Category: Discovery and Curation

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On Writing

For content platforms, revenue and moderation are inextricably interlinked

The newsletter platform Substack, on its revenue model:

A lot of people suppose that we started Substack to be the next big thing in journalism. But what we’re actually trying to do is subvert the power of the attention economy.

When engagement is the holy metric, trustworthiness doesn’t matter. What matters more than anything else is whether or not the user is stirred. The content and behaviors that keep people coming back – the rage-clicks, the hate-reads, the pile-ons, the conspiracy theories – help sustain giant businesses. When we started Substack to build an alternative to this status quo, we realized that a tweak to an algorithm or a new regulation wouldn’t change things for the better. The only option was to change the entire business model.

Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions. With subscriptions, writers must seek and reward the ongoing trust of readers.

Substack does two things differently from typical social platforms: one, by encouraging paid publications, readers pay to receive their information fix, which naturally caps the number of newsletters a person receives and by extensions the attention they capture. Two, it has aligned its revenues with these paid publications. These two by themselves are a significant departure from the norm, for the better.

There is always the likelihood, perhaps the inevitability that deliberately divisive, disingenuous polemical publications will publish on Substack for free, making money off sponsorships instead of reader payments, and they may amass large followings too. And Substack too has declared that they will be light with censorship:

we commit to keeping Substack wide open as a platform, accepting of views from across the political spectrum. We will resist public pressure to suppress voices that loud objectors deem unacceptable.

This will be something that Substack will have to reckon with, and perhaps soon. Yes, apublication with a generous enough sponsor – whether public or not – and a large enough audience is better off simply hosting their own newsletter infrastructure, which is not complicated. But they may also simply continue on Substack. What is the company to do then?

The possible answers are for another time. In any case, Substack’s approach to revenue and moderation, its recognition that they are interlinked, and its willingness to publicly articulate it, is commendable.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Writing

Content may be free but publishers of content can nevertheless be powerful

In a powerful essay that explains the moats that people who publish can create around their work, the reasons behind audience loyalty. This applies to whether the work is writing, video, podcasts or other mediums. I’ve summarised my understanding of the seven points the writer makes:

  1. Scale works differently: Writing has larger fixed costs and relatively low marginal costs, unlike tech businesses of late, which are built around low to zero fixed costs. As a result, investment in quality pays off more than in quantity.
  2. Network effects apply both to content creators as well as to content platforms like social networks, but apply differently. A publisher’s followers build a shared understanding of a small part of the world. At its best, it builds its own subculture.
  3. Publishers with strong points of view that run counter to established narratives are hard for existing players to compete with. Resisting it will fail to retain those who are inherently swayed by it; co-opting it risks alienating incumbents’ very audience
  4. Following naturally from points two and three, once a group of people with a shared interest, opinion and understanding has formed around a person’s published work, it’s hard for them to replicate it elsewhere. In tech terminology, the switching costs are high
  5. The publisher builds a brand that’s clearly identified with what their message is, and that makes it easy for people who’re looking for authority and quality to find them, because the internet’s discovery mechanisms optimise for exactly this.
  6. The publisher’s talent is a scarce resource – as we’ve seen in point one, it’s not easy to build to begin with, and in points two and four, that once built it’s not easy to replicate. And across industries, scarce and desirable resources are valuable.
  7. A final moat is a publisher’s craft, described by the writer as their processes. It’s built up over time and can neither be replicated quickly nor substituted by cash.

There’s significant overlap between them, but then it’s a grab-bag of points, not a framework. Nevertheless, it’s great starting material to understanding your power as a publisher (or ‘content creator’) and creating your own positioning.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Personal Finance Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

Herd mentality

I read recently about the USA investing app Robinhood being charged with “gamifying” investing and not putting in place “proper controls to safeguard inexperienced investors.” I was curious about what gamification techniques the service actually uses. Here’s what I found:

“Robinhood’s Role in the ‘Gamification’ of Investing: QuickTake”, Bloomberg, Dec 2020

Investors are congratulated for their first trade with a confetti animation. They’re offered a (tiny) chance of snagging a share of a high-price glamour stock such as Apple Inc. if they get a friend to sign up. They can browse the 100 most-held stocks among fellow users for inspiration. An entertainment ecosystem has risen up alongside Robinhood; TikTok videos under #robinhoodstocks have millions of views.

“Robinhood’s Addictive App Made Trading a Pandemic Pastime”, Bloomberg, Oct 2020

Robinhood’s app emphasizes social interaction by using the possibility of getting a free share of stock in exchange for inviting friends to sign up. You have a tiny chance of snagging a high-price glamour stock such as Apple Inc., Robinhood says, if your friend signs up and links a bank account. If you find your well of investment ideas running dry—or perhaps don’t know where to start—you can browse the 100 most-held stocks among fellow Robinhood users for inspiration.]

Robinhood and the Gamification of the Stock Market, McGill Business Review, Jul 2020

Through a Candy Crush-esque UX design with additions like confetti showers to celebrate transactions, the app gamifies the stock market, sending millions of bored-in-the-house millennials into a trading frenzy through a seemingly playful environment with dangerously real consequences.

Robinhood Has Gamified Online Trading Into an Addiction, Scott Galloway, Jun 2020

Confetti falls to celebrate transactions.
Colorful Candy Crush interface.
Users can tap up to 1,000x per day to improve their position on the waitlist for Robinhood’s cash management feature (essentially a high-yield checking account on the app).

Designed to distract: Stock app Robinhood nudges users to take risks, NBC News, Sep 2019

When smartphone owners pull up Robinhood’s investment app, they’re greeted with a variety of dazzling touches: bursts of confetti to celebrate transactions, the price of bitcoin in neon pink and a list of popular stocks to trade.

A critique of Robinhood’s gamified interface, Georgetown Collegiate Investors, Aug 2020

For starters, the flashing green and red lights, as well as the confetti, often lead users to act on their emotions instead of keeping a calm and level head. The green lights and confetti serve as subtle but prevalent psychological rewards for users. Likewise, the red numbers on the screen invoke feelings of anxiety and fear that may drive users to make irrational choices.

It’s surprising how over the course of a whole year and more, all the articles criticising Robinhood about its gamified interface don’t go beyond the confetti and a detail-less reference to Candy Crush-like design.

Further, nearly every post I’ve read on this topic follows a familiar narrative: that Robinhood encourages poor investing decisions because it doesn’t charge commissions, that it turns investing into a game, that it is disingenuous about how it makes money (payment for order flow to high-speed trading firms), that a customer once took his life after misinterpreting a large negative balance, quotes from ‘industry experts’ about Robinhood being the vanguard of a disturbing trend towards casual DIY investing. It’s astonishing how similar these articles are.

Ironically, the only post with any more detail and actual screenshots is this one, which praises Robinhood interface:

Robinhood is gamified from the start. They reward users that have just signed up with one free share of a stock, chosen by chance. The app doesn’t simply present the free stock to the user from the beginning. The process is similar to something you’d see at a casino. Users are presented with three blank cards, and are prompted to choose one. When chosen, the card flips and the free stock is revealed, with confetti and all…
The black background and bright primary accent colors are reminiscent of a Pacman game. Red is used when a stock has moved down, and green when a stock is up, creating a sense that the user is winning or losing

Obviously, this isn’t about what I think of Robinhood the service. It’s that the onus of understanding an issue in depth seems to be on the reader. And it doesn’t seem to be practical – the only reason I read over a dozen articles on the specific topic of Robinhood’s gamification of stock investing was because that was what I was curious about. The average reader’s just going to read one of these and form an opinion, unaware that all the other coverage of this issue is identical and narrow.

Ultimately this means that we, as individuals, need to choose carefully what topics we are interested in, since, as we’ve seen, the quality of online coverage leaves the duty of diligence to us. And finally, curators will almost certainly become even more important, moving beyond their role as tastemakers and influencers to shapers of world-views.

[Addition 5 Jan 2021] The clearest description of Robinhood’s techniques to drive impulse-based purchases is from a Twitter thread. If you are at all curious about what Robinhood’s gamification means, read through this:

https://twitter.com/petershk/status/1344286419380916228?s=20

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Austin Distel/Unsplash)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Today, presence is democratised but discovery is centralised

Demonization of Facebook is now mainstream. And because readers of this site are privacy-conscious, we have previously discussed – without judgement – both the data that Facebook collects and how to minimise that data collection. Today, I read this:

Niche products and publications… can build sustainable businesses with customers across the entire world who have nothing in common except a shared interest in the product or publication in question; or, to put it another way, customers who “lookalike”. That’s the thing about Facebook and other digital advertising companies: they are just as essential a part of growing the GDP of the Internet as are Stripe and Shopify and other companies with universal approval ratings. It is no good to be capable of serving anyone anywhere if they can’t find you.

– Privacy Labels and Lookalike Audiences, Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The post itself is in the context of Apple’s requirement of privacy labels for iOS Apps. But it makes the following point: while those who are conscious of their privacy and their attention may be careful of their use of social media and may avoid Facebook, it is perhaps the most important distribution channel that small businesses have. It is their very data collection that makes (ostensibly) precise targeting possible. If one takes that away, then the business with the biggest advertising budget wins.

The same holds true with regard to Google and discovery through search:

This post from First Round Capital makes the case that a small direct-to-consumer business only really has three ways to sustainably achieve scale: performance marketing, content marketing/SEO, and referrals/virality. While Facebook and Instagram, along with Google’s AdWords, draw the bulk of performance advertising budgets, Google dominates discovery through its search engine. And has done so for nearly twenty years now.

Just like with Facebook, it is because of the vast amounts of data that Google collects about you that a business can reach you precisely through search results on a browser or via Google Assistant or in its personalised news feed in your Google app.

Presence of all sorts – content, commerce, community – has been democratised on the Internet, but discovery of all that is today highly centralised.

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Discovery and Curation Life Design Writing

Outlets for fun and creativity

The founder of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov:

We live in an era when the possibilities for human creativity are endless. One can invent robots, edit genes, design virtual worlds… There are so many exciting unknown areas to explore. I hope that more people will discover the enjoyment of building things for others. I hope that one day we, as a species, will turn away from the self-destructive path of never-ending consumption to a fulfilling journey of creating a better world for ourselves and those around us.

I think he is mixing two messages up. Most of his post is about the ills of the unsustainable, mindless consumption of food and goods typical of the Western world. Somewhere in the post is a mention of his realisation that “the most rewarding kind of occupation is creating things, not consuming them” which led him to create the Telegram project. He seems to have combined both of these messages to make a value judgement about consumption and creation in general.

I have a different, more positive take on this.

We have spoken often about consumption in the context of content, for instance the mindless scrolling through social media. While it’s important to be mindful of and reduce that sort of consumption, it’s also important to create outlets for self-expression other than like and retweet/share that are built into social media. Your own blog. Or newsletter. Or topic-specific Twitter account. Or a public Notion page to which you keep adding. Or a YouTube channel. The possibilities are endless today.

Then as you consume vigorously, indulging multiple interests and spanning different mediums – music, podcasts, writing, streaming video, chat groups – you express to the world the best of them, and your thinking about them.

I came to this realisation late, but I have taken this to heart.

Taken together, these projects don’t cover all of my interests, and don’t even begin to approach the Telegram founder Pavel’s references to building robots and editing genes. Instead they are a set of fun, lightweight outlets for me to express idle and structured thoughts and reactions as I read, watch and listen to things I discover and like.

Categories
Discovery and Curation The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Applying anti-smoking techniques to content addiction

(via Kottke.org)

This writer tried the usual techniques to kick her phone addiction – turning off notifications, deleting apps, tracking usage, using apps to block usage, going cold turkey – none of it worked. Then she turned to a technique people use to quit smoking – one of the hardest addictions to kick. From the book she read:

… there is a huge disconnect between what we want and what we actually enjoy. They’re different neurological processes. That’s why you can desperately crave, for example, an entire blueberry cheesecake, but when you actually eat it, it’s only OK… He tells smokers to pay attention to their next cigarette. It’s like mindfulness but for noticing the unpleasantness. How does it taste? Not, “how did you imagine it would taste when you were craving it,” but how does it actually taste?

When the writer tried it with her phone consumption,

I paused and paid attention to my body. Do I feel better than I did 30 seconds ago, or worse? Inevitably, it was worse. My brain felt frazzled and crunched up. My body felt more tense and defensive. The experience had been a net loss… The more I really paid attention to the reality of how much I “liked” checking my phone, the easier it became to resist the impulse.

It’s fortuitous I should come across this. As I’ve been going through my second 30-day Reddit isolation, I have realised that I do enjoy browsing the site, but I pass from happiness to mindlessness pretty quickly, without realising it. Quitting entirely is a net negative, but so is consumption without self-awareness – I’m working on understanding what that transition point is for me.

(Featured image photo credit: Lawless Capture/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 3

(Part 2)

My Morning Routine is an website we have referred to once or twice on this site. It describes itself as

… a retired independent online magazine that published a brand new, inspiring morning routine every Wednesday between December 2012 and July 2019.

It’s unfortunate that they aren’t publishing new interviews this year, or even updates to existing one. It’d be interesting to see how people’s routines changed in the new work-from-home world in 2020. What would it say about those whose routines had not changed much?

Their last published routine in July 2019 featured this:

I view the first few hours of the day as “free,” unclaimed time. If I don’t use it deliberately, I’ll squander it on email or Twitter or the news or some other mindless timesuck that doesn’t make me feel good. Plus, I’ve learned that my focus is better in the morning than it is later in the day; I want to make good use of that time.

This resonated with me, because even last year it revealed an awareness of the need to claim time for yourself, however you then choose to spend it.

We had discussed the question of how in my post about stretching out time:

We can choose to restart an interest of ours. Re-engage with communities and groups we’ve fallen out of touch with. Start a new hobby we’ve always liked but didn’t know if it’d stick. Pursue our physical and mental well-being. Join a local cause. Whatever it looks like for each of us. And do it for no reason than because we can.

The writer Shawn Blanc takes it to an extreme by scheduling every minute of his life (or at least he did, in 2016):

I used to think a schedule meant I’d never get to have fun. Because if you’re scheduling your time then you should only put Super Duper Important things on your schedule.

Well, I do only schedule Super Duper Important things. I just have a smarter definition of Super Duper Important.

Did you know I schedule time to watch Netflix? I schedule time for a mid-day nap if I want. Time to read for an hour and a half in the middle of the afternoon. Time to take my wife out for dinner once a week. Time to go running at the gym. Time to play trains with my kids. Time to have lunch with a friend. Time to help my wife with dinner. Time to write for as long as I can handle in the morning.

In fact, by scheduling every minute of my day, I help make sure I do all the things I want to do — for work and for play.

(Part 4 follows tomorrow)

(Featured image photo credit: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 1

In my post earlier this month, we saw how you can make time stretch longer while also improving its quality:

Living deliberately is making an active choice in how to spend one’s time – and, over weeks, months and years – one’s life… Fewer hours just slip by. Days begin to look different. Milestones emerge. Memories form. A narrative forms about how we spent October or November. Time crystallises, no longer disappearing through a sieve.

This year – and who knows how much longer – a combination of less structured days and ubiquitous entertainment from our devices means it’s easy to fill up time outside of our commitments via endless consumption. It’s not just easy, it’s the default way we’ll spend our time.

This year the severe curtailing of face-to-face meetings outdoors means that we’ve moved to messaging to keep in touch. With all of its upsides, messaging with a bunch of people all days takes – all day. It’s less efficient than a conversation, it means day-long interruptions via notifications, and unlike a catch-up, has no defined beginning and end.

Added to this, we have an abundance of apps that have been designed to hold our attention: notifications, pull to refresh, gamification with streaks, guilting through use of language, ‘smart’ defaults like auto-loading the next episode, and a myriad of others. It’s hard to say no. The minutes and hours add up: go to either iOS’s Screen Time or Android’s Digital Wellbeing Dashboard to see how long you spend on your devices, and how often you pick them up.

Further layer on top of this the end of any boundary between work time and ‘life’ time. Despite increased flexibility for the most part, not only are we starting work early but are also less and less putting a firm end to it.

The common theme across these is the blurring of boundaries.

(Part 2 follows tomorrow)

(Featured image photo credit: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

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

The reinstatement of youtube-dl

Context: we had discussed last month how GitHub had taken down the code and binaries for the youtube-dl project, a tool that can be used to download videos from YouTube and a variety of other sites, and how and why it was a travesty.

In a post written by the company’s director of platform policy, the code-hosting platform said the following:

The youtube-dl takedown notice fell into a more unusual category: anticircumvention—an allegation that the code was designed to circumvent technical measures that control access or copying of copyrighted material, in violation of Section 1201 of the DMCA.

Section 1201 dates back to the late 1990s and did not anticipate the various implications it has for software use today. As a result, Section 1201 makes it illegal to use or distribute technology (including source code) that bypasses technical measures that control access or copying of copyrighted works, even if that technology can be used in a way that would not be copyright infringement. Circumvention was the core claim in the youtube-dl takedown.

Establishing that, the post then goes on to state that in their opinion, the youtube-dl project did not circumvent technical measures:

Although we did initially take the project down, we understand that just because code can be used to access copyrighted works doesn’t mean it can’t also be used to access works in non-infringing ways.

Then, after we received new information that showed the youtube-dl project does not in fact violate the DMCA‘s anticircumvention prohibitions, we concluded that the allegations did not establish a violation of the law.

This new information came through a letter sent by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s attorney [PDF] to GitHub. This is the highlight of the whole story for how well it explains what youtube-dl does and does not do. Quoting from the letter, not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the letter:

when a user requests certain YouTube videos, YouTube’s servers send a small JavaScript program to the user’s browser, embedded in the YouTube player page. That program calculates a number referred to as “sig.” That number then forms part of the Uniform Resource Locator that the user’s browser sends back to YouTube to request the actual video stream. This mechanism is completely visible to the user simply by viewing the source code of the player page. The video stream is not encrypted, and no secret knowledge is required to access the video stream… Importantly, youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies, such as Widevine, that are used by subscription video sites, such as Netflix

We presume that this “signature” code is what RIAA refers to as a “rolling cipher,” although YouTube’s JavaScript code does not contain this phrase. Regardless of what this mechanism is called, youtube-dl does not “circumvent” it as that term is defined in Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because YouTube provides the means of accessing these video streams to anyone who requests them.

To borrow an analogy from literature, travelers come upon a door that has writing in a foreign language. When translated, the writing says “say ‘friend’ and enter.” The travelers say “friend” and the door opens. As with the writing on that door, YouTube presents instructions on accessing video streams to everyone who comes asking for it.

youtube-dl does not violate Section 1201 of the DMCA because it does not “circumvent” any technical protection measures on YouTube videos.

This is wonderfully explained, and the analogy is spot-on.

I do not expect Github’s lawyers to have understood this mechanism when they first received the takedown request from the RIAA, but one would expect them to have discussed this with someone technical at GitHub, who either knew or could have asked the project about this mechanism, and this technical person and the lawyers could have determined that it did not circumvent technical measures. My guess is that in an effort to project neutrality, they did not initially take a stance one way or another. Indeed, the blog post has a short section at the beginning titled “Why did Github process this takedown in the first place?” which doesn’t really address why they went all the way to removing the youtube-dl project if they understood the issue:

As a platform, we must comply with laws—even ones that we don’t think are fair for developers. As we’ve seen, this can lead to situations where GitHub is required to remove code—even if it has a multitude of non-infringing uses—if it is in fact designed to circumvent a TPM. But this is exceedingly rare. 

I think it’s the EFF’s advocacy, finally in the form of a legal document, that gave GitHub the confidence – or cover – it needed to do the right thing. That combined with the public outcry against this.

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Switching off from alternate realities to focus on the real one

Conviction in your own opinions is tough when you’re exposed to millions of people living in their alternate realities.

The Biden campaign decided that to focus on the ‘actual’ reality – and change it – they’d need to turn off that exposure.

You and I aren’t bringing about massive social change everyday, so we don’t necessarily need to cut ourselves off the way the campaign did. But it’s good to set aside some time during the week thinking about stuff that matters to you – however trivial that might be – independent of what people say about it online.

Alternate realities – Part 1