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What Power Does a Subscriber Have?

October 29, 2024 by jkd

Seemingly as I was writing my last post, Jeff Bezos was poasting himself – it did not go well.

Matt Pearce – who I should be clear, I think is one of the smartest and most committed people out there fighting for journalism – yesterday had advocated for subscribers not to cancel their subscriptions to the Post or to his former home, the Los Angeles Times. His basic argument boils down to this:

“The cost of canceling subscriptions here is to hike the price of journalistic ethics for journalists. That’s because the journalists trapped at these companies, who were not responsible for any of this, who already have fewer and fewer high-quality alternatives to work for, are staring at a consumer reaction whose first and only certain consequence is to make their money-losing newsrooms even more reliant on billionaire subsidies and thus more exposed to the incompetence or fecklessness of the owner, whose other businesses have far, far more to lose economically from favoritism or discrimination by the federal government. More newsrooms dependency on a single source of revenue means less leverage for journalists to talk back, lest those subsidies — and therefore many of America’s last remaining high-quality journalism jobs — suddenly go away. This is while the journalists and their unions at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post are vigorously making the case to the public that journalistic integrity does not and cannot rest in the hands of ownership.”

I get it. But as I noted with Drew Harwell’s similar “it’s not our fault” lament, I think it badly misses the point both from the perspective of both audience and the structure of these enterprises as billionaire-owned publications. Pearce continued in this vein in today’s post, writing:

“The reality is that accountability journalism is in a dependency stage now, and as far as donations go, speaking as a journalist, my bias is that it’s generally better to be beholden to subscribers than to the out-of-touch whims of billionaires or philanthrophic foundations.”

This is both correct and imprecise. The “now” is correct, but it did not start now – in the case of the Post it started in 2013, when Bezos bought the paper; for the Times it’s at least since 2018 with Soon-Shiong’s purchase of the paper. From that moment forward the papers’ fates were up to billionaire whim, not any particular business reality.

But beyond that, I want to take issue with Pearce’s insistence that it’s “better to be beholden to subscribers” than to billionaires – which I would agree with if that were true – but it’s not. Under Bezos and Soon-Shiong’s ownership, every dollar of subscription revenue to their newspapers goes, effectively, into their pocket – they then write a check that might be more or less than that+advertising revenue to cover the paper’s operating expenses; in no case is that an amount of money they will miss. But it’s not as if the newsroom gets control of subscriber revenue – the money is all fungible and the money all goes to and comes from the owner.

I wish this weren’t so! I wish that the workers at both publications were its owners, instead, and that subscriber revenue really was what they were beholden to – but wishing doesn’t make it so. Now – will Bezos use the decline in subscribers as an excuse to cut newsroom jobs? Maybe! But we don’t have to believe him, because he’s lying – he really does have an amount of money that for the scale of human life and individual endeavor, is infinite. He can do whatever he likes – the first thing he decided to do when he bought the paper was cut employee retirement benefits – and it’s important not to listen to why he says he’s doing so (see: his juvenile editorial) but to merely look at the material realities of his actions and then think through for ourselves why it might be so.

I can totally understand why Matt is making the case that he is, and I do agree that in the short run “every journalism job lost at Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, with their existing scale and audiences, is extremely unlikely to get replaced at ProPublica or anywhere else on a 1:1 basis.” But my argument is that whatever jobs are lost under the reign of Bezos, Soon-Shiong and others (which could be every one – they could just shut down the papers tomorrow) were dead letters not from this moment of non-endorsement and audience revolt, but from the moment of their purchase of the papers.

Audiences, as I’ve argued and will continue to argue at greater length, have been abandoned by our newspapers and media institutions for quite some time. I take no issue with those who, as Matt suggests, stick around to support (in what way they can) the journalism being produced by legacy institutions. I also cannot criticize those who can no longer support these billionaire-owned institutions and, more importantly, do not wish to have that be their information environment. As others have pointed out, this breach of trust means you must have heightened skepticism of everything else from these papers going forward – this is why I had cancelled my Post subscription not this past week but when Bezos hired Murdoch factotum/possible criminal Will Lewis as publisher, months ago.

What Matt is arguing for is to buckle down and wait it out “until we can break it via major antitrust action or through substantial subsidy” – but in the case of these newsrooms, neither seems likely to actually address the problem of their specific ownership. This is a difference in degree but not kind to those who argue in favor of sticking around Twitter to fight the good fight, or until Elon sells it, or ____. Neither the Post nor Times is a toxic cesspool along the lines of Twitter, or anything like it (though notably they are still posting there), but there is nothing stopping Bezos or Soon-Shiong from making them so. Likely, almost all of the current staff would quit rather than go along with such a project, but that is their own decision – just as it is the audience’s decision to jump ship.

A further note: I subscribed to the Post out of some combination of nostalgia for the paper of my youth, refusal to subscribe to the New York Times, and the good sports coverage+Alexandra Petri. But the Post is already not the paper of my youth, and I am not a child – they gutted local coverage for many years under the Graham ownership regime – they were a leading voice for the Iraq war and have had shameful editorial coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza – their (along with the NYT’s) horserace coverage of politics has been a truly malign force for 30 years. Many great journalists still work there, but it is, as many legacy publications are, also complicit in the undoing of the information space in this country over the last decades. I don’t wish for its destruction, but that’s not up to either me or its subscribers – it’s up to Jeff Bezos and him alone. What I wish for myself as for subscribers to news institutions everywhere is a better information space – and that is something that is up to us, through our individual actions, and the new and emergent institutions we support going forward.

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The Washington Post and the Oakland A’s are in the Same Business

October 28, 2024 by jkd

On October 25, 2024, word began to spread across social media – the Washington Post was not going to make an endorsement in the 2024 Presidential election. The publisher, Will Lewis, wrote a milquetoast defense, saying “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates” – notwithstanding that the Post had endorsed a candidate in every race save one, since 1976. What was implicit became explicit soon after – centibillionaire Jeff Bezos, who had purchased the Post for $250MM in 2013, had spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. 

Neocon-stalwart-turned-Trump-antagonist and Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned his position – the first of a cascading series of editorialists to do so – alleging that Bezos’ action preceded his meeting with Donald Trump, regarding possible future contracts for Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company (yes the ones that look like giant dicks). The evidence there is fairly thin and mostly by implication, but it doesn’t really matter whether the sudden decision was to curry favor with once-and-possible-future President Trump; or in fear or political reprisal from same; or an honest expression of Bezos’ politics as one of the world’s richest men, and by nature no fan of democratic institutions or regulatory oversight. Bezos can afford to hold any and all of those views at once – maximum optionality is part of the impunity his wealth brings. What matters is that the promise made on Bezos’ purchase of the Post from its longtime owners, the Graham family, had been fulfilled: it no longer existed for the audience and their edification but rather for his narrow and fleeting impulses.

The Post’s torching of its generational good will occurred almost exactly a month to the day after the erstwhile Oakland Athletics played their last game in the remains of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the wretched, glorious yard filled one last time with a public fully betrayed. Its owner, in this case a ne’er-do-well scion of unconscionable wealth rather than a personal accumulator thereof, made good on a similar promise: to do whatever it was that he wanted with the team, fans or future potential fans be damned. The A’s and the Post are in much the same business, now, and the consumers of their product in much the same predicament.

City newspapers exist (or in many cases, existed) in a strange tension, much in the way local sports teams do – as something like a public trust and source of civic identity and collective meaning, on the one hand; and as ruthless and often massively-profitable businesses, on the other. Historically both papers and ball clubs have been owned by local worthies, and while the line between their business and the paper’s editorial stances was always blurry, they were first and foremost engaged in the material doings of the city where they were based. Even scions of obscene wealth like William Randolph Hearst made the bulk of their money in the business of newspapers.

Recent years in both media and sports have seen a turn, with family publishers like the Grahams making way for billionaire arrivistes like Bezos and the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong (who likewise recently spiked his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris) and the vulture claws of Alden Global Capital, much as hedge fund titan/criminal Steve Cohen’s Mets and the Dodgers’ Guggenheim Partners leave the NFL’s Rooney and Mara families as relics of a bygone age. Alternative ownership models exist, but for the time being as quirky exceptions, if also possible futures to imagine on.

Local, dynastic ownership of these quasi-public-trust/money machines could always be contentious, and often embittered, but the family model was fundamentally a bet on the long term – that this source of power, their relationship to the good will and in meeting the information or entertainment needs of the city, would pay off over time, to them and their children and on down the line. That this money and power could be good for them but also, maybe, appreciated by the city who provided it, whose residents could rely on the paper and celebrate a championship every now and then.

Bezos and his ilk have no such need – their wealth is beyond generational, it exceeds any sense of being bound by human time or geography. A sports team, a newspaper, a ssuper yacht, a trip to space – it’s a thing that occurs to them, can be used as they see fit or as amuses them, and if it ceases to exist, well – they might not even notice. They have no sense of civic duty to the audience but even beyond that, they have no financial necessity of them – Bezos could just as easily run the Post at last year’s reported $77MM loss from last year until the end of time (it’d never make a dent in his interest earnings) as shut it down tomorrow, and neither would make the barest impact on his financial might or temporal power. 

The central truth, emphasized by these blithe and clumsy interferences with newspaper editorial processes, is that Bezos et al. have no need for the audience or any particular relationship with or adulation from them. Their money makes money makes money; the newspaper, if it can be used as a one-time stimulant to make them even more money, in the form of tax cuts or government contracts from a future Trump administration, is of some use but otherwise not worth noticing. 

And so it was with some surprise that NPR reported on the afternoon of Monday, October 28 that over 200,000 people had canceled their subscriptions to the Post – 8% of the 2.5MM total. Drew Harwell, a tech reporter for the Post, wrote in (understandable) distress on the social media site Bluesky that, “The @washingtonpost.com has lost 200,000 subscribers, @npr.org says. I understand the anger; many in the newsroom are angry, too. But how many stories won’t get reported, and how many journalists will lose their jobs, because of a decision they had nothing to do with? We’re not owed anything; we have to earn it. People lost trust in the Post for legitimate reasons, and it will be hard – maybe impossible – to win it back. But what’s sad is that the journalists who report critically on people like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump could suffer the most for it.”

Harwell is right – it is sad. But I have a hard time empathizing with the woe-is-us tone – the “decision they had nothing to do with.” We all live in capitalism, and are subject to the whims of powerful moneyed forces we have nothing to do with – that’s American life. The mistake here is locating that subjection at the moment a Post subscriber clicked cancel. It was written on the wall when Bezos bought the paper, just as it’s written on the wall of any media enterprise owned by someone or someones rich enough to not care if they light the whole place – and its decades of history and accumulated civitas – on fire, and walk away. 

It was written on the wall of Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum when John Fisher bought the Athletics in 2005, though it took decades of starving the team for resources, repeatedly blowing up competitive groups of players when they got “too expensive” and campaigning for to receive a public handout in the form of a new stadium before he lowered the boom in April 2023 and announced the move to Las Vegas (maybe, eventually). The fans responded with a spirited “Sell the Team” movement and “reverse boycott” to demonstrate their love for the team, and hatred for the owner – and their own powerlessness. The A’s will play next year, and the year after, and who knows how long after, in a minor league stadium in Sacramento, before perhaps landing in Las Vegas. Whether anyone in either of those cities cares a fraction as much as the Oaklanders now bereft of all their professional sports teams isn’t any concern of John Fisher.

And perhaps Jeff Bezos will be shamed for, if nothing else, so ham-handedly running a major enterprise in public; perhaps he’ll tire of the negative PR and sell it down the line to someone else. What is clear is that the Post‘s audience – or at least, a substantial enough portion thereof to comprise its own major-circulation publication – is exercising the one option available to them in a relationship where the counter-party views them as, at best, nodes of public opinion to exploit for other purposes. Our information space is deeply broken, and this is just one of many instances where the inertial – no longer earned, and overdrawn under any examination – public trust underlying our major institutions does not survive even the slightest pulling of strings. 

I am by nature more of an institutionalist than I am a proponent of burning down for burning down’s sake – it is just so much harder to build things than to destroy. Indeed, I learned to read (and write) critically from a childhood of Washington Post over breakfast. But the thing that is now lacking is, as Harwell notes, trust: trust of an audience that their support will be returned with a consistent product, that their attention will not be manipulated to grotesque ends, that they and the purveyors of their information space are fundamentally involved in the same project. This is not an argument that any billionaire – let alone a centibillionaire – can plausibly make; indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone whose main business is the business of making money, selling this line with some conviction to such an abandoned audience. If our legacy information purveyors are to survive, are to revive a public trust in their relationship with their audiences, the nature of governance must change wholesale – and if those legacy institutions are not equal to (or interested in) the task, then we must build new institutions that are. 

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Podcast Paywalls Don’t* Work

June 26, 2024 by jkd

According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times is planning on putting podcasts behind a paywall:

The publisher is exploring making only the three most recent episodes of “The Daily” available to nonsubscribers, and making new episodes of its “Serial” show exclusive to subscribers for an initial period. The plans are still evolving and might change…

The Times is expected to gradually move more shows behind the paywall with the goal of eventually tying most, if not all, to a subscription service. It has also discussed making archives of its shows available only to subscribers, though those plans are fluid.

This is a bad idea, but I’ll walk through what the Times must be thinking before returning again to why this is a bad idea.

Currently, the Times makes a huge amount of money on podcast ads, because a) shows like “The Daily” are among the most listened-to shows around, so advertisers can get big scale, and b) the Times‘ affluent and well-educated demographic is highly desirable for many advertisers. The latter means that even shows with less-broad reach than “The Daily” can get premiums relative to their audience size, or similar programs at the same audience size, because they’re Times properties. They can also be used as fill-ins when advertisers can’t get access to “The Daily” (it’s very popular for ad placements, so highly competitive), or can’t afford a long run there given its large size.

Putting shows behind the paywall will lead to the Times making substantially less money on ad sales for two reasons: 1) fewer downloads, and 2) downward pressure on ad rates over time, because of 1). The current plan seems to be that the three-most-recent episodes of “The Daily” will be free to air and then all others behind the wall; this will lead into some drop-off but less than with other shows, as most daily podcast episodes get most of their listens in the week of release, and have relatively small (compared to evergreen shows) long tails. But there will be an impact, and it will mean that “The Daily” will almost certainly move down podcast charts (which are not absolute measures but are one of the few public signals). The move of “Serial” to a delayed-release strategy will have a similar effect on chart placement and overall downloads, but moving any other shows behind the paywall will be pretty disastrous. The Times‘ full catalog has good-not-great listenership – as ad sales go, they largely ride on the coattails of “The Daily” and “Serial,” along with a few others (e.g., “The Ezra Klein Show”). Over time, as the main properties get fewer downloads and move down the charts, the ability to sell the rest of the catalog along with them will decline – let alone trying to do so if those smaller shows are moved behind the paywall, too.

So why do it? Clearly the thinking is that the shows will be able to make more money for the Times by way of inducing subscriptions and/or lowering churn of current subscribers, while still holding their own on ad sales. The Times clearly has great internal data on subscriber behavior, so maybe this is true – but I don’t think so, and I think this will end up being walked back like every major podcast paywall initiative (see Rogan, Joe). The idea that’s central here is that people need the specific content of the Times‘ podcasts so much that they’ll subscribe, or not unsubscribe, at high rates to make sure they still have it. And I just don’t think that’s true – “The Daily” has been able to ride the reach of the Times as a platform company for journalism to a high perch on the charts, but there are plenty of other (very good, imo better) daily podcasts. “Serial” was a breakthrough hit and important for the medium, but it’s been years since it’s been culturally central, and the delayed-release strategy would make sure it becomes less so. Ezra Klein is a popular Times personality but nobody is paying hundreds of dollars a year to listen to Ezra; beyond that, the Times’ podcasts are good but explicitly not branded by the personality of the hosts, just as augments of the paper generally – these are not driving subscriptions, either.

If you want to have people pay for specific content the places where it works are either a) absolute gotta-have-it stuff, or b) content where the producers and audience have a more direct connection, and where it’s clear that it exists because of audience support. Networks like Maximum Fun survive because of the latter, as do many Patreon-supported shows (either those behind the paywall fully, or in a more public radio-style voluntary support model). The Times definitely isn’t b) – it’s a century-plus-old multi-billion-dollar corporation that’s in no small way in the business of putting other smaller newspapers out of business, at this point – and I don’t think its audio offerings are enough a) to make this any more than, maybe, a break-even proposition. Spotify couldn’t make it work with maybe the world’s biggest podcast, and a cheaper subscription program that also gives you access to all the music in the world; I don’t think the Times will make it work with shows that, while they have broad reach, are perfectly replaceable with other similar shows.

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Social Media Nervous Systems and Penumbra

July 30, 2023 by jkd

Jim Fallows puts quite well just what it is we have lost, with the necrosis of Twitter:

Twitter, now X or Xitter, is in hospice. No one knows how long this stage will last. Perhaps no one will ever know whether it was on purpose, through narcissistic impulse, or by sheer incompetence that Elon Musk destroyed the most valuable function that Twitter over 15 years had evolved to serve.

That role, Twitter at its best, was as a near-instant, near-global nervous system that could alert people to events anywhere. It could be an earthquake, an outbreak, an uprising, a World Cup match: through its own version of AI, the old Twitter could direct attention to the people and organizations best positioned to comment about it. That early AI-before-the-name was known as “verification,” which helped you know at a glance which updates were coming from, say, the Ukrainian government after a rocket attack, or Martina Navratilova during a Grand Slam match, or Joan Baez after a concert or protest march. And which updates were not.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/135526939

I think that’s exactly right, and it’s also why, no matter how amusing or interesting or low-level-pleasantly time-wasting Bluesky or Mastodon or Threads or etc., etc. might be, none of them is going to *replace* Twitter.

As Nilay Patel has elucidated repeatedly, the product of social media is moderation and while Twitter had, let’s just say an uneven record on this count, Fallows gets to the heart of what element of Twitter moderation actually worked: a combination of official architecture and hive-mind aggregation that could, faster than any media or technology we’ve had since or probably will have for a while, communicate what was happening.

This function, it’s worth noting, was already breaking down before Elon started guiding the ship to the bottom of the ocean – bad actors of all sorts (cynical political operatives, crypto/NFT scammers, etc.) were leveraging Twitter’s centrality in determining thing-happening-ness to spread mis- and disinformation, run grifts, and generally pollute the information space. It’s a wicked problem and maybe one that some retro-future version of Twitter management could have handled, but – alas.

None of the nascent alt-Twitters, however, are offering a model that (at present) stands a chance of recreating the Twitter-that-was – Bluesky’s velvet-rope approach of a closed beta with limited invites is inimical to scaling, and its moderation leaves something to be desired; Mastodon seems focused on being a scoldy nerd clubhouse; Threads is explicitly not going to be for news and politics, to say nothing of Meta’s, uh, uneven past with content moderation and current willingness to narc on users exercising their bodily autonomy, and help send them to prison. Threads’ rollout of a “Following” tab where you can actually see posts from people you follow (and only them) in chronological order is good – but they can’t help themselves, as there’s no way to make this permanent (it reverts to a suggested, non-chronological timeline every so often). This commitment to non-chronological sorting as a key property of the app (and the lack so far of a desktop app) makes it an impossible solution to the Twitter-shaped hole in our networks.

And there is a hole, even if you weren’t on Twitter. Getting back to Fallows’ metaphor, Twitter did indeed function as “a near-instant, near-global nervous system” that communicated to other parts of the global body. Famously, members of the media were over-represented there (for good reason! it’s where you found out about and disseminated news!) but also there were members of many communities – Black Twitter, comedians, shitposters, human rights activists, sports fans, and others – who performed the function not only of producing content on Twitter but also of connecting it to communities of interest. These niche communities had their own internal logics and discourses, and were connected with other digital networks – surfacing trends from other social media (over time, variously Tumblr, TikTok, and especially networks not dominant in the US and Western world) and also pushing content and consensuses from Twitter back over to those communities.

Importantly, the withering of Twitter does not mean that these local communities cease to exist – but they now in many cases lack a connection to mass-ness that Twitter provided. Not even necessarily Twitter itself, which topped out at about 30-something percent market share (dwarfed by Facebook and Instagram in the West, by other sites and protocols elsewhere) but in its connection to the over-posters and media members that defined its audience. Twitter was never quite a public square but it was an accelerant for discourse, and helped facilitate access to a megaphone for many groups that had never had that access or opportunity.

And most importantly, through that access and acceleration, it became, for a while, a place where you really could get more of a sense of the everything that was going on. Now: this mostly felt terrible. Twitter was the Hellsite for a reason – it’s hard to take on board all the news of the world, because so much of it is bad. But there was a moment of access and honesty to it all, a falling away of the scales from the eyes, the sense that you could for a minute see the system of the world.

Of course this wasn’t ever quite true, Twitter wasn’t real life, and so on. But it was more true, especially at moments of crisis, than has been so elsewhere – and Twitter’s lack of hard moderation made more of the uncomfortable truths bubble up. Threads very clearly doesn’t want that to happen – wants that not to happen. Mastodon wants to stick to its literal knitting. Bluesky wants all the jokes and fun of the top posters without the responsibility of mass scale. It’s not really even worth talking about the right-wing Twitter clones, who all inevitably fail because right-wing posters just want to harass and dunk on left-liberals, and don’t want to just hang out with each other. None of it quite works.

But I’m not sure we want it to work, right now, because I’m not sure there’s a coherent we that can bring together the combination of social knowledge and moderation theory, engineering expertise, capital, audience, and theory of the case. And maybe that’s fine. Google is actively and passively breaking search, money is rushing to “AI” tools that will eat the Internet, then themselves, and pollute the open Web with their excretions, Reddit is in the middle of a dramatic self-immolation, and journalism’s future looks bleak (with a few green shoots of possible futures). To say nothing of the ongoing epistemic crisis in the US and much of the rest of the world, with the underlying basis for determining truth increasingly divergent among communities.

There’s not a snappy ending here – we are kind of drifting in space. But I’ll end with a few questions, and endeavor to pursue those more in the future:

-What do you, personally, want an information ecosystem to look like? What would be good for you?

-What does a sustainable information ecosystem look like, in theory – and how does that hash or not, with the current conditions?

-What can we learn from the current bust cycle of mass social media, that can help inform whatever comes next?

More anon!

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The Shape of Social Media to Come (Again)

July 7, 2023 by jkd

I predicted Google+ would (or could) succeed. Why? Because Google already had access to our social graph, through Gmail. It failed.

Meta also has access to social graphs through Instagram – does it follow that Threads will succeed because of that? No. Will it also fail because Google+ failed? No.

But it will fail unless Meta learns (lol) what Google didn’t, and what they’ve already failed to learn on previous product launches: that the social graph isn’t static but dynamic, and they it also includes both cruft (old, now inessential connections) and frivolity (people, or accounts, that we follow for fun in one context but don’t really care about). As discussed on the Vergecast, Meta did make the right move in not basing the social graph for Threads on Facebook, which even it has to know is full of what basically amount to broken links. But they’re not alone – Twitter, even pre-Elon, was taking on a similar feel, with a lot of existing linkages and dominant voices coasting on inertia but not being currently essential in the same way. Instagram is a main source of connection for many, but for most, I’d argue it’s a source of passive entertainment or at least pleasant-enough distraction – these are not necessarily your emergency contacts (though they may be in there, somewhere – and many aren’t there at all).

Does Meta know the difference between these kinds of connections? I think they’d say they do, that our behavior is revealed preference, but I’m not sure. IG shows you what you engage with, yes, but also pushes you to engage with the algorithmically determined “stickiest” content – building a self-similarity into everyone’s social graph, with content made to meet those specs churning in an endless tautology.

All of these links in a given social graph are contextual and may or may not map directly into a social graph with different underlying context, fulfilling different underlying needs. Do I “really” want to read text from a cloyingly cynical cute cat account? Probably not! But mapping IG’s social graph to threads, including both connections and suggestions, means I’ll be opted into a system that thinks I want to.

Jason Gilbert nails the vibes, and the trajectory:

What does Threads feels like?

Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.

It feels like a Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone.

It feels like if an entire social network was those posts that tell you what successful entrepreneurs do before 6AM.

It feels like watching a Powerpoint from the Brand Research team where they tell you that Pop Tarts is crushing it on social.

It feels like Casual Friday on LinkedIn.

Will Threads last? I don’t know. It is an app stuffed with verified users I’ve never heard of who have 7 million YouTube subscribers. They all do Epic Pranks and they spread Positive Vibes and they Don’t Talk Politics Here.

And similarly, others have pointed out that the Good Internet is there the freaks and weirdos hang, and that the (mostly accidental) trajectory of Twitter as the place where freaks and weirdos hung out – and seeded the culture to make everyone a bit more of a freak and a weirdo (also unhappy, etc.) – was what made Twitter special, for a little while.

Threads will never be fun, it will never be weird – as Gilbert notes, its culture is being seeded by the winners and dominant presences of a separate social platform with its own established culture. Will it succeed? Maybe. There have been plenty of times in our culture where the fun and weird was purged from the mainstream. Mark Zuckerberg has a vision of culture that is not fun, that is not weird, but that is deeply prudish and misogynistic (as Taylor Lorenz notes – no [women’s] nips on Threads); it’s disconnected from the material circumstances of our world (Meta is currently threatening to remove all news links from Canadian Facebook). His vision of the world is happy-clappy, PG-rated soft focus positivity, with those who transgress thrown out of the garden with extreme prejudice, little explanation, and no recourse. We’ve certainly been in a similar place before, and maybe we’ll be there again (maybe we’re already there!).

But I hope one thing that comes out of this disruption is the freaks and the weirdos getting back to making their own fun, in their own spaces, for their own reasons. I don’t think that happens on a social media platform – or at least, not any of the ones we’re talking about now. But maybe at some point you’ll hear about it, and show up and lurk around the edges, and watch something new being made. 

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Paying Attention, and Paying for Attention

October 6, 2014 by jkd

Look at your phone. Go on, look at it. What is it?

It’s a clock. It’s a text-messaging glass slab. It’s a dynamically updating map/tracking device. It’s a ticket. It’s a late-night magazine. It’s an alarm clock. It’s a camera, photo album and publishing platform. It’s a gaming device, newsfeed(s), and a tether keeping work with you 24 hours a day.

Your laptop: it’s forty tabs open at once, word processing documents, music libraries (if you’re old), an EVEN BETTER gaming device, a TV and movie-watching platform, an audio editing suite, and, uh, other forms of entertainment.

You use these devices for dozens of different purposes, out of convenience and functional capacities. What I want you to think about is who you are in each of those purposes, and for whom you are in those purposes.

One of the most intriguing findings from my dissertation research (read it! become a member of a tiny club!) lo these four years ago was the degree to which students segregated audiences by medium. As I put it, they “use different communications technologies in their interactions with social, familial and academic audiences, in part as a manner of combatting the context collapse taking place on social network sites and mediated communications generally.” More directly: they talked to their friends via text message and Facebook message, called their parents on the phone, and only and ever talked to their professors in person and via email. That was, as they say, interesting, and something worthy of further study.

Well: I didn’t. But while the particular practices have shifted in the intervening time, these behaviors are no less intriguing or worthy of study and contemplation.

Cross-medium behavioral research is rare for a number of reasons. It’s expensive, difficult, time-consuming, methodologically fraught, ethically fraught. But I think the main limiting factor is that in any given moment, the incentives for any organization or individual performing research is to answer their central questions, as quickly/cheaply as possible. For an advertising firm: how did a given campaign deliver on KPIs as promised to the client? For an academic researcher: how does X behavior impact on my hopefully-tenure-securing line of research? For a membership organization: what were the A/B test results on a fundraising solicitation?

And to be crystal clear, this is NOT a problem solved by “Big Data.” Few but the most world-spanning organizations have the capacity to iteratively formulate hypotheses, expand data collection across boundaries, and act on findings. And the evidence suggests that even those world-spanning organizations don’t really know what to do with their endless reams of data. But, really, that’s neither here nor there: if you aren’t inside one of the world’s larger walled gardens of behavioral data, you’re still left with the same question. Namely: just who are your users, and who (and when, and how) are you to your users?

One of the foremost issues is attention. There are two ways of looking at attention: as something to maintain, and as something to be acquired. From your perspective, dear reader, you of course want to maintain sustained attention – on relationships, on work, on engaging culture. An advertiser, on the other hand, wants to capture your attention. Chartbeat – which makes a fantastic suite of products for publishers, that I’ve used and enjoyed – is part of a tech vanguard that recognizes this. As they put it:

Online publishers know clicks don’t always reflect content quality.

But research shows more time spent paying attention to content does.

Advertisers know click-through rates don’t matter for display or paid content.

Research shows 2 things matter for getting a brand’s message across: the ad creative and the amount of time someone spends with it.

The Attention Web is about optimizing for your audience’s true attention.

From their perspective, attention equals quality, and a shift to focusing on quantifying attention means better quality content (oh and also more clients). It’s a compelling thesis – but then, it is your attention that they’re selling, to advertisers. Others are more interested in selling your attention to, well, you:

As our computing devices have become smaller, faster, and more pervasive, they have also become more distracting. The numbers are compelling: Americans spend 11 hours per day on digital devices, workers are digitally interrupted every 10.5 minutes, with interruptions costing the U.S. economy an estimated $650 Billion per year. That’s a lot of distraction.

Device makers have largely turned a blind eye to this issue, building distractions in to the very devices we need for work. We address this challenge with tools that simply and effectively reduce digital distractions. Our software interrupts the habitual cycle of distraction associated with social media, streaming sites, and games.

Attention is basically an adversarial dynamic: your devices and the advertiser-supported content therein yelling at you while you struggle to maintain concentration. Many or most of us are in this stage of managing our relationships with digital communicative prostheses – a struggle. It’s not a struggle without benefits, but nor is it one without costs – study after study shows the costs to both productivity and personal health and well-being of a consistently-interrupted existence.

A central part of this struggle is creating a hierarchy – either explicit or implicit – of attention. When do you respond to a text message? It depends when you receive it, and from whom. Do you return an email? Again: who sent it, work or personal, when did it get received? And then: what do you read, or listen to? That also depends – how did you get there? A link from a friend, an immediately-forgotten source on your social media timeline, through a series of unreproducible clicks? The depth, length, and quality of the attention devoted depends on all these factors and more – but I believe it’s impossible to understand the meaning of a given interaction without looking at how these hierarchies are created.

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Big Data and Foxes

March 19, 2014 by jkd

Earlier this week I went to an excellent discussion put on by danah boyd and her Data & Society Research Institute, entitled “Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of ‘Big Data.’” Right off the top, I have to give major kudos to danah for organizing a fantastic panel that incorporated a great combination of voices – who, not for nothing (indeed, for a lot) were not just a bunch of white dudes (only one white dude, in fact) – from across different disciplines and perspectives. I’ll do a brief play-by-play to set the table for a couple of larger thoughts.

Following a rigorously on-message video from John Podesta and fairly anodyne talk (well, except for this) from Nicole Wong from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, danah led off with introductory remarks and passed off to Anil Dash, who served excellently as moderator (mostly by staying out of the way, as he made a point of noting). Alondra Nelson from Columbia University was first up, giving an account by turns moving, terrifying, and engaging on the state of play and human consequences flowing from DNA databases – both those managed by law enforcement and the loopholes that allow privately-managed data repositories to skirt privacy protections. She was followed by Shamina Singh from the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth, who provided several on-the-ground examples of working with governments, NGOs, and poor people to more efficiently deliver social benefits. In particular, she focused on a MasterCard program to provide direct transfers of cash to refugee populations, cutting out the vastly inefficient global aid infrastructure network.

Singh was followed by Steven Hodas from the New York City Department of Education, who laid out an illuminating picture of the lifecycle of data in education systems, the ways in which private actors subvert and undermine public privacy, and – not just a critic – offered a genuinely thought-provoking new way of thinking about how to regulate dissemination of private information. The excellent Kate Crawford batted cleanup, discussing predictive privacy harms and what she called “data due process.” Dash facilitated a very long and almost entirely productive audience question and discussion session (45 minutes, at the least), and I left with many more things on my mind than I entered with. I’d had the privilege of listening to eight different speakers, each from a background either subtly or radically different from one another. Not once did a speaker follow another just like them, and no small value came in the synthesis from those differing perspectives and those of the audience.

This week also saw the relaunch of FiveThirtyEight.com under its new ESPN/Disney instance. It was launched with a manifesto from founder Nate Silver, entitled “What the Fox Knows,” which is a bit meandering but generally comes down as setting FiveThirtyEight as opposed to both traditional journalism and science research, based on some fairly blithe generalizations of those fields. What it doesn’t quite do, oddly for a manifesto, is state just what FiveThirtyEight is for other than a sort of process and attitudinal approach. Marx (or even Levine/Locke/Searls/Weinberger) it ain’t.

Silver has come in for no small criticism, and not just from his normal antagonists. Emily Bell laid out the rather less-than-revolutionary staffing makeup of the current raft of new-media startups, led by Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and Silver. And Paul Krugman detailed some rather serious concerns about Silver’s approach:

you can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you’re really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can’t test your assumptions if you don’t even know what you’re assuming.)

These two critiques are not unrelated. Bell called out Silver for his desire for a “clubhouse,” and rightly so, because groupthink clubhouses – whether of insiders or outsiders – are the most fertile breeding grounds for implicit theorizing. Krugman revisited and expanded his critique, saying:

I hope that Nate Silver understands what it actually means to be a fox. The fox, according to Archilocus, knows many things. But he does know these things — he doesn’t approach each topic as a blank slate, or imagine that there are general-purpose data-analysis tools that absolve him from any need to understand the particular subject he’s tackling. Even the most basic question — where are the data I need? — often takes a fair bit of expertise.

Which brings me around to the beginning of this post. The value in Monday’s discussion flowed directly from both the diversity – in professional background, gender, ethnicity – and the expertise of the speakers present. They each spoke deeply from a particular perspective, and while “Big Data” was the through-line connecting them, the content which animated their discussion, approach, and theorizing was specific to their experience and expertise. The systems that create data have their own biases and agenda, which only discipline-specific knowledge can help untangle and correct for. There is still no Philosopher’s Stone, but base metals have their own stories. Knowing their essential properties isn’t easy or quick, but little is easy that’s of lasting and real value.

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Coffee, DRM, and Microsoft Windows

March 10, 2014 by jkd

There’s been a lot of hyperventilating over the recent news that Green Mountain is going to start cracking down on competitors designing coffee pods for their gross coffee makers:

With its single-serving coffee pods, Green Mountain Coffee has transformed the business of brew. Pop a capsule into one of the company’s Keurig machines, and the machine will instantly churn out your daily caffeine dose.

But Green Mountain doesn’t want copycats taking the business it pioneered away. That’s why CEO Brian Kelley says its new coffee makers will include technology that prevents people from using pods from other companies. The approach has been compared to DRM restrictions that limit the sharing of digital music and video online. But more than just curbing your coffee choices, Green Mountain’s protections portend the kind of closed system that could gut the early promise of the Internet of Things — a promise that hinges on a broad network of digital, connected devices remaking the everyday world.

Cory Doctorow thinks it’s a bridge too far and might end up promoting a backlash, or that Green Mountain’s overzealousness might end up with good court rulings against them. Dan Gillmor isn’t bothered by the coffee pods per se but takes a rather grander tone in conclusion:

We’re still in the early days of this war – and make no mistake, that’s what we face. The interests that want control over our lives and pocketbooks are wealthy and powerful. People are waking up to the threat. Now we all need to fight back.

I don’t disagree with either, really, but am a bit more sanguine in general, because of Microsoft Windows.  Windows might be a bit of a punchline these days, but I’m old enough to remember when it was an existential threat to commerce and resulted in one of the biggest antitrust cases ever. Though the ruling ended up going against Microsoft, the remedies were, through our current view, pretty minor. There were no Baby Bills, and Microsoft continued to have a crushing monopoly on the operating system and office productivity suite market, and make money hand over fist.

And then… the world changed. Microsoft continued to fundamentally misunderstand the Internet, and Apple managed not to go out of business and then became the plucky underdog and then the one of world’s most profitable corporations. Google won the search wars and then started eating everything remotely related (and not) in sight; Facebook was the best/last SNS. And Microsoft still had a massively profitable near-monopoly on the operating system and office productivity suite markets. The Beige Eminence of Redmond continues to have a massive role in day-to-day life around the world, often in problematic ways. But the last 15 years of tech history have shown that despite market control and massive profits, Microsoft cannot shape events entirely to their liking. They were chastened by U.S. v Microsoft, sure, but remain far more chastened by the fact that Internet Explorer and Bing are terrible and nobody likes them. Billions of person-hours are spent annually in computers with Microsoft OSes and in Word and Excel – but that hasn’t changed the fact that Microsoft cannot understand at a very basic level, the things that people spend most of their time doing on computers.

So: coffee pods. Coffee pods were a good idea as a response to legitimately terrible/inconsistent office coffee; to people who like coffee but don’t think about it too much and like not having to clean up coffee grounds (but seriously people, COMPOST, that is some good compost there); and a clever dumbed-down cashing-in on wider use of espresso machines. I briefly worked a job where the office had one – that was great, because otherwise the coffee would have been worse-than-mediocre, in all likelihood; I like it when I stay in a hotel and there’s a coffee pod machine there. But I’ve never for a second considered getting one, myself.

But mostly, coffee pods are a cheap plastic mediocrity, a Beige Eminence which performs the task of producing coffee product with little thought nor distinction. The principle of defending markets from monopolistic domination is important within a system of regulated capitalism (see: US broadband access), but in this case, what is the principle really defending? The opportunity for other suppliers to make a slightly-thinner margin on a mediocre way of delivering coffee to office workers and lazy suburbanites? And there are plenty of other coffee pod standards. It’s also not as if there’s any lack of ways to make – much better! just as easily! – coffee. Or tea. Green Mountain’s power play is, ultimately, a small-time move that doesn’t really impact important innovation in coffee delivery systems. It’s also a natural impulse and end result of our particular market system, and isn’t really worth worrying about until and unless a number of lawsuits that haven’t happened yet have bad results.

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The Death of Comments

March 5, 2014 by jkd

I don’t know if this quite qualifies as a trend, but then, trend pieces don’t need real facts, so what the hey. Something I’ve noticed these last months across several major sites, is a move away from the traditional, boring-but-understood approach to comments. While pretty much everyone already agreed that YouTube comments were the worst thing on the Internet, somehow Google managed to make them worse. Not more misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or violent – that’d be hard – but far more nonsensical. In necessitating a Google+ account (which, mea culpa, continues to be totally useless), it shut out many, and in re-threading the conversations based on “relevance” it took away the free-wheeling (often awful, but still) conversational threads of comment sections.

Similar complaints have followed on Gawker’s transition to Kinja, but perhaps the most ridiculous post-comment context has to be Voice Media Group’s new “My Voice Nation” system, which I was alerted to after it pulled in a second-order @ exchange I’d had about one of its stories. Not the tweet itself, but the conversation I’d had about the tweet, with a friend. The “comment section” thus becomes a random mash of unrelated, unconnected words – a documentation of buzz, perhaps, but in no ways a conversation.

And of course: I never signed up for that. I did send that tweet, yes, and I suppose that’s public-ish, but again – not all publicly accessible data is meant to be publicized. I’m guessing most people won’t ever notice, but for me, I’ll just make sure to never send out or comment on a piece of Voice Media Group content unless it’s unavoidable (which is to say: never).

What’s curious about this Death of Comments is that they’re not being eliminated as a feature for principled reasons, or as a straight cost-benefit analysis (i.e., it doesn’t really make sense to have a community manager paid to make the comments not *quite* so execrable). Rather, the transition seems to be away from comments and towards a comment-like substance – words related to the content, written at some point in some medium, presented in some relation to the content. I’m not sure what the long game is on that, but it’s all a little lorem ipsumy for my taste.

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Quick Thoughts on “Facebook’s Decline”

January 15, 2013 by jkd

Following on news from the Guardian that Facebook saw a nearly 2% decline in active UK users over the holidays, I thought I’d briefly cover some of the implications of this news, from my perspective.

  • Obviously this has been coming for quite a while in core markets. As the Guardian notes, in the UK Facebook has 53% market penetration, second only to the US at 54%; in terms of gross users, the US has 169M, Brazil 65M, India 63M. Clearly the play is hoping on further expansion in the latter two markets – but that proposition is tenuous, both because the of the fast-growing but still-smaller middle classes there, and because,
  • Facebook still doesn’t get mobile. Its apps are still only-OK in terms of usability, and as witnessed by the Instagram terms-of-service clusterfcuk – which resulted in more than 50% decline in users – Facebook has a fairly poor understanding of the mobile user. Which is especially unfortunate for its future expansion in emerging markets – e.g., Brazil, India – as connectivity there is primarily through mobile devices, and not desktops.
  • Facebook as public company has always been a questionable proposition, as its whole model of ad-rate-growth-driven-by-traffic-growth-driven-by-user-growth is inherently untenable given that… at a certain point you run out of users. Also, the fact that every social network site so far has seen long-term time-on-site decline from its core users. Basically: if you’ve been shorting $FB, you’ve got to be feeling pretty good right now.
  • Facebook as social utility isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Too many people, content providers, websites, and the general infrastructure of the Web have too much locked in for that to happen. But there are various ways that it can evolve from here. I’m still convinced that long-term there will be a competitive market for identity hosting, and that Facebook’s best move is to get in front of that in both setting open standards and providing a premium service; but we shall see.

     

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