Facebook and Apple News might be "killing the open web", but Twitter? I'd say Twitter is a great champion of the web. Linking is so fundamental to the Twitter experience. Half of Twitter is links to other websites.
Exactly! Which is IMO actually one of the reasons why Twitter is having such a hard time monetizing. I see them more like a router protocol where people are pointed towards consuming content outside of twitter instead of on the twitter platform.
My guess is that they will change exactly that sometime soon. First allowing you to write longer texts as attachments and first then might join FB and Apple in "killing the open web"
Does Twitter load other web content through a built-in web browser in the app? That seems to be the big "white-washing" problem with the various reader apps (Facebook, Flipboard, etc), that they're unifying the interaction experience.
Twitter still bugs you to create an account to access their content. (Try to see someone's list of followers when you're not logged in, even when that information is public.) Compare with Wikimedia where you don't even need an account to edit content.
Further Twitter is still promoting a model where to talk to people you have to create an account on a centralized platform first. ("Want to get support from a company? Chat with them on Twitter. You need a Twitter account for that.") Compare with email where you can email from any provider to any provider.
Twitter might be more open than Facebook, but they're certainly not the champions of openness.
My only use for twitter is literally to complain to companies if I want a refund quicker. Works wonders. Other than that, it's just full of noise, don't understand it personally.
What I didn't like about twitter is that they uploaded my contact info on smart phone app without my consent. To date, they still have NOT erased those information and I still get email asking me if I know someone who just happen to be in my address book a few years ago.
Disclaimer: I like twitter over facebook, which I don't use that much, and my comment history will show that I'm a twitter 'lackey', so to speak.
Does anyone else feel that the facebook moment is fading away? People have compared information to food, and I can see the similarities. When you come from a place where there's little or no food, you want to hoard all you can -- why yes, I would love to see your babies pics every day, of course, post three dozen photos of the same party from different angles, I love it, why yes, this memory from seven years ago is exactly what I need. When you're saturated with information (in this case, social media information), it doesn't feel as special anymore. Soon, you realize that while looking at Christmas photos from people you went to high school with, was fun for a while, there is only so much space in your head and social energy. The marginal value of that extra bit goes down, and averages start leveling off or going down. There's too much food everywhere, you don't want to be forced with another plate of who-gives-an-eff-about-your-fifth-Halloween-in-a-row. What was originally curiosity and genuine excitement about other people's lives becomes social courtesy: of course you will like your almost-friend's child's photos because that's what good friends would do. Social networking (in facebook form) becomes ritualistic.
So the solution is social networks that (artificially) limit your access to information, such as snapchat and twitter. You want to only share a few things, with a few people at a time, and perhaps that shared thing will disappear in a couple of days/hours/views. To me that sounds like the long-term future of social media.
There's a pretty big difference between communicating in and about the present vs. communicating about the past. I think what you've identified is the beginning of a distinction between those two activities in the technologies we use.
My grandparents have a large collection of photos, each captioned with the year, location, and the reason the photo was taken. Looking through these photos is a great experience because it's a curated history of their lives. For better or worse, the practice maintaining photo collections in that manner has been made obsolete by technology. The equivalent now is to upload everything and have technology curate it for you, filtering out the mundane and saving the important or otherwise memorable content. That's what the Facebook timeline attempts to do, and it's a feature missing from the other social applications you identified.
I don't think it's a failure of Twitter or Snapchat that they lack curated timelines, though. That's not their purpose. They are aimed squarely at communicating at and about the present. If they do take over in-the-present communication from Facebook, though, then Facebook will have a hard time constructed the curated timeline.
The internet I like isn't the internet that the greater population likes. I liked when Twitter was just text. I like Twitter because when I follow an entity, I see everything they publish - and if I don't like what they're publishing, I unfollow them, or block them. It's easier to get to the source of information via Twitter. For a while, with third party software, I was able to even more selectively block what was coming down my feed - I think MetroTweet at one point might have allowed regular expression filters. I stick to the web interface & the iOS app, but I would probably pay money again for a third party Twitter app that allows regex filters.
Other people think 140 characters isn't enough for their audience, and write 20 tweets in a row, or post an image with a bunch of text in it.
I keep Facebook fairly reasonable by blocking and unfollowing, but there's so much of the presentation that's just out of my control. I appreciate how I can keep in touch with people I don't get to hang out with often, but I feel like I'm swimming in the deep end of the marketing pool just to wave hi every now and then. With a text feed, I can dream of something like a regex filter - and probably write something to make that happen. With Facebook, there's no way I'll ever be able to tell it "Hide all posts that contain images with caps-lock, block lettering"
Anyhow, that's all to say that I like Twitter more than Facebook, and I'm enjoying whatever it is while it lasts.
I've claimed a similar phenomenom before. Going back further, when there was much less content, even chain letters seemed awesome and hilarious (and worth keeping around). Now, in a post-buzzfeed world, I don't want any more junk food.
Hilariously, you can see older people (like your parents, if they aren't already savvy,) start to use the internet more, and enter the chain letter phase....then send them to you because omg they're amazing. Meanwhile, your hipster internet-consumer self tries to politely decline the second helping of cheap candy.
Filtration is the key - I mainly want healthy information, with the occasional disgusting treat :-)
"...Let’s start with what most people probably can agree. Information is accumulating online. The amount of available information is increasing at an exponential rate, some say it doubles every second year. This mean that any illusion of being able to stay up to date with everything that is going on is utopian and has been probably since Guttenberg invented the press.
Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.
There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.
This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.
Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.
It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.
It might be an obsession, but I think it’s an obsession that many critics will find themselves having to submit to sooner or later...."
Totally agree on Facebook, but Twitter is much more valuable than the ephemeral tweets.
I think the difference between the two comes from the nature of user relationships. While on Facebook it had to be reciprocal (following was added later and it's not used much), on Twitter the user relationships can be one way. That makes all the difference. This is why on Facebook the user relationships are just replicas of real-life relationships, which was great for user acquisition but it's also a huge limitation that Facebook can't get past. On Twitter on the other hand anyone can follow anyone and while user acquisition is more difficult, it opens up the world and gives a lot of opportunity for new user relationships. Because of this Twitter is the best social network we have so far.
> So the solution is social networks that (artificially) limit your access to information, such as snapchat and twitter. You want to only share a few things, with a few people at a time, and perhaps that shared thing will disappear in a couple of days/hours/views. To me that sounds like the long-term future of social media.
not a heavy user of social network sites, so this probably won't be everyone's experience, but the features you mentioned(limit of access to information, sharing only a few things, etc) can be done on any platform. It's really how you use it; none of the sites force you to share every moment with the world
imo the long-term future of social media is to get you to use it as much as you can so they can sell ads to you
A big part of the problem is that "content" insists on being wrapped up in "interactivity" that is confusing and subtracts value (or adds cost) in other ways (image carousels with ads, articles broken into lots of small pieces to generate impressions), and the internet routes around cost.
The central thesis that "pretending that content is free" is the underlying problem is interesting. Perhaps part of the problem is bad pricing. E.g. content that ought to be cheap (e.g. e-books, streaming video) tends to be more expensive or certainly insufficiently cheaper than content that ought to be more expensive (e.g. physical books, bluray disks).
Perhaps a big part of the problem is publishers "pretending" they add value.
Some publishers definitely add some value, but then they subtract value in other ways -- it's great that the movie studio figures out who the good writers, directors, and actors are and risks its own money to make a good movie, but it's bad that it's provided on a bluray disk with annoying copy-and-other protection in a hard-to-open package, and that it's more expensive to buy the cheaper to distribute and generally more convenient electronic version. Similarly, newyorker.com has great writing (and I pay for it) but the actual presentation layer (the website) subtracts value from it.
> But the larger point is that the logic of efficiency on the internet will always favor scale—which is to say, platforms—over publishers.
I call bullshit on this one. It's unclear what the author means because they use such a meaningless term in "logic of efficiency", but the last time I looked, it was a lot more financially efficient to set up a website than a print publication. There is nothing at all inevitable about 'the biggest will win' online, as can be evidenced both by the disappearance of several former behmoths, and by the failure of several pre-Internet companies to 'make it big' online despite having unlimited capital to invest.
Maybe, just maybe, the author is referring directly to advertising revenue here, as in "the more popular sites can make more money from advertising, and thus will grow and grow". Of course, that's totally dismissing the fact that many of the 'platforms' being discussed simply offer a far better experience, regardless of what content they offer or how big they already are. Here's a hint for the author and any other publishers reading: there is far greater variation in the packaging, delivery, and experience of content online than there is offline. Take advantage of that. Don't, as we've all been telling you for the last 20 years, just try to replicate your newspaper online: that makes for a horrible experience. Don't try to do advertising in the most obnoxious manner you can get away with; that may have worked in print, but it's been demonstrated pretty categorically now that it fails online.
Or, you know, just carry on regardless, blame platforms for seizing the opportunity that you choose to ignore.
I think you are wrong to dismiss that point so harshly, when all empirical data shows it to be true. Engineering, Hosting, Marketing, Monetisation, all those things are massively cheaper when done by one big player. There is a reason publishers outsource advertisement to those shitty networks: They would be overwhelmed by the cost to operate, let alone create those beasts. And even when this problem would magically go away, they still lack the access to the petabytes of data the big platforms enjoy. Without this data, the advertisement will necessarily be crude and lacking focus.
A link recently discovered was blocked by facebook (and I had no idea they were actively blocking the posting of links by users!): eulawanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-partys-over-eu-data-protection-law.html
Slightly related: I only found out recently that The Guardian has a subscription option in their app (the 'Premium' tier, Euro 3.61 per month) that removes all ads:
It's great to see that at least some publications are experimenting with models outside the traditional paper and the obvious plastering content with ads.
Does that mean they expect to extract 3.61 from the ad viewing portion and they've set that price for parity? Interesting. That's rather a lot more than one would expect.
I do have to say, my experience with Apple News has been very nice. These apps seem to affect publishers more than the 'open web' and at that they are little more than nice RSS readers that don't ruin your experience with ads even though there are still ads there.
I don't particularly see anything wrong with separating publishers from content producers. It now seems more appropriate to think of news magazines and traditional 'publishers' as content producers who rely on the new 'publishers' a la Facebook, Apple, Twitter to distribute their content because they cannot and should not be focused on building an enormous infrastructure to do this.
Print media is 'open' in that anyone can print something and distribute it but the ability to do so effectively has pretty much been consolidated into the hands of very few for a long time. Now a days you can publish your own music, your own books, and your own news and its popularity will be determined by the masses, not some worn out talent scout trying to please a boss who is using focus groups to figure out what might make him a buck.
Ultimately I think we will see a more open and democratic future for publishing, not the death of the open web. Control is shifting hands to a new set of publishers, one that puts the visibility of content into the hands of the readers in the form of likes and tweets.
Maybe the news produced by these traditional outlets just doesn't have as much value as it once did. That is what likely scares them in my mind.
This should be the first thing to read in this article. The author seems to not have any preferred publisher anyway. He can consider and write why not, I'd also like to know.
Then don't be surprised with the statement in a paragraph before:
> And that’s why so many articles kinda sound the same these days.
I find the author’s argument regarding “publications losing their voice and not focusing on the preferences of their audience to meet the preference of the platform’s audience” self-contradictory. Is it not your own audience that is following you on these platforms? More so, the platforms give you real-time feedback and allow your audience to tell you which issues are most important.
I find this to be the real issue here. The author is most interested in telling you what is important, instead of allowing you to decide for yourself. …And this is why certain publications struggle with these platforms.
Unfortunately often it's not completely honest feedback about your content. It's feedback filtered / deformed by the fact that other people on the platform will see the likes, retweets, comments etc As a result it's not the best content that becomes popular. It's the one used to impress others.
I don't need an ad-blocker. I need a like blocker. When I go on facebook I want to see personal things my friends share, not a bunch of shit they saw and clicked "like" on. And I'm guilty of "liking" crap too. Maybe they could prioritize personal plain text posts, since those are actually the most relevant to me. But that is least relevant to advertisers.
If they don't focus more on the users, a distributed replacement will eventually come out and there will be zero ad revenue to be had from that social platform. I've got some ideas in this space, but no time and no team.
I am on the opposite. What my friends like actually come out to be what I am probably going to like and I quite enjoy most of those likes. There are a few spammy one or useless crap, but overall the situation has been much better compare to, say, 2-3 years ago.
I think the way Facebook and Twitter present stream is inconvenient for users who have a lot of friends or following a lot of people. It is simply a long linear scan and it literally takes me ~10 mins to review when I am on at the end of the day, I just want to see what's going on in everyone's world, ya know. I don't think gallery style will work either. I don't know, but linear scan is just not working.
Completely OT: You know that phenomenon that when you hear a word for the first time in a long time or first time ever - and then you suddenly hear it again and again? Just happened to me with the word "Fungible". I happen to know what the word means, coming from a financial/trading background but don't recall hearing it for some time now. Then 2 completely unrelated Hacker News articles I read, almost in a row, had the word "Fungible" in them - neither of which had anything to do with finance/trading!
I know it is just random chance, but it feels really strange!
This is simpler than most people think. If there is no ad time/place, the platform won't be able to monetize it. Google makes people go away, but right before that people look at their search result where the Ads are displayed.
Why it doesn't work twitter, probably nobody follow the news link and bother come back to strike a conversation on twitter. Mostly the conversation takes place right below the news article and with the author not the tweet.
Most online conversation took place right where the content is at, on Youtube, on NYtimes, on Forbes, unless compassion with twitter but now we that passion is going down.
There is also a subtle difference of the social relation where the news feed is from, which is why facebook news feed is a BAD idea. Why would I have my mother in law in my facebook circle yet sharing the latest Intel acquisition news, or even makeing comment.
Never mix life and work, even hobby or side projects, that's social network 101, or platform 101. I know a friend who has 9 facebook Ids, I personally have 3,4 twitter accounts, for the purpose explained here.
From a news consumption standpoint, iOS news is a joke, facebook news is meaningless, twitter is inconvenient, therefore I use Zite, which connects to my twitter.
From a conversation standpoint, Hacker news format is idea, but lack of twitter's networking.
The article doesn't define the "open web," and platforms like Facebook and Twitter would seem to mostly follow the dictates set out in Tantek's original definition.[1] So it's hard to guess at what the author means -- Facebook and Twitter aren't "the open web" by tautology, basically. It's really hard to engage with the author's arguments that way.
What is trivial to understand is that the author's proposed remedy doesn't work:
> The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy. We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.
The fundamental problem with this is that siloing content the way the author suggests (publications with strong identities and paywalls to get readers to give money in exchange for content) breaks hyperlinks. It breaks sharing. Paywalls work when there's a marginal benefit to knowing something that someone else doesn't -- say, it helps you pick stocks better than the next guys. Otherwise, all else being equal, the article I can share with my friends, link to in my blog post, that I can engage with and respond to and have other people able to read the same article I am -- that's far more valuable than the article that I can read but can't share. We didn't get here because we're all stupid, or because people are unwilling to pay for anything ever. We got here because we were trying to come up with a model that allows people who make content to be compensated for it without betraying the fundamental thing that made the Web the Web -- the hyperlink. If your proposed alternative business model doesn't even TRY to engage with the question of linking and sharing, it's not going to work.
What is a page view on an article worth these days? A couple cents? Less? If the micropayments implementation was right, and if paying for content became a more mainstream idea, I don't think you'd feel that you "[could] read but [couldn't] share" an article just because it charged a nickel to continue past the intro paragraph. I don't see how that would break hyperlinks.
Facebook is actively blocking a rival community that "pays" users by passing ad revenue to users (users get incentives to post content and invite friends)
Tsu is basically a pyramid scheme where the investment is your time. The "payments" they would give to their users are tiny, not enough for people to actually get any money out (except some outliers), and all what people are talking about on Tsu is: getting referrals to Tsu, making money from Tsu.
Somehow, Morocco was among the countries that used Tsu the most, and being Moroccan I was myself continuously spammed by people posting referral links to Tsu... so it's understandable that facebook blocked them.
"It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity"
I have no sympathy for writers here. You view us readers as fungible commodity. I use Reddit, HN, Facebook and twitter to weed out the worst bullshit. There are lots of articles around just to keep me comfy long enough to show me adds. One of the worst these days is New Yorker, beautifully written articles about stuff people don't really care about. (Or atleast I don't care about.) Currently it survives on elitism. Web platforms are problematic. But lot better than ordering magazines at random, or paying for New Yorker monthly for that yearly gem.
“Go where the readers are”
It's more important to write what the readers want to read. I click stupid shit. I read mediocre pieces. I'm willing to pay for good stuff.
I think there should be ordering/crowd funding service solely for written media. So that authors don't just babble nice sentences inside their comfort zone, but actually tackles things people are interested in.
The real problem is that author doesn't know if s/he gets paid before the article is written, but also the reader doesn't know if the article is worth anything before reading it.
I think the author of this piece has many good points, he just needs to dig deeper. This bleak context free future the author is painting is probably not true. People like context. Any social meeting is often first superficial introductions, then shallow gossip and only later dvelves into deep stuff. Internet is probably going to mirror that, but with more inertia.
The article seems to be confused over content viewed by way of advertisement and content delivered by users actively seeking content.
When I want to read up on some news, I go to the publisher's site directly or to a preferred aggregator, which is not going to be facebook/twitter/etc.
Advertised content is typically very poor, and really not worth defending.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
My guess is that they will change exactly that sometime soon. First allowing you to write longer texts as attachments and first then might join FB and Apple in "killing the open web"
[+] [-] mattlutze|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anton_gogolev|10 years ago|reply
...via URL shortners, which is very unfortunate.
[+] [-] a3_nm|10 years ago|reply
Further Twitter is still promoting a model where to talk to people you have to create an account on a centralized platform first. ("Want to get support from a company? Chat with them on Twitter. You need a Twitter account for that.") Compare with email where you can email from any provider to any provider.
Twitter might be more open than Facebook, but they're certainly not the champions of openness.
[+] [-] ducuboy|10 years ago|reply
This is obvious if you look at tools such as http://svven.com or http://nuzzel.com.
[+] [-] gambiting|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spdustin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treenyc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] benten10|10 years ago|reply
Does anyone else feel that the facebook moment is fading away? People have compared information to food, and I can see the similarities. When you come from a place where there's little or no food, you want to hoard all you can -- why yes, I would love to see your babies pics every day, of course, post three dozen photos of the same party from different angles, I love it, why yes, this memory from seven years ago is exactly what I need. When you're saturated with information (in this case, social media information), it doesn't feel as special anymore. Soon, you realize that while looking at Christmas photos from people you went to high school with, was fun for a while, there is only so much space in your head and social energy. The marginal value of that extra bit goes down, and averages start leveling off or going down. There's too much food everywhere, you don't want to be forced with another plate of who-gives-an-eff-about-your-fifth-Halloween-in-a-row. What was originally curiosity and genuine excitement about other people's lives becomes social courtesy: of course you will like your almost-friend's child's photos because that's what good friends would do. Social networking (in facebook form) becomes ritualistic.
So the solution is social networks that (artificially) limit your access to information, such as snapchat and twitter. You want to only share a few things, with a few people at a time, and perhaps that shared thing will disappear in a couple of days/hours/views. To me that sounds like the long-term future of social media.
Anyone have any thoughts?
[+] [-] ecdavis|10 years ago|reply
My grandparents have a large collection of photos, each captioned with the year, location, and the reason the photo was taken. Looking through these photos is a great experience because it's a curated history of their lives. For better or worse, the practice maintaining photo collections in that manner has been made obsolete by technology. The equivalent now is to upload everything and have technology curate it for you, filtering out the mundane and saving the important or otherwise memorable content. That's what the Facebook timeline attempts to do, and it's a feature missing from the other social applications you identified.
I don't think it's a failure of Twitter or Snapchat that they lack curated timelines, though. That's not their purpose. They are aimed squarely at communicating at and about the present. If they do take over in-the-present communication from Facebook, though, then Facebook will have a hard time constructed the curated timeline.
All that being said, I don't use any of them.
[+] [-] leviathant|10 years ago|reply
Other people think 140 characters isn't enough for their audience, and write 20 tweets in a row, or post an image with a bunch of text in it.
I keep Facebook fairly reasonable by blocking and unfollowing, but there's so much of the presentation that's just out of my control. I appreciate how I can keep in touch with people I don't get to hang out with often, but I feel like I'm swimming in the deep end of the marketing pool just to wave hi every now and then. With a text feed, I can dream of something like a regex filter - and probably write something to make that happen. With Facebook, there's no way I'll ever be able to tell it "Hide all posts that contain images with caps-lock, block lettering"
Anyhow, that's all to say that I like Twitter more than Facebook, and I'm enjoying whatever it is while it lasts.
[+] [-] chaqke|10 years ago|reply
Hilariously, you can see older people (like your parents, if they aren't already savvy,) start to use the internet more, and enter the chain letter phase....then send them to you because omg they're amazing. Meanwhile, your hipster internet-consumer self tries to politely decline the second helping of cheap candy.
Filtration is the key - I mainly want healthy information, with the occasional disgusting treat :-)
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.
There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.
This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.
Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.
It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.
It might be an obsession, but I think it’s an obsession that many critics will find themselves having to submit to sooner or later...."
http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
[+] [-] ducuboy|10 years ago|reply
I think the difference between the two comes from the nature of user relationships. While on Facebook it had to be reciprocal (following was added later and it's not used much), on Twitter the user relationships can be one way. That makes all the difference. This is why on Facebook the user relationships are just replicas of real-life relationships, which was great for user acquisition but it's also a huge limitation that Facebook can't get past. On Twitter on the other hand anyone can follow anyone and while user acquisition is more difficult, it opens up the world and gives a lot of opportunity for new user relationships. Because of this Twitter is the best social network we have so far.
[+] [-] ljk|10 years ago|reply
not a heavy user of social network sites, so this probably won't be everyone's experience, but the features you mentioned(limit of access to information, sharing only a few things, etc) can be done on any platform. It's really how you use it; none of the sites force you to share every moment with the world
imo the long-term future of social media is to get you to use it as much as you can so they can sell ads to you
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Tloewald|10 years ago|reply
The central thesis that "pretending that content is free" is the underlying problem is interesting. Perhaps part of the problem is bad pricing. E.g. content that ought to be cheap (e.g. e-books, streaming video) tends to be more expensive or certainly insufficiently cheaper than content that ought to be more expensive (e.g. physical books, bluray disks).
Perhaps a big part of the problem is publishers "pretending" they add value.
Some publishers definitely add some value, but then they subtract value in other ways -- it's great that the movie studio figures out who the good writers, directors, and actors are and risks its own money to make a good movie, but it's bad that it's provided on a bluray disk with annoying copy-and-other protection in a hard-to-open package, and that it's more expensive to buy the cheaper to distribute and generally more convenient electronic version. Similarly, newyorker.com has great writing (and I pay for it) but the actual presentation layer (the website) subtracts value from it.
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|10 years ago|reply
I call bullshit on this one. It's unclear what the author means because they use such a meaningless term in "logic of efficiency", but the last time I looked, it was a lot more financially efficient to set up a website than a print publication. There is nothing at all inevitable about 'the biggest will win' online, as can be evidenced both by the disappearance of several former behmoths, and by the failure of several pre-Internet companies to 'make it big' online despite having unlimited capital to invest.
Maybe, just maybe, the author is referring directly to advertising revenue here, as in "the more popular sites can make more money from advertising, and thus will grow and grow". Of course, that's totally dismissing the fact that many of the 'platforms' being discussed simply offer a far better experience, regardless of what content they offer or how big they already are. Here's a hint for the author and any other publishers reading: there is far greater variation in the packaging, delivery, and experience of content online than there is offline. Take advantage of that. Don't, as we've all been telling you for the last 20 years, just try to replicate your newspaper online: that makes for a horrible experience. Don't try to do advertising in the most obnoxious manner you can get away with; that may have worked in print, but it's been demonstrated pretty categorically now that it fails online.
Or, you know, just carry on regardless, blame platforms for seizing the opportunity that you choose to ignore.
[+] [-] thomasz|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] microtonal|10 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2013/aug/12/1
It's great to see that at least some publications are experimenting with models outside the traditional paper and the obvious plastering content with ads.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Jgrubb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n0us|10 years ago|reply
I don't particularly see anything wrong with separating publishers from content producers. It now seems more appropriate to think of news magazines and traditional 'publishers' as content producers who rely on the new 'publishers' a la Facebook, Apple, Twitter to distribute their content because they cannot and should not be focused on building an enormous infrastructure to do this.
Print media is 'open' in that anyone can print something and distribute it but the ability to do so effectively has pretty much been consolidated into the hands of very few for a long time. Now a days you can publish your own music, your own books, and your own news and its popularity will be determined by the masses, not some worn out talent scout trying to please a boss who is using focus groups to figure out what might make him a buck.
Ultimately I think we will see a more open and democratic future for publishing, not the death of the open web. Control is shifting hands to a new set of publishers, one that puts the visibility of content into the hands of the readers in the form of likes and tweets.
Maybe the news produced by these traditional outlets just doesn't have as much value as it once did. That is what likely scares them in my mind.
[+] [-] acqq|10 years ago|reply
This should be the first thing to read in this article. The author seems to not have any preferred publisher anyway. He can consider and write why not, I'd also like to know.
Then don't be surprised with the statement in a paragraph before:
> And that’s why so many articles kinda sound the same these days.
[+] [-] ScottGillis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArekDymalski|10 years ago|reply
Unfortunately often it's not completely honest feedback about your content. It's feedback filtered / deformed by the fact that other people on the platform will see the likes, retweets, comments etc As a result it's not the best content that becomes popular. It's the one used to impress others.
[+] [-] phkahler|10 years ago|reply
If they don't focus more on the users, a distributed replacement will eventually come out and there will be zero ad revenue to be had from that social platform. I've got some ideas in this space, but no time and no team.
[+] [-] yeukhon|10 years ago|reply
I think the way Facebook and Twitter present stream is inconvenient for users who have a lot of friends or following a lot of people. It is simply a long linear scan and it literally takes me ~10 mins to review when I am on at the end of the day, I just want to see what's going on in everyone's world, ya know. I don't think gallery style will work either. I don't know, but linear scan is just not working.
[+] [-] intrasight|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanDav|10 years ago|reply
I know it is just random chance, but it feels really strange!
[+] [-] FlailFast|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitcuration|10 years ago|reply
Why it doesn't work twitter, probably nobody follow the news link and bother come back to strike a conversation on twitter. Mostly the conversation takes place right below the news article and with the author not the tweet.
Most online conversation took place right where the content is at, on Youtube, on NYtimes, on Forbes, unless compassion with twitter but now we that passion is going down.
There is also a subtle difference of the social relation where the news feed is from, which is why facebook news feed is a BAD idea. Why would I have my mother in law in my facebook circle yet sharing the latest Intel acquisition news, or even makeing comment.
Never mix life and work, even hobby or side projects, that's social network 101, or platform 101. I know a friend who has 9 facebook Ids, I personally have 3,4 twitter accounts, for the purpose explained here.
From a news consumption standpoint, iOS news is a joke, facebook news is meaningless, twitter is inconvenient, therefore I use Zite, which connects to my twitter.
From a conversation standpoint, Hacker news format is idea, but lack of twitter's networking.
Something has all these together would be a hit.
[+] [-] cwyers|10 years ago|reply
What is trivial to understand is that the author's proposed remedy doesn't work:
> The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy. We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.
The fundamental problem with this is that siloing content the way the author suggests (publications with strong identities and paywalls to get readers to give money in exchange for content) breaks hyperlinks. It breaks sharing. Paywalls work when there's a marginal benefit to knowing something that someone else doesn't -- say, it helps you pick stocks better than the next guys. Otherwise, all else being equal, the article I can share with my friends, link to in my blog post, that I can engage with and respond to and have other people able to read the same article I am -- that's far more valuable than the article that I can read but can't share. We didn't get here because we're all stupid, or because people are unwilling to pay for anything ever. We got here because we were trying to come up with a model that allows people who make content to be compensated for it without betraying the fundamental thing that made the Web the Web -- the hyperlink. If your proposed alternative business model doesn't even TRY to engage with the question of linking and sharing, it's not going to work.
1) http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web
[+] [-] pauleastlund|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvvcxz|10 years ago|reply
Vote with your time and attention. For better or worse, the majority of people vote for these sites.
[+] [-] ck2|10 years ago|reply
Well that makes sites like Facebook and Twitter predictable and the power they wield.
[+] [-] tmikaeld|10 years ago|reply
Facebook is actively blocking a rival community that "pays" users by passing ad revenue to users (users get incentives to post content and invite friends)
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-banning-tsu-rival-soci...
[+] [-] halflings|10 years ago|reply
Somehow, Morocco was among the countries that used Tsu the most, and being Moroccan I was myself continuously spammed by people posting referral links to Tsu... so it's understandable that facebook blocked them.
[+] [-] vlehto|10 years ago|reply
I have no sympathy for writers here. You view us readers as fungible commodity. I use Reddit, HN, Facebook and twitter to weed out the worst bullshit. There are lots of articles around just to keep me comfy long enough to show me adds. One of the worst these days is New Yorker, beautifully written articles about stuff people don't really care about. (Or atleast I don't care about.) Currently it survives on elitism. Web platforms are problematic. But lot better than ordering magazines at random, or paying for New Yorker monthly for that yearly gem.
“Go where the readers are”
It's more important to write what the readers want to read. I click stupid shit. I read mediocre pieces. I'm willing to pay for good stuff.
I think there should be ordering/crowd funding service solely for written media. So that authors don't just babble nice sentences inside their comfort zone, but actually tackles things people are interested in.
The real problem is that author doesn't know if s/he gets paid before the article is written, but also the reader doesn't know if the article is worth anything before reading it.
I think the author of this piece has many good points, he just needs to dig deeper. This bleak context free future the author is painting is probably not true. People like context. Any social meeting is often first superficial introductions, then shallow gossip and only later dvelves into deep stuff. Internet is probably going to mirror that, but with more inertia.
[+] [-] softyeti|10 years ago|reply
When I want to read up on some news, I go to the publisher's site directly or to a preferred aggregator, which is not going to be facebook/twitter/etc.
Advertised content is typically very poor, and really not worth defending.