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What Power Does a Subscriber Have?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on October 29, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 28, 2024| 1 Comment »

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

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 26, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on July 30, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 7, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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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The Death of Comments

Posted in Uncategorized on March 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »

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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The Transition from Email to Social Media

Posted in Uncategorized on August 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I wrote a column for the Txchnologist, and it’s over here. If you like what I’ve been writing about here recently, you’ll like this too. A preview:

Social media, despite its centrality in our daily lives, still causes most businesses to tremble with fear. They fear liability over what employees may post in their official capacity. They fear embarrassing information posted by employees, both current and potential, in their off hours. They conduct social media “background checks” to ferret out anything that might reflect poorly on the business. Such is this fear that social media sites are discouraged or outright blocked at many workplaces.

As modes of business communication, social media channels are treated as loudspeakers, with messages painstakingly cleared through legal and public relations, polished to perfect sheen and void of real meaning. Meanwhile, email remains the central trusted tool of business communications. Used internally, it is the official channel for directives, meeting planning and document-sharing. It is the central way to communicate anything that matters both within your organization and to any collaborators. For external communications, email lists are built, maintained and bombarded. Huge marketing dollars are spent formulating email segmentation strategies, word-smithing, and tracking open rates.

All of this is entirely backwards.

Read the whole thing!

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Communications Segmentation

Posted in Uncategorized on February 8, 2011| 1 Comment »

TechCrunch reports on a recent ComScore report highlighting changes in webmail usage:


In introducing his messaging platform last November Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said one of the primary motivations behind Messages product strategy was that teenagers have given up on email, “High school kids don’t use email, they use SMS a lot. People want lighter weight things like SMS and IM to message each other.”

A comScore report on 2010 digital trends reinforces at least part of Zuckerberg’s claim.  It’s inevitable: Innovative social messaging platforms like Facebook and Twitter as well mobile communications continue to dominate our online time, and web email begins its steady decline. Total web email usage was down 8% in the past year (YOY), with a whopping 59% decline in use among people between the ages of 12-17. Cue Matt Drudge -style alarm.

Usage was also down 1% among 18-24 year olds, 18% among 25-35 year olds, 8% among 35-44 year olds and 12% among the 45-54 demographic. Because oldsters are continuing to migrate online in droves, web email use actually saw an uptick in the AARP-eligible sector, with 22% gains among 55-64 year olds and 28% among those 65 and older. Obviously this was not enough to offset the decline in youth usage.

Though the numbers don’t lie, “webmail is dying” is entirely the wrong way to look at it. My dissertation research found similar figures in terms of the pre-eminence of social communications methods: cell phones and texting are the center of young peoples’ (in that case, college students’) social universe, with Facebook messages more popular than email for social communications. Contra Zuck, IM is not used as frequently or centrally in their social communications, and it’s my hunch that for the most part it’s getting pushed out by texting.

But all of this changes in a professional context. Young people still use email for communicating with their parents and, in the context of college, want to only use email (and face-to-face meetings) to communicate with their professors: no cell, texting, IM, Facebook messages. Definitely not. This divide was further explicated in interviews where students described that email was for professors, internships (and bosses there), and campus organizations – mailing lists and the like.

What’s clear is that while webmail and email are, among younger cohorts, losing their social centrality, they are not going away at all. Rather, email is becoming increasingly professionally branded. Old people (e.g., me) still use it (albeit at slightly decreasing rates) for social communications, and the ComScore report shows that the oldest cohorts are actually using it increasingly for those communications. But email has become the central tool for business communications, and as young people enter a workforce that is actually increasingly adopting webmail for professional purposes – notice the flat number among 18-24s and smaller decreases above that – email usage will endure. It just might get left at the office.

 

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Police States are Bad Ideas

Posted in Uncategorized on April 20, 2010| 2 Comments »

This is why:

Lower Merion School District employees activated the web cameras and tracking software on laptops they gave to high school students about 80 times in the past two school years, snapping nearly 56,000 images that included photos of students, pictures inside their homes and copies of the programs or files running on their screens, district investigators have concluded.

In most of the cases, technicians turned on the system after a student or staffer reported a laptop missing and turned it off when the machine was found, the investigators determined.

But in at least five instances, school employees let the Web cams keep clicking for days or weeks after students found their missing laptops, according to the review. Those computers – programmed to snap a photo and capture a screen shot every 15 minutes when the machine was on – fired nearly 13,000 images back to the school district servers.

If authorities have the ability to behave badly, some of them always will. Which is why stuff like this is especially bad:

The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their master plan for enforcing copyright to the new Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Richard Esguerra points out, it’s a startlingly distopian work of science fiction. The entertainment industry calls for:

  • spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials;
  • mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material;
  • border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives;
  • international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies;
  • and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security!).

The Fourth Amendment has been gutted pretty extensively over the past generation, but if “unreasonable search and seizure” has any meaning at all, it should mean that neither the government nor private corporations should be legally empowered to constantly monitor our activities through our own computers.

I’ve thought for a while that the coming divide in our politics is not going to be one of conservatism versus liberalism, but about authoritarianism versus a politics of individual liberty. News like this goes to reinforce that belief, as does the acrimony of our current political climate in the US. More on the latter, later, but I’ll reiterate the main point: it’s a bad idea to give authorities unlimited surveillance powers because they will always, always be abused.

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Communications Channels, eReaders

Posted in Uncategorized on January 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I’ll heartily second what Jim Fallows says here (though without rehashing my earlier anti-Kindle thoughts, I wouldn’t say it’s an argument for the Kindle per se so much as eReaders in general):

My main view on communications media is that new systems usually add to old ones, rather than displacing them. Radio didn’t eliminate books and newspapers — that would come later!; movies didn’t eliminate still photos; TV didn’t eliminate either movies or radio; and the internet has not (yet) eliminated TV. A few communications systems do disappear altogether, except for specialist/curio use: vinyl records, photos on real film, etc. Usually the field just becomes more crowded and the options more diverse.

So it will be, at least for a while, with e-readers like the Kindle versus “real” books.

To add to this a bit, what I think this kind of innovation in new communications channels does is to rationalize the kind of content on each. For all the nostalgia that some (e.g., me) have about obsolete forms, books do a better job at holding novels than newspapers, so we don’t see serialized novels anymore. Similarly, TV and movies do a better job at dramatic narrative than radio, so very few radio dramas still exist. But radio’s still excellent at talk shows and sports broadcasts (safer, too, if you’re driving), and the nature of the technology means that nowadays we can shove a radio into just about anything else (e.g., cell phones).

eReaders are going to perform a similar function – eventually (sooner than later) they will mostly eliminate the printing of many academic texts and monographs (and this is going to be a good thing for the people who write those texts, but more on that later). There’s probably a good place for magazines on eReaders but I’m not quite sure on what that is. Many of the books at the top of best-seller lists will find a lot of their sales (or in the Kindle’s case, rentals) moving very quickly to eReaders once there’s a critical mass – which makes sense for the most disposable (if fun) stories. Nobody’s really that well-served by several dozen more Dan Brown books ending up in used book stores.

In the end, eReaders represent not a replacement for books but an overlapping-but-complimentary form. They’ll absolutely cut into book sales but there will be a new equilibrium whereby booksellers will be able to more clearly see what their market is, and isn’t.

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