In the nineties, the internet seemed to be a vast endless expanse of wonder and weirdness. Because it was. Especially before any localisation or personalisation.
In the nearly thirty years since, the internet, particularly the web, has exploded, and now it’s orders of magnitude bigger: more people from more countries, more domains, more types of stuff online, more types of devices – and way faster pipes.
And yet it seems smaller. The relentless optimisation by search engines and social media (well, Google and Facebook) has de-weirded the Internet, stripped it of its long tail. Everyone’s talking, but it’s about the same set of things.
I think we need more entry points to the Internet to get some of that magic back. Social media doesn’t cut it, not even Reddit, at one time the Front Page of the Internet. And metafilter survives valiantly, but as a shadowy of its former self (or perhaps in the shadow of what is now the giant corporate internet).
What are some worthy successors to StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us?
With Bitcoin and other digital-money-type cryptocurrencies, this point of view is understandable. The total mined Bitcoins are now worth nearly two trillion dollars (no one yet denominates items in Bitcoin; the US dollar has that locked down). Millions of people trade bitcoin 24×7, institutions hold it, firms create derivative instruments for it, publications cover it, social media chats constantly about it.
And yet, there are very few applications of Bitcoin outside of it being a speculative asset. It has not displaced the dollar or even threatened to do so.
Events in Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Lebanon and other countries have severely devalued people’s savings in their local currency, but we have yet to see a wholesale shift to bitcoin. This is for several reasons, not necessarily a lack of trust in an all-digital currency, But the fact remains.
The decentralised finance world is similar but slightly less straightforward. Hundreds of projects doing very interesting things have their own native token. Several people do their research, identify which projects actually have teams, are building products, have pedigreed backers, and then buy and hold the native tokens of such projects. The expectation – and basis for speculation – is should the project do well, the token will rise in value too.
That isn’t necessarily true. The research should also look at what the native token represents. How much of the value that the project creates does the token capture?
It is a lubricant in transactions in the project ecosystem? In that case, how does holding the token cause its value to appreciate (other than you holding so much that you cause scarcity).
Does the token aid proof of stake? In that case, how distributed is the network? Does your holding the token aid one of just a few concentrated pools?
Does the token confer voting power on decisions? In that case, who (or what) decides what is brought to a vote or not? Are decisions binding? How diverse is the voting pool?
Did the project’s backers get some exposure to their project’s native tokens themselves? If not, why are they not aligning themselves with the project’s value capture?
This research is not radically different from that in the world of traditional finance. If you aren’t doing this, it’s fine – then do make peace with the fact that your crypto holdings and trades are just that – speculation.
Every month I get a receipt from Apple about my monthly iCloud Drive charge.
It’s a reminder of the fact that in addition to all the hard drives I’ve bought from Apple – in my computers, phone and tablet – I also rent one from them, in perpetuity.
All in order to keep data on the other hard drives in sync.
I think Apple’s biggest marketing coup is normalising paying for several hundred GB of local storage *and* several hundred GB on iCloud.
To sync files between devices that spend all day next to each other & which we know can exchange files at high speed via Airdrop.
It made sense at one time. When Apple’s free iCloud tier offered 5GB of space, and they sold iPhones with 8GB of storage. Then, it was a secure, private way to store data that wouldn’t fit on your phone.
Today, ten years later, all of Apple’s iPhones and iPads start at eight times that, 64GB storage. And the latest iPhones 13, and all iPads Pro have a minimum of 128GB.
Meanwhile, the base iCloud tier is still 5GB.
Because Apple’s model is a client-server one – iCloud in the center, all of a person’s Apple devices (iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, Apple TVs) around it – there’s no way that the base storage tier is enough for anyone’s data. And everyone ends up paying for what is effectively a rented hard drive from Apple. An intelligent one, but a hard drive nevertheless.
But most people have their devices in close proximity to each other. They’re usually connected to high speed wireless networks throughout nearly every day. An alternative model could easily have been one where each of these devices stay in sync in a mutual, peer to peer structure. If you have a don’t own a Mac, Apple could extend the Windows iCloud client to sync your data.
With this, you don’t pay for as much storage online. And Apple’s data centre scale reduces a bit. You also don’t connect to the public internet. That saves data, frees up bandwidth and is a lot more private.
A peer to peer model would fit in a lot better with Apple’s very public commitment to the environment and to privacy.
I’ve moved most of the documents I don’t use very often to a peer to peer system via Resilio Sync (for which I have a family license). I have a dozen GB synced between three Macs, one iPhone and one iPad without needing an Internet connection:
You can see that as I type this on my Mac, I have two other machines that are syncing data. All on my local LAN.
Nearly 30 GB of my iPhone’s 128 GB is my own documents, synced locally
Neither my iPhone nor iPad use iCloud Backup – they are both backed up to my Mac weekly. That saves me over fifty GB of space I would have otherwise paid for. It’ll also mean I can set up a new iPhone a lot faster than from iCloud.
Ours are the first generations to accumulate digital data through our entire lifetimes: documents, files, photos, videos, music. Each of us will easily have several terabytes of data. At some point, paying today’s rates to store all that information online is going to cost too much money.
Maybe we’ll have near-ubiquitous connectivity, essentially free bandwidth and rock-bottom rates for cloud storage, all with the guarantee of security, resilience and privacy. I’d love to see that come to pass.
Until then, I think we need to consider how we’re going to manage our data the way we did just ten years ago – ourselves, on our own machines.
Paypal, Venmo and Square opened up buying and selling cryptocurrency in their apps in the last year, at least to customers in the USA.
Recently, the Canadian investing service Wealthsimple announced the ability to “buy and sell cryptocurrencies instantly”, starting with a list of about a dozen such tokens.
The benefit of such widely used services offering easy access to cryptocurrencies is clear: anyone who has been curious about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can now ‘buy’ them. They can experience dizzying gains and crushing losses. It’s informative and educative. And it goes beyond crypto: more people than ever can experience how this volatile an asset behaves.
At the same time, the highly abstracted nature of these experiences means that people may not understand what makes these tokens important beyond volatile curiosities. Particularly the idea of total ownership of your tokens without a mediating party – like these apps.
With Venmo, Paypal and Wealthsimple you don’t actually own bitcoin or any cryptocurrency. There’s no indication that Paypal, say, buys a certain amount of bitcoin on some exchange and holds it on your behalf. At most, it holds some bitcoin – it its name – and when you ‘buy’ bitcoin within the app for US dollars, it earmarks, in software, some of that bitcoin against your account.
No wonder none of these will let you send your bitcoin (or crypto) to another one of your own wallets. You can only sell ‘your’ bitcoin back to them (Venmo, Wealthsimple faqs).
That goes against the very basic idea of bitcoin, which was that you shouldn’t have to rely on third parties like banks to hold your money for you. There’s a high risk that ordinary customers of these apps will view the highly abstracted, processed bitcoin (and other crypto) as mere trinkets, toys. Venmo encourages you to buy bitcoin so your friends can get a notification about it:
Beyond this, people hold cryptocurrency at the very exchanges where they buy it from, in exchange for their local currencies.
Here the situation is somewhat less bad. You do have a bitcoin wallet, or several other wallets for different cryptocurrencies: you can deposit from an outside wallet to this one. You can send tokens from this wallet to an outside one.
But your ability to operate this wallet is controlled entirely by the exchange. If it decides you have violated its terms of use, or if the exchange is attacked, or there’s a technical problem that causes it to lose your credentials, you will no longer be able to access your tokens.
Tens of millions of people – more likely hundreds of millions – hold such ‘hot’ wallets at exchanges. They all trade control for convenience.
Only a small fraction of the total number of people who have bought bitcoin or cryptocurrency tokens hold them in wallets that they truly control, in what are termed ‘non-custodial’ wallets, meaning no one holds your tokens in custody other than you yourself.
Now while you have total and exclusive control, you also bear sole responsibility for keeping your access keys and recovery passphrase safe. A significant fraction of the bitcoins that have ever been mined have been just lost because people forgot or lost what they needed to access them.
Today mediating companies like PayPal and exchanges like, say, India’s CoinDCX or the USA Coinbase, far outspend non-custodial wallets on acquiring new customers.
I think for the decentralised economy to cross any sort of realistic threshold of relevance, vastly more people need to experience holding their own tokens in non-custodial wallets. That’s when they’ll get a sense of what decentralised tokens, decentralised money means.
One example is Okinawa, Japan, far south of the country’s main islands:
… a place where the average life expectancy for women is around 90, the oldest in the world, people form a kind of social network called a moai — a group of five friends who offer social, logistic, emotional and even financial support for a lifetime.
In a moai, the group benefits when things go well, such as by sharing a bountiful crop, and the group’s families support one another when a child gets sick or someone dies. They also appear to influence one another’s lifelong health behaviors.
“Traditionally, their parents put them into moais when they are born, and they take a lifelong journey together.”
That’s not the only reason Okinawans live longer than even the average Japanese – diet and genetics seem to play their part too – but social practices seem to be the third pillar of their longevity.
This National Geographic article from last year, which touches briefly on each of these three factors, also mentions moais.
Takashi Inafuku, head of one of Ogimi’s districts, belongs to two moai—one with a group of school friends and another with former co-workers. “They are places where you can exchange information and communicate with others,” he says. “I think that participating in moai, having a common hobby and releasing stress, can help promote longevity.”
While the forced isolation of the last nearly two years has had a devastating effect on people’s mental health, I have observed clearly that those with such strong social connections have fared better during this period. Often, such connections had been built and nurtured electronically even before the pandemic, and so weren’t buffeted as much by it.
Dan Kennedy, a professor who writes often about the business of news and journalism:
Substack isn’t merely similar to blogging. It is blogging, and it’s amazing that so many think that it’s new and different. Like Blogspot, WordPress, Medium (an earlier cautionary tale for journalists) and others, Substack will take its place as just another platform for self-publishing — better than some, but evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The big difference between Substack on the one hand and software and blogging services on the other is that a newsletter lands up in your mailbox, like newspapers and magazines of old.
Things would have been different if RSS had taken off, but here we are. Email apps no longer support RSS; browsers don’t detect and highlight RSS feeds on web pages; Google Reader has been dead nearly a decade.
Dan’s core point stands: anyone can publish, but a rare few will reach a subscriber base large enough to support a full time job newsletter writing.
And that is because just like with blogging services before it, Substack too has struggled with discovery of new and interesting writers, as we have discussed on this site last year.
To that end, the Twitter owned newsletter service Revue is better placed for surfacing new, independent writers because people can set up their Revue newsletters show up on their Twitter profile, like so:
Substack has chosen to generate awareness by encouraging writers with a substantial existing following to start a newsletter. It highlights organic breakout successes. But it still doesn’t have anything beyond this, no directory or recommendation engine to bubble up the thousands and thousands of ordinary people who have their own Substack.
Endnote:
As things stand now, there are still too many steps to set this up. Not everyone sees a ’newsletters’ tab in their Twitter app that prompts them to set one up. Then, if you sign up to Revue with your email and a password, you need to link your Twitter account to your Revue one. And everyone needs to dive into settings and set your newsletter show up on your profile.
There’s a lot of room for Twitter to make this a lot simpler.
It could also build Revue into the Twitter app itself: have Twitter threads optionally published as a Revue issue and vice versa. Have Twitter super-followers optionally join the paid version of the writer’s newsletter for an additional fee. And so on.
I can’t seem to understand why GTM (go-to-market) isn’t something that founders prioritise – is it cognitive friction? Is it a blind spot?
From my experience operating and advising early stage startups, here’s what I think is the answer:
I think it’s that in the early days of any company, in the pre-product-market-fit phase, the product and go-to-market are intimately connected. Unless you have a product with a captive market or captive IP (both rare), you need to develop and market the product in tandem. The marketing (or sales) head and the product head need to collaborate as peers. In fact, as one.
This doesn’t sit well with most founders. They usually have a clear idea of the product they want to bring to market. It’s why they set up the company in the first place. For many, it’s a chip on their shoulder, for instance they are now creating something they were not allowed to in a previous job. Consequently there’s a clear build phase where, as someone said about Steve Jobs, the only market research is looking into the mirror every day.
In turn, this means that by the time the product is ready to be taken to market, the founder is invested not just in the idea, but in its initial manifestation. The person in charge of go to market is given a fait accompli and told to sell it. The founder is confident it’ll sell because in their minds they’ve built the perfect version one.
If the startup is lucky, this approach’ll find traction. Usually, it doesn’t.
Finally, making things worse, because how invested the founder is in the product by now, they expect it to sell, quickly. And so they expect the try-learn-improve iteration phase to be dramatically shorter than it should be. That leads to a phase of short term, tactical fixes that usually doesn’t result in cracking go-to-market channels and positioning – or any learning at all.
What is one of your ideas that most resonates with your audience?
There are probably two. The first is the idea of systems over goals, or rather than worrying about the outcome, focusing on the process and building better habits each day. The line that people bring up a lot from the book is, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”
The other one that has gone over well is what I call “identity-based habits.” Rather than worrying about the results you want, focus on becoming the type of person who could achieve those results. So instead of worrying about losing 40 pounds, focus on being the kind of person who doesn’t miss workouts. Or rather than worrying about finishing the novel, focus on being the kind of person who writes every day.
I haven’t yet read Clear’s book Atomic Habits, but I found both of these useful ways to frame one’s goals, especially as someone who values systems and sustainability, as we’ve explored several times on this site.
They also potentially nudge you away from unhealthy behaviours: a brute force approach, or self guilt/self recrimination, overcoming both of which has been a long – and ultimately successful – struggle for me.
A few days ago I learnt about a proposed policy in India to ban VPN services altogether from the country. This puts the county in the august company of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey. So far, it’s a recommendation to the government from a parliamentary committee on home affairs. The Home ministry in India is responsible for internal security.
The intent is to deter criminals from communicating privately without interception. But the collateral damage is vast.
One is to businesses: for the most part, companies have been able to recreate the security of an internal network even with people working from home by having them connect via a VPN. The potential danger to this has been widely reported by the Indian press.
But this is also a blow to personal privacy, and of people’s freedom to choose and run the software they want on systems they own. I haven’t seen much coverage of this angle in print and online press – that discussion has happened mostly on Twitter.
~ attacks on attention & drain on bandwidth with nonstop ads
~ attacks by scammers over open access n/ws
This must be addressed along with anticrime measures.
Taking away tools for self-protection online from ordinary citizens because criminals could use them is like disallowing anyone from carrying pepper spray because robbers could also use them to attack victims. Everyone is presumed guilty until proven innocent.
Laying the onus of cyber security on citizens loses much its meaning when you also take away tools they can use to protect themselves. Take this post from the government’s ‘cyber dost’ twitter handle:
Imagine if the government itself encouraged citizens to protect themselves online through VPNs, Signal, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, tracking- and ad-blockers, educated people about PGP. But around the world they have taken the opposite approach. India is no exception.
These are questions policymakers and citizens going to face over and over again, around the world. The years-in-the-making ban on cryptocurrencies is a similar issue. As is the repeated threats of banning Whatsapp and other end to end encrypted chat services. If security wins over freedom every time, citizens will remain in the pre-internet nineties while most motivated criminals will continue to manage to access all of these.
The service is designed so it knows nothing about my identity.
No signup – just a string as user ID.
It accepts cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash), and even adds a 10% discount.
There is no real account management with profile or settings. Just VPN keys to be generated.
The service itself claims to not log anything, and audits itself regularly.
We want you to remain anonymous. When you sign up for Mullvad, we do not ask for any personal information – no username, no password, no email address. Instead, a random account number is generated, a so-called numbered account. This number is the only identifier a person needs in order to use a Mullvad account. This is a fundamental difference that sets us apart from most other services.
and
We log nothing whatsoever that can be connected to a numbered account’s activity
Not having to deal with all of this overhead makes using the service magical. It also means that for the team, the definition of the product is very narrow – just the VPN service, nothing else. No log management, customer profile management, ad partner management and on and on – nothing that’s not core to the service. They get paid for what they deliver.
It has to be just a matter of time before this frictionlessness becomes the norm.
