Category: Discovery and Curation

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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.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation

Anker and value-signalling

I ordered a USB-C to USB-A braided cable, and it arrived today. I picked Anker despite it costing a little more than twice as much as the equivalent AmazonBasics cable because it – Anker – has a reputation for good quality products.

I wasn’t prepared for just how good.

The cable comes in a small suede pouch that not only has a velro loop to keep the cable in place but also a tiny magnet stitched within to keep the pouch shut:

The packaging itself makes multiple references to customer support, encouraging you to get in touch with them if you have a problem. The tiny card has ‘Happy?’ and ‘Not Happy’ halves.

The pouch has made sure that this cable is always going to be the one I toss into my bag among other USB-C ➝ USB A cables. And when it comes to buying future cables, there’s a good chance I’m going to spring for the one that encourages me and makes it easy to contact it there’s ever a problem.

More broadly, the whole package is a powerful example of signalling of value. It’s a commodity market – we’re talking cables here. But the message I receive loud and clear is that this is a company that cares about quality and stands behind it, that anything I buy from it will be long-lasting and won’t harm my devices.

The cable costs Anker more to make than the other cheaper cables do. And by adding just a little extra to those costs through the pouch and the paper card, the company’s able to set itself far apart from the alternatives, potentially charging a much higher markup than its competitors while also building loyalty.

After all, it’s a cable today; it’ll be other higher-priced products tomorrow.

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Solitude

In the book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, the author writes about solitiude

“Solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you… a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”

It means not simply being alone, but being alone with your thoughts. So watching TV or Netflix, reading a book or articles, listening to music or a podcast, even if alone, do not count as solitude – your mind is still receiving, as the author says, “input from other minds”.

It’s when one makes this distinction that one typically realises that such moments of solitude are rare, if they occur at all during a day. But this is also when one’s brain actively processes all the information it has consumed or been exposed to during the day – sleep being the only other time, and one is not really conscious then.

Typical of the work-hard-play-hard culture that’s become the norm, our antidote to total absorption in work or socialising has become meditation. While not at all a bad thing, it is as extreme a disconnection from work & play as our work & play itself has become. The big ocean between them is simply spending time not actively doing stuff – whether it is simply sitting or going on a walk. As part of the 30-day Reddit-Twitter isolation I’m going to resist the temptation to simply fill the time with more books, and try to spend some time by myself.

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Warfare has changed and we don’t know it yet

Written nearly two years ago, the blogger and writer Venkatesh Rao makes the case that the rules of engagement for warfare have changed from attacks on physical infrastructure to manipulation of information. That the nature of the attackers has changed, their objectives have changed – from destruction of assets to hijacking of opinion and emotions, and that governments in particular and society in general has not yet fully understood this:

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for;

[But] In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

We know this is coming, and yet we’re doing very little to get ahead of it. No one is responsible for getting ahead of it.

He draws the analogy to the infamously ineffective Maginot Line built by the French in the 1920s, for future WW1-style attacks that left the Ardennes forest unprotected because it was thought to be impenetrable.

Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem, and attempt to engage in good-faith debate about whether moderation is censorship… The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem

Powerfully,

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation.

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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)

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Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Discovery of independent publishers online – Part 1

Substack, the newsletter platform, is going to need a discovery engine. As it becomes increasingly popular as a publishing service, discovery becomes both a problem and an opportunity.

Substack “readership and writership has doubled there in the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic.” according to its CEO. 

This made me think about discovery of indepdendent publishers. 

RSS, the original pub-sub standard, had no discovery built in, primarily because it was the web. 

Google Reader had your social graph as a result of Gmail, and towards the end of its short life ended up with some good social discovery:

Friendfeed took that further. You could link a wide wide variety of social accounts to your own Friendfeed account, giving your friends a single destination to ‘follow’ you. People could mix and match friend feeds. In fact, you could even create a ‘shadow’ profile for people who weren’t on Friendfeed. It was a loss for both the social and the open internet when FF sold itself to Facebook.

Regardless, both Google Reader and Friendfeed were both near-social discovery services.

Today Feedly is the dominant RSS sync – and reader – service. Even today, Feedly’s discovery seems like an afterthought compared to its fairly well built subscription and reading capabilities:

And while Flipboard does support RSS – you can, as far as I know, add and follow an RSS feed into the app, it’s hardly one of the top publishing platforms for independent publishers, and its discovery is very broad, but also very shallow. 

I really want WordPress to succeed as a discovery service. They’re a great way for an independent publisher to start a blog. But I think their positioning is somewhat muddled with regard to discovery. It’s up-front-and-center in their mobile apps, which I would imagine a blog writer would use to publish on the go, not read.

But on their website it’s virtually hidden. 

Part of the reason for WordPress’ ambivalnce about pushing discovery is that its business model doesn’t involve intermediating the relationship between publishers and readers. It’s clear it views itself as a blogging platform, and its paid plans have entirely to with with added features for publishers. There are few incentives to actively increase audiences for their publishers.

(Part 2: The new generation: Medium and Substack)

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Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Real-World Crypto

On the coverage of cryptocurrency in India

The Economic Times reported that “A note has been moved (by the finance ministry) for inter-ministerial consultations” regarding a legal framework for cryptocurrency. 

Other news sites (Bloomberg, MoneyControl, MoneyLife, ) have published their own articles, all citing the Economic Times. Naturally, the crypto press has picked up on the same story overseas. To the casual news reader, the ban is now inevitable.

The only piece of actual news in the ET article, though, is that a note has been drafted by the finance ministry for inter-ministerial discussions on a legal framework for cryptocurrency in India. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything beyond this is speculation.

This has led to these articles being shared on social media over and over with similar speculative discussion. It’s another example of today’s media’s SOP to use sensation to drive page views, as we have seen in the series on 21st Century Media.

This could have been a chance to own a discussion, become the destination that people trust, about India’s approach to cryptocurrency. Any one of the media sites could have distinguished clearly between the news – the note – and the context: the RBI’s banning of cryptocurrency in 2018, the IAMAI petition in the Supreme Court to reverse it, the SC’s judgement earlier reversing the ban, the difference between a legal framework and the RBI mandate, what a good legal framework could look like. Coverage like this combined with the trust and brand recognition of any of these news companies could have heviuly influenced the awareness about, and therefore the debate on, cryptocurrency in India.

This is a lost opportunity.

Categories
Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Wake up

This piece, “Avoiding the Global Lobotomy”, is among the more powerful I have read in a while. It is particularly relevant to the Mega-trend of Wellness when Always-On that we discussed yesterday. Some quotes below, but the context is important and the piece should be read in its entirety.

… this entire ‘timeline’ of spectacle events are simply empty happenings which momentarily infect your thought leaving you no time to analyse your being until the next comes in and slams your mentality to the floor.

Time becomes constrained to the point where one is not ‘living in the present’ in a Buddhist or Taoist sense, but merely existing at the whim of the latest dopamine feedback response, whatever spontaneous social-media based or dopamine-inducing masturbation session the user succumbs to that day is their nano-present.

…the end-game is roughly 3 or 4 seemingly different thought loops which lead back to precisely the same reality, one wherein you are born, you go to work, you consume, you produce and you die, and you do not question whether or not you want to do this, whether you like to do this, or whether you even thought about any of this in the first place.

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Discovery and Curation Real-World Crypto

Fake news, verified videos and the blockchain

This tweet shows why information and identity verification is going be a huge deal with 21st Century Media:

https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1268040635946135552?s=21

Identities needn’t even be stolen. As the tweet demonstrates, in the deluge of information that is everybody’s life, appearing plausible is all that’s needed.

Similarly, videos can and will be doctored, voices can be added in. It is easy enough to imagine someone quoting a credible tweet but inserting a modified video in place of the original. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social media will need to put in place processes to mark media as verified. This is much harder to do than for accounts, but just as important.

But perhaps we should not leave it to such platforms to establish provenance. Such a use case – trust-less verification – is a great use case for decentralised ledgers like blockchains. 

There already exist proofs-of-concept and trials for establishing provenance in supply chains. Everledger provides companies private blockchains on which they can trace the ownership of assets. OriginTrail does the same thing on its own blockchain. Ascribe was a project that focused on this for intellectual property (but admitted it was a few years too early). 

More specific to the use case we are discussing, Prover makes possible “Authenticity verificaiton of user generated video files”. Truepic does this for both photos and videos in the following manner:

When a user clicks the shutter button inside the app (or inside any app that has embedded Truepic’s SDK software), Truepic sends the metadata, including time stamp and geocode, to a secure server and assigns each photo or video a six-digit code and URL for retrieving it. Truepic then initiates the chain of custody on the image itself, allowing Truepic to prove its authenticity. Last, Truepic logs all of the unique information about the image or video to a blockchain.

This still leaves open questions about the actual use of these verified images. The biggest is whether social media platforms will make it easy to identify these verified images. I can think of ways that the verification platforms could make it possible on their own, perhaps via an embed code. But it’s native support that’ll make it easy for the average user scrolling through hundreds of tweets and posts to identify verified images/videos amid a sea of unverified and possibly altered ones – I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Aside: in December, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey had announced a funding programme named Bluesky for research into an “open and decentralised standard for social media”, of which Twitter would ultimately be a ‘client’ of this standard. One of its target problems (perhaps the main one) was that

… centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.

– @jack

This is possibly the only public indication from any major social media platform about a decentralised solution to the problem of fake/doctored media. Even here, decentralised does not necessarily mean neutral, or not owned by the company – people responded to that twitter thread with examples of such protocols and implementations that already existed.