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Uncategorized

Intimacy doesn’t scale

I think a significant part of the problems with today’s social media design is the lack of context, whether it is photos on Instagram or posts on Facebook.

You scroll through a feed. You tap on a post. You read the caption. That’s all you have to divine the poster’s background, intent, state of mind, everything.

So the engagement between the poster and their readers/viewers is shallow. It’s expressed in one-tap likes or thumbs-ups. It’s expressed in one-tap re-tweets. It’s expressed in single-line comments that might as well have been emojis. LinkedIn even suggests emotive canned reactions, complete with exclamation marks (“That’s great!” and “Has it been a year already!”).

Very quickly the poster begins sharing with the expectation of mass visibility but low-engagement. Readers scroll past even faster, ignoring dozens of posts wholesale, and tap-tap-ing their reactions on a few. Tapping and expanding to read a message and is attached photos is breaking rhythm (leave alone reading a message’s other comments or tapping an attached link).

Once this becomes the norm, the whole act of expressing oneself on social media takes on a hollow, performative look. Our real selves move to other places like our messaging inboxes & small family groups – the dark forests of the Internet.

This extract from a blog post I stumbled upon says it well:

… thinking about photo sharing in general. And more specifically about how we’ve created this efficient system for sharing to a mass audience. The personal aspect of photos is lost in the sharing process.

When I would post a photo, I wouldn’t receive any comments, it never sparked any conversations. I would just get a handful of likes and that was that. What’s the point? It’s become a game of vanity where the number of likes you receive is the only feedback mechanism. It stinks.

As an experiment, I started sharing photos with individual people, privately, over iMessage. I wouldn’t send them a whole collection of photos, just one at a time here and there. And what I found is that when you send an individual person a photo privately, you actually spark a conversation.

– https://initialcharge.net/2022/01/thoughts-on-photo-sharing/

The design of social media simply doesn’t lend itself well to the sort of engagement that the writer sought. From its earliest days, social media has sought to optimise for scale. At the beginning it made sense because the more people there were on a service the more, well, social it’d be.

But these services also began optimising for increased engagement between users. Increasing followers and followed. Encouraging frequent posting. Encouraging limitless scrolling. If you expend much of your cognitive bandwidth on breadth of coverage, precious little is left for depth of interaction.

Group chats have proved to be a reasonable alternative to social media. I wonder what that will evolve to.

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Uncategorized

Contemplate experience

This piece is from 2020, but – as often with paper journals – evergreen:

One student, a slight girl with dark eyes, dark hair, and a sweet determined demeanor, had the most beautiful journal I had ever seen. It was a small red book inside of which she both wrote and made collages from the scraps of papers she shed just walking through her life—ticket stubs and business cards, a photograph, seashells collected on vacation, sand—it was all glued into her book. Words wove their way around the images.

Hers was a combination of scrapbook, journal, and artwork, mesmerizing to look at and, she told me, calming to create. She gave herself time each day to spend with the journal. It freed her, allowed her to contemplate experience, process it.

– Why I (Still) Carry a Notebook Everywhere

Categories
The Next Computer

The most reliable computer I own

Whether I’m heading out to a cafe, a week-long trip, or just around the house, my iPad Pro is what I reach for.

The iPad isn’t the most capable device I own, but it’s the most reliable. And increasingly, that’s what I value above all else.

Here is a short list of what I mean by reliable:

  • Applications won’t hang. They just won’t. Just as importantly, they won’t lag. Jobs may take a _very_ long time to run if I’m running something in parallel, but unlike any desktop OS I have run, the rest of the system won’t stutter. This is the epitome, I think, of Apple’s hardware-software integration.
  • Battery life is super-predictable.
  • Connectivity is guaranteed – I have a 4G SIM, so the iPad is always either on Wi-Fi or on cellular data.
  • It wakes instantly and is ready to go immediately. Always.
  • FaceID will always work – unlike a laptop, I’m not going to ever mistype my password.
  • Airdrop always works – at least, between my iPad and phone. I can tap Share on either device confident that the other is always visible.
  • A peripheral will either work or it won’t. Once I know it works, I can rest assured it’s going to work every time I plug it in.
  • Apps will never update while I’m using them or at launch.
  • This is rather niche – I know I can use it to sign and return any document in a pinch. I run into this only a couple of times a year, but when I do it’s extremely reassuring. Even if it’s a paper document, I can scan, sign and print/email it.

I think the most important design choice Apple made is setting very clear expectations about the user experience: both what to expect and what not. I can’t expect applications to run in the background, for instance, so I’ll make sure I’m running screen on any Termius session on remote machines so I can always reconnect and pick up from where I left off. This is as important as the expectation that the machine will always start instantly regardless of whether it’s been off a few seconds or a few days.

None of these is solely a result of the iPad’s form-factor as a tablet. It’s a number of things that come together. Several people have remarked that the iPadOS software does a disservice to the massively capable hardware on recent iPad Pros. They are right, but over time I have come to understand what Apple will not compromise when it builds new software capabilities.

The iPad is in fact a new kind of computer – just one that’s not merely portable and flexible, but completely reliable.

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Real-World Crypto

Democratisation is not the same as permissionless-ness

The Internet has democratised pretty much anything you can think of. That which is not yet democratised is spending increasing amounts every year to protect its monopoly, whether by force of law or perception.

Democratisation does not mean the end of concentration of power.

The biggest, most powerful companies are the world are tech giants. Whose products have democratised communication, access and opportunity. Those products have produced previously unimaginable social and economic value, and within a generation.

Yet they are, and have been, under investigation for abuse of power. They may have created platforms for creativity, connection, work and play for billions of us, but none of us have any control over these platforms.

A whole other class of powerful companies are financial giants. They have not even democratised access with and to their sophisticated products, unlike tech giants. We aren’t even aware of most of these products.

The excitement around cryptocurrencies, DeFi and DAOs and so much other decentralised tech is the promise of both democratisation and agency.

Some months ago a venture capitalist, new to crypto but with a lifetime’s experience of asking the right questions asked me incredulously how it was that anyone could create a new currency. And a new financial product. And a new organisation.

The key is that blockchains are permissionless by design. No one, fundamentally, needs approval to set up any of these above. The genie of trustless transactions let out of the bottle by the original Bitcoin whitepaper cannot be put back. That genie is capturing greater and greater amounts of economic value every year.

We are already seeing decentralised commerce. Decentralised financial products. Decentralised gaming. Decentralised communities. Decentralised governance. Decentralised creativity. And, of course, the original use case, decentralised currency.

Their success depends not on legislation. Or capital. Or location. Or race. It depends not even on technology, really. It is community, and, by extension, legitimacy. As the founder of the Ethereum project sums up an excellent blog post of his that I strongly recommend you read:

The concept of legitimacy (higher-order acceptance) is very powerful. Legitimacy appears in any context where there is coordination, and especially on the internet, coordination is everywhere.

There are different ways in which legitimacy comes to be: brute force, continuity, fairness, process, performance and participation are among the important ones.

Cryptocurrency is powerful because it lets us summon up large pools of capital by collective economic will, and these pools of capital are, at the beginning, not controlled by any person. Rather, these pools of capital are controlled directly by concepts of legitimacy.

Permissionless systems have lower barriers to entry. Leave alone creating competing systems from scratch, blockchains can and have been forked, preserving information and participation. And for the first time, the community of a project has the agency to act – collectivity – to do so. Because of this, a project must build and preserve legitimacy or risk irrelevance.

No matter how much a traditional tech giant may have democratised access, it is very much permissionned. In some sectors, for instance finance, that permission is regulation by the state.

As this genie of permissionless systems attracts more and more users, as those people move more and more economic activity there, backlash will follow. But both incumbents and regulators will find that permissionless systems, by their very nature, are difficult to rein in.

For tech and finance – and other – giants, the traditional rules of market capture don’t apply. For instance it is difficult for a ride sharing app company to compete for a driver’s loyalty with cashbacks or a reduced commission against a decentralised version that gives the driver actual agency over the organisation itself, that not just allows or encourages collective action, but requires it, cannot function effectively without it.

For regulators, traditional models of regulation may not apply. To begin with, permissionless entities are borderless. They are not just resistant to regulation or opposed to regulation, they transcend regulation. For instance A capital markets regulator in a country may ban participation in liquidity pools, but they will continue regardless. Regulators’ only option, then, is to block the gates to the decentralised world itself, that is, the conversion of fiat versions of value – currency – to decentralised versions of value – tokens. If a decentralised organisation gives someone enough agency, though, they will find ways to access membership of that decentralised organisation. The organisation does not need anyone’s permission to exist, to function, to create value for its members – why should I need permission, goes the thinking.

At the conclusion of this, I must stress that this is not a value judgement. This is not meant to unquestioningly assert the superiority of permissionless systems. It is a thinking-through of what permissionless really means. And, specifically, that it is different from democratisation in the fundamental aspect of distribution of control. It is a pointing-out of why the spread of permissionless systems is likely inevitable, inexorable.

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Uncategorized

Detail

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.

– “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”, John Salvatier.

The writer makes the case that when you examine tasks and phenomena because you are stuck, you uncover detail you’ve missed. And details you thought were important get put into perspective.

In the years I followed a regular meditation practice, I’d have days when interactions seemed to occur in higher resolution than usual. Visually I’d notice people’s cues and expressions. Aurally I’d be aware of the timbre of that person’s voice. As someone new to this it became too much to process. But that detail, and the sense of slowing down of time, meant that interactions also became more intuitive.

Of course the writer isn’t taking about mediation or HD interactions. He simply makes the case, quite well, that when you pay attention, “the important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them.”

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

Everything is on high-speed internet. Why are we seeing wait spinners all the time?

In this blog post about offline-first, this important point:

Latency is more important than bandwidth

In the past, often the bandwidth was the limiting factor on determining the loading time of an application. But while bandwidth has improved over the years, latency became the limiting factor. You can always increase the bandwidth by setting up more cables or sending more Starlink satelites to space. But reducing the latency is not so easy…

Offline first applications benefit from that because sending the inital state to the client can be done much faster with more bandwidth. And once the data is there, we do no longer have to care about the latency to the backend server.

This is why iOS Background App Refresh, when implemented well, works like magic. iCloud Tabs in Safari are a great example of this:

Safari doesn’t stop you from using the browser while it syncs tabs. In fact, if it detects that the connection isn’t good enough to fetch tabs from other devices quickly enough, it just won’t show you the “From {device name}” section.

Safari continues to attempt to sync tabs in the background, where you’re using the browser or not. When it’s synced, the section shows up. Like magic.

iCloud photos is another example of offline first; there is never any wait time while you use the same photo library across multiple iOS and Mac devices.

Likewise the podcast app Overcast will download podcasts and sync subscriptions silently in the background.

In both cases, the developers have designed for the fact that bandwidth over time is abundant, but when the user launches the app, (lack of) latency is important, so the apps don’t sync right then.

Of course, conflict resolution is an important part of offline-first, and today many applications do this at a file level. The interface’ll ask you which version (from another device or from the local device) you want to use.

Other, more intelligent applications will do this within a file. A text editor like TextMate on MacOS detects that a file that is open in the editor has been changed on the filesystem because it was edited on another device and has synced via, say, iCloud or Dropbox. The editor then uses markup to highlight the conflicting text.

Either way, the application won’t stop you from using it until it can determine everything is synced, which often isn’t possible quickly.

Unfortunately, too many apps today rely on calling home at every launch, even if it isn’t to sync files. Compare the launch of the image creation app Canva and the Twitter app Tweetbot (both cold launches). You can see which one loads existing content first and then start looking to sync. Its clear which one feels more snappy:

Canva
Tweetbot

Whether your users are on a phone perpetually connected to 4G, a desktop plugged into gigabit Ethernet, a laptop with patchy wifi, or a tablet with no available connections nearby, an offline first app gives them confidence that it’ll be available instantly when they need it. To capture text. Review a photo. Add a contact. Or even browse the web.

(ends)

Categories
The Next Computer

iOS apps worth trying out

Recently someone on Twitter bought the new iPhone 13 after several years on Android, and asked about iPhone apps worth trying. This is what I sent them. Here’s hoping you find this list useful.

Read/Social

Productivity 1

Productivity 2

Photos/Videos

Other utilities

Categories
Life Design

The disrupted and the deliberate

I used to think that disruptions in habits were temporary. One things got back to normal, I’d automatically go back to my regular schedule. I’ve discovered quite powerfully that that isn’t necessarily the case.

I fell ill in April 2018 for a couple of weeks and never really got back to my workout routine that I had built up over years, a routine I persisted with even through mental illness.

Earlier this year, some major disruptions caused changes to my sleep schedule. The disruption has passed but my sleep schedule has remained shifted by a few hours. This was a schedule I’d developed as a child and stuck through adulthood to middle age.

And also in 2018, I finished no books, an extraordinary feat for me – I’d read at least a couple of dozen books a year since my teens. But I’ve found it hard since to get absorbed in a book from start to finish – and I had, until now, known no other way.

Just like it had been with sleeping early, quickly and well, just like with being in shape had.

I’m reconstructing each of those habits once again. There are several frameworks to help, such as Atomic Habits. More than anything else, though, is the hard realisation that each of these is going to be a journey, one that requires me to be deliberate at and with each step. Habits that are knocked out of orbit by disruptions don’t just wobble back into their old trajectories, they need to be trained to revolve around our selves once again.

Categories
Product Management Startups

Desire-friction mismatch

Today

https://twitter.com/magdalenakala/status/1441474446334828549?s=20

This reminded me of something: for ten years now, I have dealt with or advised founders about desire-friction mismatch.

Founders often assume that because they have built a particular product that a certain defined market segment desires – ie because they have achieved product market fit, that their numbers should now take off.

It doesn’t always.

PMF is an important milestone. But achieving it doesn’t tell a founder how motivated the average person in their market segment is. It doesn’t tell them how their promise tips the stakes for average would-be customers.

At a certain level of friction, customers’ desire to start using your product won’t be enough. They’ll sigh and move on.

At this point, a founder needs to engage their product person. To take whatever minimum viable product that got them to product-market-fit and iron the wrinkles out of the customers experience. These wrinkles exist as a result of compromises made – rightly – to speed up the initial go-to-market.

But now the founder needs to invest in the product so that it’s simple to understand and easy to get started with for the larger-than-earlier numbers of customers to come.

Unfortunately, it’s at this very point that a founder’s attention and investment turns from product (and tech) to sales and marketing in an attempt to acquire customers at a larger scale than during the PMF phase. To now look for sustainable, efficient acquisition/distribution channels.

What can happen – and too often does – is that a startup spends more (money, time, attention, emotion) in acquiring lots of new leads and sending them down a signup flow where the friction outweighs their desire to get through it.

When numbers don’t ramp up as quickly as expected, the founder is now unsure about the product-market-fit itself. They think about what they got wrong. Maybe they revisit it. Maybe they have the product people make cosmetic changes to the product trying to communicate the value proposition even more loudly (too often by adding more text/visual clutter).

In this case the problem isn’t that customers don’t get the value proposition. They do – the team’s now past the PMF milestone. But they don’t have the motivation to deal with the friction that the still-early product presents – not every product is as important to people’s lives as play-to-earn games like Axie are to people in the Philippines.

Being able to diagnose if it’s lack of PMF or desire-friction mismatch is often what makes the difference between an excellent startup’s post-PMF journey taking off, and sputtering.

Categories
The Next Computer

What we think of as a computer has changed in ways our 2007 selves could not imagine

Several of the reviews of this year’s iPhone 13 line from mainstream USA publications were lukewarm about the main decision a reader wanted to make: should they buy the new iPhone or not?

Source: this Youtube comparison video

CNN was clear you should only upgrade if you’re on an old iPhone (or are a professional photographer). The New York Times began with the sentence “the truth is that smartphones peaked a few years ago”. CNET compares the newest phones to older ones and only starts suggesting upgrades with phones three years old.

It’s clear that people are waiting longer to get a new smartphone than they did several years ago. And that wait is getting longer.

I think it’s mostly because smartphones – now just phones – have become an everyday essential. Far from the novelty they were for their first decade, they are now how we interact with the world. Consequently, the choice to get a new iPhone is no longer about signalling exclusivity or wealth; it’s a much more utilitarian decision: whether the phone one owns is now long in the tooth.

And the answer to that question is usually No. For a few years now, phones have been much more capable than the average person needs them to be. Give the average person an iPhone XS instead of the iPhone 13 from three generations later, and they’ll have a hard time convincing themselves that the new one is really all that better.

Phone processors are also as fast as most desktops and laptops. Graphics performance is arguably better. They also have about the same amount of storage space. We use them for different things than we do our computers, but they’re really – as Apple describes its iPad – the Next Computer. It’s just that in ten years, what we think of as a computer has changed in ways our 2007 selves could not imagine.

So it stands to reason that phones would cost as much. In the USA, iPhones used to cost around $500. The first iPhone cost $499 and $599 depending on storage. The iPhone 13 Pro Max, the biggest model in the fifteenth generation of iPhones, now starts at $1099. Only a few Android phones are as expensive, but the percentage increase in price is about the same.

That’s as much as a laptop computer. And so therefore if phones are already faster than we need them to be, they play the same role in our lives that our laptops used to, and they cost as much as a laptop, we shouldn’t be surprised that we replace them as (in)frequently as we do our computers – that is, once every three or four years.

I’d expect that gap to grow.

Apple has understood this for a long time now.

Years ago, they publicly said they were ok with the iPhone cannibalising iPod revenue (because they’d rather they themselves did than anyone else). In much the same way, they welcome, even encourage the use of iPhones for years on end. And in balance, they have opened up opportunities to earn throughout that period of ownership, through services: iCloud. Apple TV+. Apple Music. Arcade. Fitness+. And very likely more in the future.

from Apple

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.