Werd I/O

Emily Bell has a timely opinion piece in The Guardian today about Facebook's ethical responsibility with respect to news:

Facebook’s retreat from news, and the complexities of taking responsibility for the type of content circulating on its platform, has many implications for press organisations in the US and Europe, but at least in rich, western democracies, its actions can be mitigated by other strategies. In countries such as the Philippines, Myanmar and South Sudan and emerging democracies such Bolivia and Serbia, it is not ethical to plead platform neutrality or to set up the promise of a functioning news ecosystem and then simply withdraw at a whim.

Yes, Facebook needs to recalibrate itself and understand the responsibilities that go alongside its position. But in so much news commentary there's a subtext that megasilos like Facebook, and the internet as a whole alongside them, are some unmovable force of nature that require a reactive response.

The internet is an open platform evolving through collaborative means. The web is open source. All of the paradigms we've come to use across software have evolved over time, one set of developers iterating on ideas created by another, iterated upon by another set, and so on. Standards on the web are open source. New movements and innovations are typically created by very small groups of people, failing fast and prioritizing running code over consensus, which are then codified by working groups that themselves are made of loose federations of people.

Yes, Facebook et al deeply need to understand their responsibility to democratic society and adjust their objectives in that light. But the news industry need to deeply grok that it isn't subject to the whims of the internet. If organizations lean in, they can materially help shape the platforms that have disrupted their businesses. They're not doomed to be outsiders; they are welcome to join.

At the beginning of Emily's piece, she notes:

The homepage is back, and not just for those chronically old people over 40, but for every news organisation that wants to survive falling off the great Facebook cliff of 2018.

The homepage's return is a very good thing. Any information business needs to have control over its platform. Returning to the feed economy and innovation around new ways to subscribe to information will also be good; let a thousand reader services bloom. I'm still waiting for the first decentralized reader with integrated subscription or per-item content payments, but those are the kinds of developments we need. And they're the kinds of developments that need to have publisher voices included - or even to be driven by publisher organizations.

Why were news organizations so dependent on one company's algorithmic policies to begin with? Yes, they capitulated to insane supplier power, and yes, it looks like a horrible decision in hindsight (as well as to those of us who worked in open technology at the time). But their business models were collapsing, and it was an easy answer. Most of us would probably have made similar decisions under similar pressures. But it's time to move on.

Publishers need to be supporting and collaborating with teams building products, perhaps through organizations like Matter (selfish plug, but also, the partner program really works). They need to be supporting the evolution of technology platforms by joining organizations like the W3C and participating in groups like WHATWG.

And finally, they need to start collaborating by building the software they want to see in the world, under an open source license, in a way that allows all of them to benefit. It's not about building something that draws a direct profit; instead, they can help create an ecosystem that better supports their current businesses, and provides a clearer framework for supporting them as their businesses evolve into the future. They need to hire teams to build an ecosystem that holistically supports them, and in turn, democracy.

Because honestly, Facebook has put journalism in peril. And there's no such thing as democracy, or freedom, without it.

A lot has been said about Facebook's upcoming changes to its news feed, which will downgrade posts from Facebook Pages and news publishers in favor of people you actually know. Facebook stock fell 4.5% in response: not a lot, but enough to be felt.

It's easy to see why they're changing their strategy here, even though it will result in shorter visits to Facebook and fewer ad dollars spent in the short-term. In addition to having been instrumental in the Brexit referendum and the instrument for foreign actors hoping to sway the US election (not to mention a propaganda weapon for the likes of Duterte), passively reading your Facebook feed makes you feel bad. Over time, that can only result in fewer people using the service. (It's also worth noting that linking itself so tightly to journalism may cause it difficulties in China.)

Publishers are variously up in arms. Digiday's post was particularly alarmist:

The end is nigh. Facebook is planning a major change to its news feed, starting as early as next week, that will decisively favor user content and effectively deprioritize publishers’ content, according to three publishers that have been briefed by the platform ahead of the move.

The end is nigh. Later on in the piece, one anonymous publishing executive is quoted as saying, "we're losing hope".

But I don't think any of this fear is warranted. This is the web, and Facebook isn't the only game in town. Publishers are already diversifying away from it in order to acquire readers, strengthening their businesses in the process. Facebook's monopolistic supplier power has been overwhelming for the last few years, and the result has not just been felt in the publishing businesses themselves, but in democratic society. A change is long overdue.

Some good thought experiments for web technologists in publishing houses are: what does it look like to retake control of our distribution? How can we work with other publishers, as well as startups and technology companies, to make reading the news easy and fun? We've been hacking the monolithic social network model to be a news distributor for the last decade, but what else is already out there, and who can we work with?

There's a lot out there, from new kinds of technologies explicitly designed for distribution that gives publishers more control, to new ways to pay for content, to interesting new platforms for discovery. And this is before we consider new paradigms like ambient computing (Alexa etc), AR and VR, which are all on the up.

Overall, a lot is possible on the web, if you speak to experts, understand your audience (and your potential audience) deeply, and approach distribution with an innovation mindset.

And to think, not so long ago, publishers were contemplating moving themselves wholesale onto Facebook itself. What a disaster that would have been.

Fascinating story about Instagram dropshippers by Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic:

Ganon searches out some lion-themed objects, including the one that he anticipates making the most money from, a gold-plated lion bracelet that he puts on sale for $0. He gives some tips for finding popular dropshippable items, too. He sorts Shopify-hosted sites by traffic with myip.ms, and then digs below the most popular stores, which generally sell products they make themselves. Deeper into the top 1000 stores, there are dropshippers reselling Aliexpress goods, just like Ganon is, so if can ferret out what products are selling at high-performing stores, he can siphon off some of those dollars. All he’d need to do was do reverse image searches to find the listings in Aliexpress, suck those products in with Oberlo, and he could effectively clone the store in a few minutes.

There's nothing particularly new about any of this, but I've seen an uptick in ads for these Everlane-lite products in my Instagram feed and had wondered what the model is.

I'm curious about the effectiveness of the storytelling involved: one store discusses a founder who "had a constant desire to present himself well but didn’t believe fashion and style should come with such a high price". I don't think I could count the number of times I've seen an online store with a founder story like this. It never came across as authentic, but over time the bullshit factor surely becomes overpowering.

Also, importantly: the cross-platform techniques described aren't going to work under the GDPR, because they heavily depend on targeted advertising. Embedding a Facebook pixel in your Shopify site is going to necessarily be a thing of the past, at least in Europe. So hounding someone with ads because they happened to visit a product page on a website may become a thing of the past, forcing marketers to find more authentic and user-friendly ways of reaching potential customers.

This seems like such a soulless way to build a business, and if these aren't technically scams, they sit on the very blurry edge of the border of scamland. I won't be sad if, through a combination of legislation, better privacy features, and new business models, this kind of dropshipping becomes a footnote in the history of social media; just one more reason why targeted advertising is insanely bad.