Category: Discovery and Curation

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Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Work, tools and agency

From the writer Anne Helen Petersen, on “How Work Became An Inescapable Hellhole”:

 Like email, Slack allowed work to spread into the crevices of life where until that point it couldn’t fit. In a more efficient, instantaneous manner than email, it brings the entire office into your phone, which is to say, into your bed, when you land on the plane, when you walk down the street, as you stand in line at the grocery store, or as you wait, half naked, on the exam table for your doctor.

 It didn’t just accelerate communication; it standardized a new, far more addictive form of communication, with a casualness that cloaked its destructiveness. When you “shoot off a few emails” on a Sunday afternoon, for example, you might convince yourself you’re just getting on top of things for the week ahead—which might feeltrue. But what you’re really doing is giving work access to be everywhere you are. 

… the technology writer John Herrman… predicted the ways in which Slack would screw with our conception of work: “Slack is where people make jokes and register their presence; it is where stories and editing and administrating are discussed as much for self-justification as for the completion of actual goals. Working in an active Slack … is a productivity nightmare, especially if you don’t hate your coworkers. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either rationalizing or delusional.”

While I fully agree with tools like Slack breaking down of boundaries between your work sphere and your other spheres, the state of mind that the writer describes is one of a poor pre-existing relationship with work.

It’s important to recognise that the normalisation of remote work and the ubiquity of work tools that are model led on addictive hyper-communicative social media have made this relationship worse, not caused it. Unless you are a bottom-of-the-rung worker drone with no flexibility and no voice, you have the ability, however little, to push back against a 24×7 work culture, a culture that causes enough anxiety that people need to show off their input instead of their output. As the writer herself says,

Many of us still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake. No wonder we spend so much time trying to communicate how hard we work.

If it weren’t for these tools, distributed work would have been much more difficult – in many cases impossible. For those companies that have been distributed for a while, it’s given employees the opportunity to optimise their location and time for their other interests and constraints. It’s lowered the overhead of building and scaling an organisation of people. It’s reduced the friction of communication – just five years ago your only option as a smallish company was email, with long chains, lost contexts and renamed file attachments as some form of version control. Today you’re split for choice with Slack, Google Docs, Trello, Notion, Airtable, Zapier and thousands more tools, free and paid.

But no matter how good they get, they are tools meant to serve us. Never the other way around. Regardless of whether you’re a founder or CEO, part of the leadership, or in some position of authority in the company. Be aware of your relationship to work. Make it easier for the ones whose work time your control to immerse themselves in their other sphere. Push back when people above you intrude into your non-work spheres. It’s not always going to result in you getting fired.

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Discovery and Curation

Why is bigger better?

In this piece titled “What is the measure of a good company?”, in the context of the clothing brand Brooks Brothers having recently filed for bankruptcy:

You could see the race to the bottom as the brand became more and more volume focused… But making great products and having a few great stores wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted volume. Maybe no one stopped to think about the fact that maybe Brooks Brothers wasn’t meant to be a two-billion-dollar brand. J.Crew and GAP do that kind of volume — why would anyone want to end up like that?

All of this comes down to: Why is bigger better? Why does multibillion in sales make your company great? Why is that the goal when you are already rich? Even if I had a few hundred million invested in a business I would feel a lot better about the unlikelihood of doubling it if I were just making great things. 

We went from an era of small local brands upto the 1850s to some 175 years of a few large brands that used global wage arbitrage in their favour – the era of capital as a moat. 

I think over the next few years we’re going to see the era of the long tail of a much laarger number of small, niche brands across all sorts of industries including clothing.

While brands in the previous era created leverage using the global supply chain, those in this era will use the Internet and that same supply chain.

As we have seen in our series on Lienar Commerce, the community-first model will eventually become the norm. This allows brands to thrive while still staying small.

Finally – if the creators of these new era brands are sensitive to and deliver what what the community wants and values, then those brands are likely to be more resilient to pricing pressure from large, more generic brands who have economies of scale in their favour. At its extreme, this may put less pressure on the supply chain and on the incentives to keep wages in third-world-countries as low as possible.

Featured image photo credit: Jezael Melgoza/Unsplash

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Alternate realities – Part 3

(Part 2)

8/ And its why real-world consequences of online behaviour, such as the people jailed for merely like-ing a Facebook post critical of politicians, is distressing. As George on Seinfeld cried, World Are Colliding.

9/ All of this works both ways. Communities of fringe loonies will use the same tools to block you from injecting reason into their online dialogue. And when reporting online harassment results in a real-world arrest we are gladdened.

This is a plot point in several movies or books that involve virtual worlds. They are never fully independent of the physical world, and their interaction with the physical isn’t always sanguine. It’s often the case in the real real world. People have been jailed for writing their mind, for sharing videos in jest, even simply liking Facebook posts – usually pricking the fragile ego of a person in power. Mere anonymity is often not enough. Even when you’re all wearing masks, your virtual town square can be invaded by the real-world Basij.

However benevolent and forward-looking the authorities online may be, they’ll clash with – and usually lose against – authorities in the real world. Just look at Twitter’s transparency report regarding data requests from governments. According to themselves, they complied with four out of every ten such requests. Facebook complied with 3 out of every 4 requests, and nearly 90% of requests from the US and the UK.

10/ In any case, this kaleidoscope theory accommodates more of what we are seeing happening than the more common polarisation theory. It posits that polarisation is a special case of the sharding of reality.

Most reporting frames the problem as one of polarisation – like a dumbbell, there is a concentration of people around two diametrically opposite viewpoints.

This is not new: most of the US’ 20th century relationship with the world outside through the lens of communism versus capitalism, never mind those that didn’t care, didn’t matter, were explicitly non-aligned, or had widely varying interpretations of each economic system. It has resulted in a with-us-or-against-us mindset. If you weren’t a committed communist, you were a capitalist pig. If you weren’t for the Vietnam war, you had to be against it – and therefore unpatrioric. Ditto with the 21st century Iraq occupation. Then it was Christianity versus Islam. Today the country’s much more insular, so it’s supposed to be Democrat versus Republican.

In India you’re either a secular, used as a pejorative term, or a mindless devotee of the Hindu right, never mind what secularism was supposed to mean or the many schools of Hinduism. The definitions of each now form narrow edges meant to cleave.

But online, while the war of polar opposites is fomented and waged, myriad cultures form, thrive and die, each with their own biases and rivalries. For the first time they can exist freely and openly without having to pick sides in someone else’s battle. This freedom is important – so far only the privileged have been able to declare themselves against ‘the world’. Now any group that feels marginalised in real life can do so.

11/ Either way, we’d entered this age of infinite realities sometime in the 2010s. The diminishing of the physical space this year marks an inflection point, when a critical mass of us begins defecting into our online realities and being shaped by their cultures.

The pandemic has cause the diminishing of our real world public spaces, making online ones all that much more important. New types of closed communities hog attention – Houseparty, Clubhouse – and several other similar apps – but the other inevitable shift will be to true public spaces. Today there is little other than Twitter.

It’s going to be fantastic to look back in ten years’ time at the movement of people’s social lives to such online worlds – all run by private entities. In a decade, 2020 is going to seem as quaint as the web of twenty five years go – Lycos, DMOZ, Photobucket, Kozmo – seems today.

End note: The other development we haven’t explored in this series is the increasing popularity of game-oriented virtual worlds like Animal Crossing and Minecraft. They fall somewhere between closed communities like groups & subreddits on the one hand and town squares like Twitter. World-building is more deliberate, more visual, more explicit. But they also provide the same sort of open endedness of Twitter and the creation of communities. In fact, as we have seen, of entire economies.

(end)

Featured image photo credit: William Álvarez/Unsplash

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Alternate realities – Part 2

(Part 1)

5/ The vastness of Twitter is what gives this the scope of a whole reality. A Facebook or Slack group or email list seems closed in comparison, a direct digital analogy of a forum or group meeting. Twitter seems like whole new worlds.

6/ Imagining hundreds of such alternative realities is heartening. This was already true – it’s what we speak of when we speak of VC Twitter, Crypto Twitter, Infosec Twitter. We are now seeing this more evenly distributed.

Twitter is an extraordinary phenomenon, the closest we have to an internet within the Internet. It’s smaller than other social networks, a fraction of Facebook’s size, but its easy publish-subscribe nature gives it a limitless feel that no other comes close to. Twitter’s natural velocity is also faster than, say, Facebook or Instagram. It’s not quite a messaging app, but you don’t see the equivalent of tweet-storms on other networks.

This openness and quickness is a big contributor to multiple subcultures coexisting on the same fabric, and you can plug yourself into any number of them. In its early days Twitter described itself as a giant world-wide town square. It still remains that, and because it’s virtual, you can participate in many simultaneous gatherings in that square, ambiently aware of innumerable such conversations around you. It’s a testament to Twitter’s versatility that it can feel like a vast open space and an echo chamber at the same time.

7/ I think that’s why there’s such pressure on Twitter from its most ardent users for tools to combat trolls and abuse. It’s to keep out those who impinge on their reality.

Social media gets flak for encouraging escape for the real world. This is in fact the Internet’s biggest benefit. Usenet, a precursor of bulletin boards, was among the Internet’s earliest use-cases. When you participated in different usenet groups with their own argot, inside jokes and community cultures, you plugged yourself into alternative realities. The more open the group the faster it grows and at some point generates its own culture. But that same openness leaves it open to interference from what it considers outsiders. It’s easier online than in real life to hijack discussions, brigade entire threads, disrupt a whole group.

How do groups counter this? Groups have moderators, empowered in some manner to enforce conduct that’s been agreed upon. Disrupters can be banned, words and topics can censored, threads can be locked, accounts can be limited to posting only a certain number of messages every hour. With active moderation, the work required to consistently disrupt a group often dwarfs the hoped-for benefit. The group fights off the infection and lives another day. This is how Reddit works.

But Twitter isn’t a group. Consequently, there are no moderators but Twitter itself. This leaves Twitter uniquely vulnerable to harassment, abuse, hate speech, stalking. Because people can retweet with a single tap, the effects of the already devastating act of doxxing – publishing someone’s real-life details like house address, person phone number, children’s names – are magnified. The effects of these are a topic by themselves. But consider the context in which we’re discussing this:

Twitter’s a place where people can be their own selves in an open environment – this combination is what makes it an alternative world. If this world has intruders like above, it’s the equivalent of being accosted by those people in a cafe or a park bench or walking down the street. Because you’re not in a digital bar, there are no bouncers to throw the offending party out. It’s a public space, and police are – until recently – absent.

(Part 3)

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Alternate realities – Part 1

This is an annotated Twitter thread I had posted a little while ago, itself prompted by an excellent thread by Erik Torenberg.

This is my thread, with the same text and commentary right below:

1/ In his thread Erik says (among other things) that multiple parallel hyper-realistic online worlds made possible by Twitter gives demagogues attention leverage never possible in the 20th c. They can perpetuate their existence creating online simulacra of majority-oppression without having to deliver on chaos. But…

Small decentralised foreign teams can manipulate opinion en masse, as the 2016 American national election proved. We’d have imagined this would be done through damage to communications infrastructure, but these teams sabotaged, not wrecked, the tools people use everyday. Or more traditionally, certain events would have been made to happen, benefiting one or the other political side. Instead, these teams constantly magnified and spun multiple small events to create an alternative reality. It make it easy for those who wanted to believe to believe. Taking to its extreme, many people online now perennially consume outrage porn. Warfare has changed and we don’t know it yet.

2/ … I think the ability to create an alternative reality and subculture is also freeing, empowering in a way. Any shared national narrative of the past was foisted upon people by whatever small set controlled TV and print media.

I remember reading a couple of years an article on how decadal cultures like “the 80s” and “the 90s” don’t exist for the 2000s and 2010s as each of us has plugged into our own online cultures. Since online cultures evolve faster than mass media ones, generations form faster too. Consider the Xennials, a ‘micro-generation’ that I fall squarely in the middle of, who identify with neither of the successive generations labelled GenX and Millennial.

(Part 2)

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Data Custody Discovery and Curation

“Notion is eating the web” – Part 5

(Part 4 – A Notion-hosted site I built)

The catch is that, quite simply, it’s a closed system and a closed format. And while you can point your domain to it, it’s also not something you host. Your data and your business is at risk if you’re locked out of your Notion account, or if Notion’s systems are breached. If Notion begins to charge for public hosting or removes/restricts its free plan, you’ll incur costs just like your self-hosted WordPress installation, but without any of the control. This isn’t specific to Notion, but it is definitely applicable to it.

This is the problem with no-code systems and tools in general. The reduction in friction is almost always at the cost of control over data. In this case, you can in theory keep a local copy of all the data you put into Notion – I have all of the icons, the photographs, the text in Markdown, tables in CSV. But the value of Notion isn’t in the data. It’s in the meta-data. It’s in its ability to organise my coffee-related data and text on the same page. To create galleries out of simple tabular data. To make it possible for me to organise my coffee database for myself and offer that same database to the world via the web. It would just not be the same for me to create HTML pages – open format – of each of the roasts and brew methods, to link to different brew methods from roast pages and vice verse. HTML is a linked graph. Notion is databases. There is value in those roast <> brew method relationships.

I’d love to see WordPress implement a version of this. With the Gutenberg publishing system, it has already taken a block-oriented approach like Notion has.

If one of those blocks can be a database – not just a table – of WordPress pages, it could transform what a WordPress site could be.

(ends)

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation

“Notion is eating the web” – Part 4

(Part 3 – how Notion changes the game when it comes to easily creating flexible, data-rich web page)

The best way to learn a tool is to use it to solve an actual problem.

I’d given Notion a try a couple of times when it was much newer. When they dropped an important limitation on the free plan, I tried it once again, but I still didn’t really get it. More recently, I read, this time in detail, an extraordinary profile of Marie Poulin, who uses Notion to organise several aspects of her life, capturing and displaying detailed personal data. It’s at that point that something clicked. Everything was a database, and the entire proposition of Notion was displaying that data in any number of different ways.

Now I have been working with a friend to create a website and a community around coffee – specifically, people in India who brew their own coffee. The hypothesis is that there are hundreds of such people across the country not, but there’s no destination for all of them to share their journeys, experiences, questions. We wanted to start by sharing our own favourite roasts, cafes, brew methods, roasters, articles, and take it from there. Content → Community → Commerce, like we have seen before in our series on Linear Commerce.

I defaulted to WordPress for this project. I already pay for hosting for this site and have WordPress set up. The idea was to turn it into a multi-site installation and have the domain point to the coffee site’s wordpress. This was exactly what I did over oneweekend. We had written content for the site’s About page, so that went up. And stalled. It wasn’t simple to create a gallery of the roasts, roasters and brew methods that I had wanted us to get started with. Even with Elementor and its Gallery widget – it was just too clunky.

That was where I was at when I re-read the Poulin article. It took me a single weekend on Notion and fewer hours than I had spent on WordPress to create exactly what I had wanted. Not just the setup – all the content too.

This is the Notion site as it stands today. It’s an early public draft and we work on it nearly every day. Notion makes it simple to add a lot of data easily. Because there’s no edit mode, any changes we make to content or layout are available to the public immediately.

Made and published entirely on Notion

(Part 5 – What’s the catch?)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation

“Notion is eating the web” – Part 2

(Part 1 – People are using Notion for all sorts of stuff)

Now Google Docs has long had the ability to publish a document to the web. Over five yers ago when I ran the consumer banking business at the payments company Citrus Pay, I published job descriptions as public Google Docs documents. The URL didn’t matter because they were going to be linked to from job boards and WhatsApp groups, and I wrapped them in a URL shortener in any case.

More recently I used a set of public Evernote pages to rapidly prototype some web content that the Cube Wealth app linked to. It took the team minutes to create and publish – web pages would have taken hours.

It’s not fancy, but it did exactly what it was supposed to do – present information about the fund clearly

Both of these examples worked well because the focus was the content, not the appearance. In fact, the simpler the layout of the page, the more effective the page.

But in terms of content, both are both ultimately document-oriented tools. They are built on the printer-era Microsoft Word model – even Evernote. They’re adequate for publishing long-form single-column simply-formatted text, with images and links embedded [1].

Which means they fall short when you want to use them for other, more capable web properties. You need another tool that maintains the tight feedback loop between editing and publishing, but adds flexibility in layout and in displaying other types of content beyond text.

(Part 3 – Notion)

[1] Evernote excels not in its display of output but in the ease of getting information in and making it organisable and searchable.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation

“Notion is eating the web” – Part 1

This tweet and the replies to it have a number of excellent examples of people using Notion to host public-facing properties on the web.

https://twitter.com/schlaf/status/1299123331606679552

Landing pages, about pages, job descriptions, libraries, portfolios, manuals, roadmaps, dashboards. This tweet thread linked to in the replies has another list of use cases with examples, including the ones above:

Some months ago we wrote about Notion as an example of a general-purpose software that optimised for nothing, and therefore was suboptimised for everything. This technically holds true.

The Notion then is still the Notion of today. But the norm around what constitutes a website has changed.

WordPress page editors like Elementor and Oxygen are fantastic, feature-rich WYSIWIG tools with which you can create highly customised pages on your site. But they are high-input, high-output tools. For sites where content and speed are more important than form, they are overkill. Even a vanilla WordPress.com site with pages may be too much overhead.

(Part 2 – So we move on to other sorts of tools)

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Discovery and Curation Product Management

Understand your search; search to understand

A blogger describes their “best SEO tactic so far”

The single most successful strategy I’ve found for getting search engine traffic for a more niche site has been to pay very close attention when something is difficult to find online. This isn’t very difficult to do, since it’s easy to notice when something is frustrating. The key is to be aware and take notes.

Look at your browser history and write down the exact queries you typed…

… after you’ve learned what you were trying to learn during your frustrating search, create the very thing you were trying to find… Make your own version of the resource you finally found, but fix whatever issue made it difficult to find.

This strategy tends to be stable because it works with the search engine and doesn’t tend to get crushed by updates the way more aggressive techniques do. It leads to creating genuinely helpful resources for people to find online and Google has every incentive to return them in its results.

Content created this way tends to rank well because the entire strategy revolves around escaping competition.

This is less a tactic or a hack than the essence of SEO – literally optimising for what people are searching for. No wonder it is resilient to search algorithm updates – it’s not optimising for the algo. It goes straight to the human.

This made me think of what I learnt at some point when building direct to consumer products. When talking to your customers, pay attention to the terms they use to describe their problem or their current solution.

Often the designer or copywriter will use ‘industry’ terms on the site, in literature or within the product, because those are what the team uses to communicate with each other internally. You’ve probably noticed this yourself as a customer when you’ve called a helpline.

This is why it’s important for you, as a product manager, to handle customer support and have product-market-fit conversations regularly. Understanding words, phrases your customers use helps make your product more relatable, more human and ultimately more attractive in an environment saturated with options and alternatives.