Category: Writing

Categories
Real-World Crypto RG.org Writing

Crypto dot rahulgaitonde dot org

The Whatsapp group I started on bitcoin, cryptocurrency and decentralised finance now has over 200 subscribers across 14 countries.

Now, all of the past posts from the group are now available at Crypto.RahulGaitonde.Org. I will continue to add new posts here as they are published on the Whatsapp group.

Unlike the group, I have left comments open here – if there are ever discussions on posts, WordPress has moderation tools; Whatsapp does not.

Categories
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)

Categories
Data Custody Products and Design Writing

Because of Notion, the web is no longer read-only

I learnt today that a friend of mine had set up his own personal website. He built it on Notion and linked a domain name to it. That set of Notion pages has a surprising amount of information on it, including what appears to be the beginnings of a knowledge base of the areas he’s built a career in.

His Notion pages have collapsible sections, text, images, embeds, multiple columns – the works. This is by a person who, from what I know, has not had previous experience with WordPress or Weblow or the like.

What Notion has done is simple and yet profound. It has made it super simple to put high quality, information-dense web pages online.

If you are technically adept, you can buy a domain, hosting, install WordPress, a theme or two, a few plugins like Elementor and build your web pages. If you have enough money, you can hire an agency to build a site for you – and train you to add/edit information on it. If you’re the leadership of a company in charge of public-facing properties, you can get a team to build it for you (well, for the company).

But if you’re outside of a fairly narrow set of people, the web is read-only for you.

That’s why social media became such a big deal. It gave everyone an input box and a send button that published to everyone on the Internet. You could fill that box with text, pictures, sounds, whatever you wanted.

But social media is linear, post-oriented and reverse-chronological. As are WordPress.com, Medium, Substack, Revue – all of which are holdovers from the blog era.

For true self-expression, you want to be able to create free-form information. Notion makes that possible. And makes it look pretty, so you aren’t distracted by themeing and customising looks-and-feels. You just focus on how you want to present what is important for you to say.

It does look like the future of publishing.

End note: we’ve spoken time and again about owning your data. Notion is not that. Whatever its data export capabilities may be, it’s still a proprietary format hosted on a third party service. Yet for most people, the benefit of self-expression and one’s own unique online presence is a powerful motivator. And you know what – that might be a good enough trade off for now.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Writing

Own your content, December reminder

and

Within 24 hours. The case for owning your own content gets stronger by the week.

Previously:

July 2020: Platform censorship and the Malpani incident

November 2020: A problem with Amazon Web Services caused several appliances to go offline 

Categories
Life Design RG.org Writing

One year streak

Today is one year since I began publishing daily on the site. When I completed three hundred days in early October, I had written a Twitter thread about this practice means to me and what it’s done for me. I was surprised I had not linked to it here. Here goes:

All of this is still true. I intend to keep publishing – and there is something else, complementary, in the works. Soon!

Categories
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
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Writing

Writing for shorter attention spans

From an interview with Anand Samwal, the publisher of the excellent business newsletter CB Insights, which I have subscribed to for years now:

“As attention spans have shrunk, short, conversational, and highly visual research is more respectful of the reader’s time and that is the type of research we aim to provide,”

“I’d characterise our research as being of ‘higher nutritional value’, which means fewer words and more insights vs being full of ‘empty calories,’

This explains the fun and rather cheeky tone of its newsletter.  It also explains the focus on bite-sized commentary and shareable infographics,

Credit for these numbers [640,000 subscribers] go also to the carefully crafted, irreverent headlines.  “Bye-bye,” “no more startup drama pls,” and “this might anger you,” are a few examples of these headlines – the kinds that leave subscribers curious and wanting to click through.

(Featured image photo credit: CB Insights website)