Werd I/O

This week, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the New York Times how he plans to continue to monetize his service:

Twitter’s core business of selling ads that are inserted into the flow of tweets that every user sees has plenty of room to grow, he said. The social network’s ideal model is for ads to make up about one in 20 tweets that the average user sees - the same level that Facebook strives for. "We're well below that now," he said.

The web, which has long been in competition with Facebook and Twitter, is racing to catch up. Analysts haven't been kind; last month, an editorial in Forbes sniped that "the web doesn't seem to be trying to raise its market cap at all". This has led Carl Icahn and others to question whether a new board is in order. In response, Tim Berners-Lee, CEO of the web, told reporters this week:

Starting this quarter, we're monetizing the web. Around 5% of the written sentences that users, or "surfers", see will be tasteful contextual advertising, which will add value and increase engagement. We've always been about linked data, and now we're linking it to a number of easy, convenient ways to pay to reach your audience.

The web will also introduce a new Pro version, launching this September, which will include several new tags, unlimited access to HTTP, and a "professionals mode".

Andrew Keen's new book The Internet is not the Answer takes a contrarian view to the digital revolution:

Instead, it has handed extraordinary power and wealth to a tiny handful of people, while simultaneously, for the rest of us, compounding and often aggravating existing inequalities – cultural, social and economic – whenever and wherever it has found them. Individually, it may work wonders for us. Collectively, it’s doing us no good at all. “It was supposed to be win-win,” Keen declares. “The network’s users were supposed to be its beneficiaries. But in a lot of ways, we are its victims.”

Andrew has forged a career from standing to the side of the Internet gold rush and saying, "wait a minute". This isn't a criticism; we need that voice, I think, to counterbalance the cheerleading role that the tech press typically fills. In particular, as the Guardian points out:

The US government’s decision, in 1991, to throw the nascent network open to private enterprise amounted, as one leading (and now eye-wateringly wealthy) Californian venture capitalist has put it, to “the largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet”.

Wealth in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But what Keen seems to be suggesting is that this has actually in part been obtained by devaluing other peoples' jobs - it's not wealth creation, in the same sense that software is something created from nothing, but rather wealth redistribution. The jobs that were rendered obsolete have not been recreated; there is no employment equilibrium. In particular, the article and the book cite figures that show a significant downturn in jobs for creatives.

There's a tricky conversation to be had here. Some of those jobs were bolstered by models that should not continue to exist, while few of us would argue that we don't value art or creative work. New models must therefore be found to support artists. (Companies like my friends at the Creative Action Network are doing great work here.)

It's been pointed out to me more than once that the 20th century models for selling creative work were very temporary. After I posted recently that relying on donations wasn't a sustainable practice, my friend J. Nathan Matias also pointed out that nonprofit arts and cultural organizations have a higher survival rate than businesses in America (PDF link). Elsewhere, arts are often funded (I think rightly) from public money. I'm not sure how much of this funding goes into creative work online, but anecdotally, I'd love to see more.

Artists themselves need more freedom to experiment online. The first years of the web were highly experimental, and many of the first startups could be thought of as art projects. However, over the last few years we've seen this slip away, to be replaced with projects that are either obvious land grabs (Uber, Spotify, food delivery apps and laundry startups, for example) or have settled into homogenizing advertising display funnels (Facebook). It's worth saying that some of the best startups, like Slack, have avoided this pattern, and retained a sense of whimsical experimentation. Meanwhile, projects like CASH Music and the aforementioned C.A.N. are transparently fighting for the artists. I'd hope that creative workers feel that they can take our project, Known, and use it as the basis of their own creative sites. But it's now the exception rather than the rule.

Yet, I know I've discovered all kinds of new artists across mediums. Meanwhile, reductive lists like the Billboard Charts have massively declined in importance for many listeners (which I think is a very good thing). The Internet is not the same thing as its prevailing business models, and I simply don't buy the implied argument that the Internet has been a net negative. But I do think it's worth having a conversation about who is hurting - and if nothing else, using it to figure out who has a problem just waiting for a startup, or a non-profit, to solve.

I enjoyed this episode of the New Tech City podcast about the case for boredom:

It's a part of their Bored and Brilliant project, which attempts to encourage us to spend more time stewing in our own mental juices. The argument is that we spend too much of our time using our brain to attend to structured tasks, including checking social media and responding to notifications, and not enough time daydreaming.

It rings true for me, but I'd go further.

We live in a very goal-orientated society. Everything seems to be about setting goals and realizing them. There are so many resources, and so many products, that are about helping you be more productive. There's also so much of a macho culture around this that having dead time - just chilling out, not checking your email, going for a walk with nothing in your pocket - is almost frowned upon.

That's already no fun. But it's also counter-productive. There are countless studies which show that "boredom" lead to creativity, while countless more show that taking time off makes you a better worker. But more fundamentally, these attitudes all hang on the idea that your goals are correct to begin with. If you are following your goals with laser focus, you're not only limiting your opportunities for creativity, but you're actually losing opportunities to learn and grow. If you're obsessively measuring your productivity in terms of quantifiable metrics, as many of us do, you're losing the ability to qualitatively test if you're doing the right thing at all. Creativity is an essential part of being human.

One common meme from the obsessive-productivity camp is the idea that we should "live deliberately", or "live intentionally": turn your life into a series of conscious, carefully-considered, mindful decisions. I mean, sure; the world could certainly use more consideration. Nonetheless, I think you also need to leave room for "meandering aimlessly": allowing for serendipity and the kind of semi-conscious, uninterrupted thought that leads to more creative ideas and actions over time. Jeff Bezos noted that the people who are correct more of the time are the ones who have the freedom to change their minds. Steve Jobs famously said that taking LSD was one of the most important things he ever did (and other industry figures have, privately, advocated taking shrooms); maybe it would also have helped to spend more time chilling out.

That doesn't mean there needs to be a framework for it, copyrighted and sold, that we should all strictly adhere to because it makes us better people. If all this talk about the benefits of daydreaming leads to a Daydreaming Productivity Technique, I will barf. It's not the point. The point is that we need to allow ourselves to be human, to disconnect, and set our minds free once in a while. We'll all be better off for it.

Andrew Sullivan, the veteran political blogger, is quitting. As Ezra Klein at Vox noted:

The blogosphere lives. But Sullivan's decision to hang up his keyboard is nevertheless a marker. Sullivan was the closest we had to someone trying to run a blog with real scale. He was trying to make his blog — and its sizable audience — into a business. But blogging, for better or worse, is proving resistant to scale. And I think there are two reasons why.

Meanwhile, Emily Bell, the Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, dedicated her Hugh Cudlipp lecture on journalism to the power that social networks hold over modern news:

Social networks and search engines are the masters of this universe. As we see the disappearance of print as a significant medium, and the likely decline of broadcast television, the paths our stories and journalism must travel down to reach readers and viewers are being shaped by technologies beyond our control.

These are two sides of the same problem. On one hand, Sullivan is finding it unsustainable to maintain his blog. Meanwhile, on the other, Emily Bell points out that newspapers are not in control of their delivery mechanisms or social reach, and essentially are at the mercy of the policies of the social networking companies.

In Gigaom, Mathew Ingram agrees with Bell's assessment:

Social networks like Facebook need the content that comes from media outlets because that’s what drives the engagement they need to sell advertising. But journalism and journalistic organizations should get something in return, and that is a commitment to at least consider the principles that should apply to such content, since they now control how and when (or even if) people see it.

The question is, will they?

I would argue not. As I pointed out at Hacks and Hackers last month, the interests of the social networking companies are at odds with the interests of news and journalism. Content is routinely removed for being controversial, whereas the nature of a lot of news is inherently controversial. Journalism is a brave profession with a strict separation between editorial and revenue control structures, whereas social networks deliberately engineer specific responses in order to sell ads and maintain engagement. Those aren't good traits for a news medium.

In fact, optimizing for engagement leads to increasingly emotionally manipulative content. Wired reports that Facebook is testing engagement across different kinds of content:

“We really try to not express any editorial judgment,” Adam Mosseri, News Feed product director, tells Levy. “We might think that Ferguson is more important than the Ice Bucket Challenge but we don’t think we should be forcing people to eat their vegetables even though we may or may not think vegetables are healthy.”

[...] Unfortunately, so far, it looks like users are less willing to engage with “meaningful” stories or news, preferring anything that triggers a strong emotional response. But Facebook is hopeful that when it begins asking users about sets of stories instead of individual items people will start to reward informative content.

Facebook, of course, makes its money through advertising, so its primary driver is engagement: encouraging people to see and interact with sponsored content. Twitter is heading in a similar direction, with features like While You Were Away that highlight content they think you should see.

Which brings us back to blogging. A weblog is just a series of articles on your own site. The problems that bloggers have with finding an audience are very similar to the problems that news organizations have with finding an audience on their own sites. In both cases, referrals from social networks are key: Facebook alone is responsible for almost 25% of all referred traffic. (And the average smartphone user checks Facebook 14 times a day.) It wouldn't be possible, or wise, for most publishers to turn their back on these audiences, despite the opacity of the news feed. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Medium clearly sees an opportunity here to be a go-to news feed for serious readers. Their acquisition of the 2015 State of the Union address was a statement of intent. As the Washington Post noted:

Compare that with the response of Kate Lee, Medium senior editor, when asked why the White House would seek out Medium: “You’re publishing to a place that has millions of readers.” Lee says the site, the creation of Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, gets about 20 million unique visitors per month. “People are already here, and they’re much more likely to discover your piece.” Clean and user-friendly though WhiteHouse.gov and other sites may be, they “exist in their own silos and it can be hard to get people to come to you.” Lee declined to say just how much traffic the State of the Union remarks generated but seemed quite happy with the results.

It's an interesting turn of phrase to describe WhiteHouse.gov, and other organizations' own sites, as silos. Medium is also a silo: you must publish directly on the site, and there are no incoming APIs. It is another social network, albeit one that's done a very good job at attracting high quality writers and readers, and it is not necessarily less of a threat to news organizations. Because the content is hosted on Medium, it is also not a viable alternative to a newspaper, say. There's no way for writers to make money from their content.

The simple answer is that we don't yet have what we need, as readers or publishers - and although the ability to easily find audiences and new content is not readily built into the medium, the web has many of the building blocks. I keep coming back to Anil Dash's seminal essay The Web We Lost, where he describes what we get when we lose the open nature of the web as a platform:

We get excuses about why we can't search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

In his follow-up, Rebuilding the Web We Lost, he makes the opportunity clear:

As is obvious from the responses I've gotten, many, many people care about a social web that honors certain human and creative values. As I've spent years thinking about the right way to write for this blog, and to build ThinkUp, and to sit on the board at Stack Exchange, and to advise clients at Activate, and to work on all the other stuff I do, I just keep running into the fact that there's a huge opportunity to make a great new generation of human-friendly apps with positive social values.

That's certainly what we aim to be building with Known. We want to help people communicate and find audiences from their own websites (as I'm doing right now from mine). It's also a goal of the indie web and related communities.

An informed voting population is vital to democracy; anything that subverts our ability to receive news and information is, in effect, subverting democracy. However, there's also a hugely valuable market for content that's just waiting to be set free. Facebook isn't going away any time soon - but it may be joined by new, more open applications. As Anil Dash describes them: a new generation of human-friendly apps with positive social values.

Which seems to me to be exactly what Emily Bell was talking about.

One of the first conversations I had when I moved to California was with Kaliya, about alternative models of ownership for startups. I know it's something that's come up at events like Future of Money, and it's interesting to see it emerge in USV's question of the week. What would community-owned applications look like? Are they even possible?

Growing up in Oxford, I lived around the corner from a Co-op: a national, collectively-owned chain of small supermarkets and other community businesses. Co-operative branches employ over 70,000 people, and their ownership structure makes them accountable to their communities, resulting in products and policies that are generally high-quality and ethical.

Every person who works there is an owner, and so was I: I paid £1, and in return I got a better deal and, importantly, a share of the profits. That never amounted to a lot of money, but I felt like I was part of it. This is the important bit: I also got to vote on policies, management and local representatives. It was a bit like being a part of a privately-owned democracy.

I think when a lot of people think of community ownership, they immediately imagine the stereotypical archetype of communal living, with anti-capitalist principles and heated arguments over basic ideas. That's not how it works out in practice, either for healthy small-scale communal ownership arrangements or for national co-operatives. Around the corner from me now, another co-operative - Cheeseboard Pizza - draws lines around the block twice a day, and has opened a second branch downtown. They're out to make a profit. And the Co-operative is a thriving business that includes one of the most prominent banks in the UK.

I think this model - community ownership governed by a council of representatives - could work for startups and applications, but it needs to be balanced against a startup's need to scrappily prototype and fail fast. A management bureaucracy is not going to help with those things.

So how about a community-owned venture capital firm?

One of the major criticisms of modern VC has been about the perceived bias towards exits, whatever the cost. That's for good structural reasons: firms need to deliver a return to their limited partners. The "whatever the cost" thing is overblown - investors understand the links between good business practices and good returns - but nonetheless, there is certainly room to test alternative models.

A co-operative venture capital firm would not be the same as crowdfunding. The fund would be managed by the firm's partners - but the firm's partners, investment hypothesis and policies would be voted on as part of a co-operative structure. Investment decisions would be made by representatives, in order to protect the privacy of the startups under consideration. (In other words, ordinary members, paying the equivalent of my £1 to the Co-op, would not get board-level information rights or to attend pitches.) But the fund's ethics and performance would ultimately be judged by a wide array of members, who ultimately will see dividends from the returns if it performs well. It would be, in effect, an open-access, democratically-run, rolling VC fund.

I'd consider this to be less dangerous than crowdfunding for members: there, I'm expected to do my own due diligence and keep on top of company performance. Startups also potentially miss out on the mentoring and partnership that they might ordinarily get from an investor. In this model, I have representatives that I elect, who are paid to do that diligence and nurture their portfolio based on principles and ethics that I helped vote on.