

The arc of awareness is bending inexorably towards a substitute to the centralised web that came to characterise the 2010s.

Tight bundling of PIM, media and messaging on mobile leaves little room for a third party. Microsoft has tried to be it, but has little to offer by way of differentiation. Mozilla on the other hand has a clear positioning – and two decades of delivering on its promises. It doesn’t need to win the majority of phone users today – it can count on a minority that cares growing into a plurality.

(Part 3 – Mozilla seems rather far from that vision today)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 1

Mozilla recently announced that it’d be laying off a quarter of its workforce. This also includes a “new focus on technology” and “a new focus on economics”.

The Verge’s article has the Mozilla Corp CEO say “… Mozilla will initially focus on products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.”, although I cannot find that in the blog post she authored.

In the original blog post, the CEO stated that Mozilla’s long-term goal was “to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products.”, which is neither here nor there.

I think Mozilla has a huge opportunity here, but its vision, at least as articulated publicly, is not broad enough.

The opportunity I see is the following: there is a growing section of people who have become aware, through increased press coverage, of the dominance of a few american internet companies and their own dependence on these companies [1]. They aren’t going to be Stallman-like in their use of technology any time soon – the trade off is far too unfavourable – but they are looking for reasonable alternatives and are willing to pay for them. Baker the CEO has said exactly this, that Mozilla plans to “build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech.”

Well to begin with, Mozilla should create a set of paid privacy-oriented products that anyone can setup on their phone to attain a basic level of privacy protection: the Firefox browser (exists), a VPN (available in a small set of countries), an DNS-sinkhole adblocker, a password manager and a second-factor authenticator app. They’ll need great documentation and guides about how to set this up – in this regard the Mozilla community is a great asset.

[1] See the reporter Kashmir Hill’s 2019 attempt to go a month and a half without services from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

(Part 2 – It gets even bigger)

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Communities

We discussed the coming explosion of independent publishers in a large number of niches that combine content, community and commerce.

Steading a community is different from having a large number of followers. The former venture capitalist Li Jin describes the hallmarks of a true community:

I believe the following need to be present: high intentionality, P2P interactions, & UGC content.

1) Intentionality: Members seek out the community as a destination, not just as part of a broader platform’s feed

2) P2P interactions: Strong engagement and ties between members

3) UGC content: Members contribute content vs. just engaging w/ what’s broadcasted to them

Just like a publisher’s content can be across a site, Instagram, Twitter, newsletter, a YouTube channel, the corresponding communities can exist in a variety of places. 

The journalist Jon Russel, currently of The Ken, runs his own group on Telegram that, as of this writing, has over five hundred and seventy members. 

The writer Jacob Lund Fisker‘s Early Retirement Extreme community runs as a bulletin board. 

Azeem Azhar runs both his newsletter and his community on Substack using Substack’s discussion threads feature named, well, Community. Here is an example paid newsletter issue with its community.

Many others run private Slack groups. 

Interesting to me is that these communities are almost all off the public web and in the dark forests of the Internet, not indexable by Google and other search engines. As Li Jin describes above, truly vibrant communities may form because of a common interest in the publisher’s content, but it is their discussion that adds the most value. Their not being open to the internet if what engenders their openness.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 2

(Part 1)

In his piece ‘Never-ending Niches‘, the writer Ben Thompson articulates in a new way some points we have discussed before in the context how the Internet has opened up exponential opportunities for people to build powerful micro-brands. In this post we look at one of these points.

So it was with the Internet and the trade-off between reach and time: suddenly every single media entity on earth, no matter how large or small, and no matter its medium of choice, could reach anyone instantly. To put it another way, reach went to infinity, and time went to zero…

… there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human interest stories that had the potential of going viral. Both approaches, though, favored media entities with the best cost structures, not the best content, a particularly difficult road to travel given the massive amounts of content on the Internet created for free.

That left a single alternative: going around Google and Facebook and directly to users.

Old Media relies on paid social for reach and discovery. 21st Century Media relies on organic social. Old Media gamifies sharing on social and on dark forests. 21st Century Media is shared because it speaks directly to readers’ interests.

Put another way, Old Media optimises for reach and hopes that will create a relationship. 21st Century Media optimises for relationships because it knows that will create its own reach.

This reminds me strongly of the upside-down funnel that the cofounder of the email service Mailchimp described seven years ago:

What he describes is, in a nutshell, what drives independent publishers:

When you start a business, you don’t have a budget for marketing. You probably don’t have the time or talent for it, either. The only thing you’ve got is your passion. That damned, trouble-making passion that suckered you into starting your business in the first place. Take that passion and point it at your customers.

(Part 3 – a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of direct-to-consumer companies)

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

For newsletters to become the new blogs, discovery is the missing piece

The last couple of posts described why online archival of sites and blogs is something I’m interested in. Specifically, the web is getting old, domains expire, blog hosting services change. That reminded me of this article from 2013 by the blogger Jason Kottke:

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.

Kottke himself is one of the Internet’s most well-known, longest-published bloggers, having written for twenty-two years running, with well over ten of those full-time. But his essay highlighted a trend that has continued unabated. There are more people writing online than ever before, but that has increasingly been on closed platforms like Medium.

The trend around newsletters is encouraging. We have talked before of how major journalists moving to their own newsletters could even spawn a wave of independent, reader-supported journalism. There are many hundreds of high-quality newsletters now, to the point where discovering them is going to be an issue. There is no good search/browse/recommend for newsletters yet.

Newsletters are email, a technology much older than the web itself. But they’re easier to keep track of someone’s writing than a blog. RSS and RSS Readers never really caught one because it was one more piece of software readers had to use, but everyone has an email inbox. For the writer, publishing an email is as simple as, probably simpler than publishing a blog post.

The downside is discovery – where do you find interesting things people are writing?

Discovery is going to particularly important if newsletters are to thrive as an easy means of causal writing and distribution for the average person – because while newsletters have been around from very early on in the form of people just mailing a group of friends and growing organically from there, the latest wave of newsletter services typefied by the venture-funded Substack for who monetization is an important goal. That changes what the service optimizes discovery and promotion for: newsletters about topics that are ‘current’, that have the highest chance of conversion to paid, and not the long tail. It starts looking like other Silicon Valley businesses:

Arguably, it’s another example of money and prestige coming for an internet-age creative format that was better when it was a hush-hush community activity—non-remunerative, an anti-discovery algorithm, full of in-speak, artistically strange (see: podcasts, blogs, fan fiction, memes).

Without discovery, newsletters aren’t going to replace social media as the place most people share what’s interesting to them. Nevertheless, they remain an extremely hopeful medium for independent, direct-to-reader journalism.

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Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Everything is an identity war

This well-known 11-year-old essay from the investor Paul Graham advocates keeping your personal identity small because

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities…

If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible

This is even more true today with social media having become pervasive since then, and the media much more polarised and polarising. There are vastly more things beyond politics, sports, religion, automobiles (and, sadly, today, science) that you can unconsciously weave into your identity. Beyond even iOS and Android: your email app. Your Twitter client. Your method of brewing coffee. Your food delivery service. Even stocks: long Tesla or short Tesla? Or cryptocurrencies. A tech personality: Musk or Dorsey or Bezos or Ambani or Jack Ma. A viral Medium essay. Notion vs Roam Research.

Very nearly anything can become an identity war.

The hard part is cultivating being detached from these positions emotionally while thinking about and considering them rationally. It starts with being aware of when you begin identifying with something, as opposed to making a conscious decision to adopt or pay for or subscribe to it. That in turn starts with being conscious of the information flows you plug into, and building online networks deliberately.

Categories
Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

Discovery of independent publishers online – Part 2

(Part 1: RSS, Google Reader, Friendfeed, WordPress)

Medium, created by one of Twitter’s founders in 2012 “initially… as a way to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter’s 140-character[s]“, is built around both discovery and publishing. In its early days it appealed to both sides:

In 2014

But having now establised itself as an attractive destination for writers, its home page focuses entirely on discovery. Each of the tags points to a Medium collective blog:

As an aside, Medium’s monetization model is somewhat contrived, based on a metric named Member Reading Time, 

As a user reads, we measure their scrolls and take care to differentiate between short pauses (like lingering over a particularly great passage) and longer breaks (like stepping away to grab a cup of coffee). Reading time incorporates signal from your readers without hurdles. You don’t need to ask your readers to remember to clap, or click, or do anything other than read.

It is a bold take, but does not inspire confidence.

This is in contrast to Substack, which allows its publishers to set their own prices and takes a 10% cut plus Stripe’s card processing fees.

Which brings us full circle to Substack’s discovery. Unlike WordPress, Substack’s incentives are in fact aligned with its publishers build a paying audience. But so far it’s followed a WordPress-like publisher-centric positioning. As with most marketplaces, it’s starting with building supply.

This will likely change over time if and when Substack feels confident it has cemented its position as the dominant independent publishing platform.

The big unsolved problem and opportunity is yet a neutral discovery destination of great writing for your specific niche interests, whether that writing is on Substack or Medium or a WordPress hosted or self-hosted blog, or a Threader-collated Twitter thread.

(ends)