Archive for May, 2009
We got a new sign at the office today.
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on May 29, 2009 by themaroonWhy Adwords Won't Work For Social Networks
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on May 28, 2009 by themaroonSomeone on a web forum I read recently asked why it is that social networks seem to have great trouble monetizing through ads. I have a pretty good chunk of experience in that area, so I thought I’d offer up my thoughts based on what I’ve seen. For perspective, I’ve done affiliate marketing on the self-serve ad platforms for the big three search engines at various points in time over the last 6 years (in fact Google recently sent me a cookbook and an apron for that anniversary, thanks guys). More recently I spent a few weekends tinkering with and a few weeks running affiliate ads on the big two social networks. I also have a couple moderately successful Facebook apps (around a quarter million installs each) that have used both ads and other forms of monetization with varying degrees of success, and for which I’ve purchased ads from Facebook and third party apps on it, so I’ve seen a bit of both sides of the coin.
Everything I’ve seen so far has led me to the conclusion that an Adsense-style model of self-serve, targeted ads isn’t going to work for Facebook and Myspace anywhere near the way it does for Google, but it’s not going to be a total bust either.
The first thing that makes me think that is that the networks themselves seem to be convinced I’m correct. Their attempts at a self-serve ad platform are at best half-assed, not the sort of thing you’d build if you expected to bring in billions from it. I remember the early days of Adsense, and they were a little rough compared to what you see there now, but still significantly more advanced and less buggy than you’ll find on the social networks today.
The first thing I noticed in both platforms was that neither ad manager works in Firefox, which is by far the most standards-compliant browser that has any real market share. Facebook won’t let you get to the ad manager once you’re in the ads and pages section, and Myspace requires a separate ad account but unless you’re using IE it didn’t even let you log in until recently. They’ve added Firefox support finally, which is one more improvement to the platform than I’ve seen added to Facebook’s so far.
Given the surge in popularity of non-IE browsers over the last couple years, you would think that if Facebook felt their AdSense-type offering had any potential, they’d go the extra mile to make them cross-browser compatible. In fact, the way web development is done almost everywhere, it usually takes effort to make a standards-compliant website IE-compatible, not the other way around. It’s doubly ironic too considering that both Myspace and Facebook bug anyone using IE6 to upgrade on every page. The message they’re sending is “Please, use a better browser if you just want to upload some photos and cyberstalk that hot girl who went to your middle school, but not if you’re actually trying to pay us thousands of dollars. Then you have to get IE6 running in a virtual machine.” I’m all for launching early and iterating, but Firefox has the kind of market share and growth, especially among the sort of people who might be placing self-serve ads, that these days means you just have to support it out of the gate.
But moving past that serious annoyance, after dusting off the old Internet Explorer and getting my hands dirty what I found surprised me. I had heard that ads on Facebook, when purchased on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) basis don’t get good clickthrough rates (CTR), and thus generate low effective CPMs (which stands for “Cost Per 1,000″ meaning the amount you’re paying per 1,000 ad impressions). That only seem to be part of the problem though. While they certainly were well below the CTR you’ll find on Google (which is not really a fair comparison, for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a second) using the advanced targeting that both systems offer I was able to get my message out to a rather highly-focused group of people and achieve a workable CTR. It wasn’t great by any means, but it wasn’t abysmal like I’d heard and given the enormous reach both networks have it was more than enough to justify the time spent.
The real problem I found was that users clicking through simply didn’t convert. It didn’t matter what I did with the ads, on which platform, or which affiliate program and product I was using, I just couldn’t get many users who clicked through to actually buy. At one point I even included in the ad texts the name of the site they were pointing to, the item (with picture) and even the price. The clicker knew exactly what they were going to see when they landed. For instance in one ad I targeted a book at people who had listed themselves as fans of the author. My ad said something like “Buy Book X, the latest by Author Y, at Amazon.com for $15.99″, and included the picture of the book taken directly from the Amazon page. There was no ambiguity at all.
And yet the vast majority of clickthroughs didn’t purchase. After many iterations of the ads, drilling down the demographics and targeted keywords, improving the text to optimize for conversions rather than clickthroughs, I was able to get to a point where I could break even at a certain CPC where, if I were able to purchase the same ads on Google (with vastly less demographic targeting) for the same price I’d be a billionaire. To compare I ended up running them on AdSense and paying almost 20 times the CPC, while making about the same $0 in profit doing so on a much higher volume (due to getting 3-5x the CTR).
Unfortunately, on the social networks, by the time I had gotten the conversion rate to a point where I was breaking even on a given CPC by adding more granular targeting, my CTR had dropped by somewhere between 20% and 50% depending on the product. That meant that the networks, which of course optimize for their own profit, effectively stopped showing my ad. They show the inventory with the highest effective CPM (eCPM) first, because that’s what they profit most from. eCPM is simply the product of CPC and CTR, times 1,000.
eCPM = CPC * CTR * 1000
So you can see that if your CTR falls by 50%, your CPC has to double for Facebook/Myspace to make the same eCPM. By the time I had gotten to where the ads were breaking even (still far from profitable enough to be worth running) they were barely being shown. They seemed to at best run late at night when presumably all of the higher-eCPM ads had already hit their daily budget.
Of course both Adsense and the social network platforms are markets. The fact that I wasn’t able to get ads shown at the CPM I needed to make a profit indicates that someone out there is making a profit selling something. Simply using the social nets and looking at the ads gives you a good idea of what and who, and using the ad managers gives you a pretty good idea of what they must be paying. As far as I can tell, companies that make novelty t-shirts, get-rich-quick schemes, and dating sites are buying users at somewhere around 10-20 cents eCPM on Facebook.
On Google, I don’t even think you could get an ad to run at 10x that price, which is why I just don’t think the social networks ar ever going to get high eCPMs from self-serve ads. The people we targeted when running ads for Draftmix on Google were pretty much identical to the ones we’ve targeted for our apps on Facebook, but they cost us over 50 times as much.
Why do users on social networks click fewer ads, and convert less frequently when they do? The answer to the first part is obvious. When you show an ad on Google, you’re showing it to someone who wanted to find what you’re telling them about. It’s like an ad in the Yellow Pages. The only people seeing it are more or less specifically looking for it. If you’re running an ad for the latest book by J.K. Rowling, you can just show your ad to people who searched for “new Harry Potter book” and you’re going to get ridiculous click throughs and conversion rates.
People on Facebook, on the other hand, are just hanging around, using stupid apps that tell them which state they should move to, and leaving wall posts on each others’ profiles. When you’re advertising there, you’re like a life insurance salesman trying to approach people at a bar on Friday night. All of the demographic targeting in the world won’t make up for the fact that they aren’t looking for what you’re selling, and in fact aren’t looking to be sold anything at all.
The second one I’m not sure about and I found much more surprising. What compels someone, who clearly has little or no interest in a product, to click a highly descriptive ad for it and then not purhcase? Your guess is as good as mine. Until the social networks figure that one out though, they’re going to have to find a much better revenue stream if they want to be the next Googles.
Verified Extortion
Posted in Startup on May 21, 2009 by themaroonI’ve mentioned previously that when you’re developing on somebody else’s platform “you have to be ever-mindful of the fact that you’re playing in somebody else’s back yard”. Never has this been more apparent than when Facebook announced their new Verified Apps program going live yesterday. Apparently one of the dangers of working on someone else’s platform is outright blackmail.
Facebook really couldn’t have done a better job with this rollout, if their intention was to piss off developers. Basically here’s the way it happened. Many months ago, they announced their intention to create a Verified Apps program, wherein app developers would submit their applications for verification. We were told we’d receive various benefits, though they were murky. The only thing clear was the cost: $375 per year.
Registrations opened about 6 months ago, at which point many people paid their fee, and until today little more was said. And almost immediately app developers’ allocations (basically the amount of things Facebook lets your app do) started dropping. Apps like ours, which maintained a relatively constant invite acceptance rate, and even lowered the amount of spam reports and the like, went from being able to send out 20 invites per user per day to 16, then to 12, and sometimes even as low as 8.
This is more significant than it may sound. Many apps on Facebook spread primarily through invites, and senders seem to act in an almost binary manner, either sending out 0 on a given day, or sending out whatever the maximum allowable number is. So knocking an app from 20 invites per day down to 12 might not be exactly a 40% reduction, but it’s not very far off. Facebook was slowly but steadily choking off apps.
Games, which are the only apps on Facebook with any lasting value, were among the ones hardest hit. Meanwhile the new home page rewarded other apps that spread mainly through wall posts and feed messaging. Facebook made the already easy-to-ignore app invites even less noticeable, and hammered users with a barrage of “What Golden Girl Are You?” type garbage. Junky quiz apps that before struggled to survive rocketed to the top of the directory, while a lot of the mid-level (but growing) games saw their traffic turn into an upside down V.
With a little creativity, many of us have been able to turn it around, at least a little, but for most game developers the platform’s glory days are over, or so it seemed. But now you can get them back for the low, low price of $375! Facebook’s Verified Apps program seems to do little of any use except bump your allocations back to where they were before it was ever announced.
On one hand, I’m not as angry about it as I might sound. It’s their platform, why should they not do what they can to monetize it? $375 per year is a joke for a successful app. It’s a small fraction of what even a mid-level app makes in a day there. It’s clear that their ad platform is never going to amount to anything, so even though our apps give them a few million extra impressions per day, that’s not going to pay the bills.
On the other hand, it’s just shady how it was rolled out. It feels too much like extortion. Sell me on the benefits of Verified Apps by making it a good program. I feel like someone smashed me on the head with a baseball bat and then said “hey, I’m a doctor, you better pay me to check and see if you have a concussion.”
But, once again, it’s their house and it’s their rules, so there’s little I can do but pay my $375 and just be thankful. It could be worse, they could be Apple.
If You Brew It, It Will Buble
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on May 18, 2009 by themaroonMy first batch of beer, a hefeweizen, bubbling in the airlock.
I Have a New Hero
Posted in TV, Movies, Music, and Why They All Suck on May 13, 2009 by themaroonA couple weeks ago, I was listening to my favorite daily NPR show, Marketplace, and I noticed something hilarious. They were doing a segment about people selling their hair to be made into fertilizer, and when it wrapped they segued into the next bit with a little instrumental portion of a song. That wouldn’t be notable, except the song was “Cut Your Hair” by Pavement, so the effect was hilarity if you knew the song well enough to recognize it from a few bars, which I would guess is true of less than 1% of Marketplace’s audience.
I thought it was hilarious (not an emotion usually evoked on NPR, especially during their “comedy” shows) for a minute, and didn’t really catch what came on next because all I could think was “I don’t care, I don’t care, I really don’t care/did you see the drummer’s hair? Oooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooooo.” And then I promptly put it out of my mind and tried to get home before I had to listen to any of “Fresh Air”. One of my pet peeves is when radio shows play movie clips, and that show does it enough that I shouldn’t listen to it while driving.
So the next day I was driving home again, and listening to Marketplace (sponsored by Thrivent Financial for Lutherans) again, and up popped auditory Easter egg. This time the segment was the normal “numbers” and it’d been a bad day on Wall Street. Again an instrumental portion of a song, “Feel the Pain” by Dinosaur Jr., another in-joke aimed squarely at some subset of my generation.
I debated whether or not to write about how someone with my taste in music, sense of humor, and admiration for Kai Ryssdal (guy’s got the best voice on radio) seems to be in charge of the switchboard over there at American Public Media. But twice is still a coincidence, and over the next week or two I missed or only half heard a few episodes, and it slipped out of my mind.
But they got me again on the way home today. The lead-in was a segment about the drop in consumer spending, and ended with a bit about how people were moving away from places like Saks and Banana Republic (which they’ll pry out of my cold dead hands) and toward places like Kohl’s (where you’ll find me right after the prying) and the song at the end was “Undone – the Sweater Song” by Weezer.
Granted, that one wasn’t as impressive as the first two since it was a pretty big hit and a lot more people were probably in on the joke, but it does make me wish I had a phone capable of Shazam. And three times is a trend. So here’s to you mister plays-instrumental-portions-of-appropriately-titled- ’90′s-rock-on-public-radio-financial-shows guy. If this were a radio program right now I’d be torn between playing the breakdown of “You Oughta Know” and the intro to “Interstate Love Song”.
Greatest Onion Article Ever: Classmates.com Employees Don't Have Heart To Tell CEO About Facebook
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on May 11, 2009 by themaroonSEATTLE—Employees at Classmates.com—an online service that enables users to find and communicate with people from their past for a monthly fee—have done everything in their power to keep the company’s CEO from finding out about the wildly popular social networking site Facebook. “He knows something is going on,” Classmates.com web coder Josh Krzysch said while combing his boss’s newspaper and removing any offending articles. “The other day he asked me why people aren’t interested in getting in touch with old friends anymore, and I told him that the Internet just isn’t very popular right now. What else was I supposed to say?” Employees claim that unless things somehow miraculously improve by next month, they plan to quietly pack up their desks and leave in the middle of the night.
via theonion.com
Obesity and the Fastness of Food – Economix Blog
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on May 7, 2009 by themaroon
Biden advises family to avoid airlines, subways – On Deadline – USATODAY.com
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on May 1, 2009 by themaroonVice President Biden says he’s advising his own family to stay off commercial airlines and even subways because of the new swine flu.
I used to avoid subways as if they were the plague. Now I will avoid them as if they were the swine flu. Thanks Joe!
Hacker News Disease
Posted in tech on May 1, 2009 by themaroonI’ve been seeing more and more lately of what I call "Hacker News Disease". It’s a pervasive mental illness that has caused me to severely reduce my participation there and remove some of the major tech blogs from my list of daily "must reads".
In fairness, this particular problem isn’t by any means endemic to Hacker News. It occurs at the crossroads where a bunch of smart people meet general tech industry discussion. I’m sure there are plenty of places that suffer from Hacker News Disease (and they probably had it first, have a terminal case of it, and are much less civil about it too) but HN is just the only one I’ve participated in, so they have the misfortune of being the community I’ve named it after.
The disease has two primary symptoms:
1. Repeatedly mistaking intelligence for knowledge.
2. The belief that anybody not in the tech industry is stupid.
The first part is endemic to all smart people (but no brilliant ones). People tend to overvalue the skills they have, and undervalue the ones they don’t. Even the most knowledgeable, intelligent people around are rarely experts in more than one or maybe two unrelated subject areas. The sum of human knowledge is vast, and while smart people often believe they could become an expert in any of them individually if they only had the time and inclination, the relatively short number of years we have on this planet precludes them from mastering more than a very small portion of them. So smart people have a lot of intelligence, but still only a tiny amount of knowledge, which causes them to overvalue the former at the expense of the latter.
The tech industry, however, overlaps with just about every subject area known to man on a daily basis. Follow a handful of the better tech publications and topics such as law, politics, entertainment, economics, biology, real estate, sales, design, and psychology are just a few that pop up every time you open your RSS reader. It’s hard to find a sizable industry that hasn’t been drastically altered by the technological advances of the last twenty years, or won’t be by the next twenty either, so it’s not at all surprising that the people in the industry like to talk about those changes as they progress.
The problem comes when people don’t know what they don’t know. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone post a legal question on Hacker News, and get dozens of replies from people who aren’t attorneys. They feel qualified to have an opinion because they’re smart, and lots of the tech articles they read have a legal slant to them, and I guess it’s easy to mistake TechCrunch for education. The fact that they’ve never taken even an introductory law class doesn’t stop them from assuming they’ve got it figured out enough to offer advice.
The same happens in every field imaginable, to the point where I almost wish the site made everyone post verified credentials just so that if anyone with actual knowledge ever responded to a question, you’d be able to filter that signal out from the overpowering noise. Generally what happens though is I click on the commenters’ profiles a few times just to find they’re some 20 year-old programmer working on a new website for people to share music and then I give up.
"The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool doesn’t know he doesn’t know."
-(Lao Tzu)
In and of itself this wouldn’t be insidious, because at least the fools are well-meaning, and usually polite too. People mostly don’t offer psychological or legal or health advice over the internet in an attempt to do harm. They mean to help, and they simply don’t realize that harm (and little good) could come of it.
The problem is where it intersects with the second symptom, which is the belief that everyone not in the tech industry is stupid. This is pervasive in the tech media, and in the industry as a whole. A hundred times each day you come across someone saying that "These record label execs are suing people! They’re idiots and they just don’t get it." Or "These newspaper editors are trying to charge for online content! They’re idiots and they just don’t get it." Or "These clowns from Fox and NBC who run Hulu don’t want their videos showing up on Boxee! They’re idiots and they just don’t get it". Or "Warner is picking a fight with Lawrence Lessig? What are they, idiots?"
It never seems to occur to anyone that perhaps the people they think are stupid really aren’t, and perhaps (in reality, almost for certain) the people being commented about are just as smart as and know far more about the situation than the ones doing the commenting.
You can see an example of the last one if you click the link above. While I’ve been thinking of this post for months, it took me staying home sick for a bit to actually use the site enough to inspire me, and then give me the time to write it. In the thread, people who aren’t IP lawyers argue the finer points of fair use, and assert that Warner is nuts for messing with Lessig. The following scenario never seems to occur to any of them, and they even balk at it when it’s mentioned:
1. Warner has an army of highly paid, very smart and very knowledgeable IP attorneys, who all know way more about the situation than anyone who has ever even seen Hacker News, because while the people on Hacker News were studying programming, the equally smart Warner attorneys were studying intellectual property law and working on high-profile IP law cases.
2. Said attorneys (all of whom know exactly who Lawrence Lessig is, and are more familiar with his work than anyone on Hacker News) carefully examined the case, and decided for whatever reason to issue a DMCA take down notice which, by the way, is not a lawsuit, or even remotely close to one, and was issued to YouTube rather than Lessig, though you’d quickly lose sight of those facts when reading anything written about the whole affair.
3. It occurred to the attorneys that Lessig would fight this, because anyone who has ever read anything by Lessig would know that, and as I mentioned before, the attorneys in question are not retarded. Thus they issued the takedown notice because they wanted him to fight it, or at least don’t really care if he does.
4. Because they’re smart lawyers, who are experts on IP law (because that’s their job) and who issued a takedown notice to Lawrence Lessig that they wanted and expected him to fight, there’s a strong chance Warner has something serious to gain from it.
Now I’m not saying any of that is the case. For all I know, this was all just done by some automated software or a low-level grunt whose job it is to find Warner IP on YouTube and issue takedown notices, in which case it will likely blow over and isn’t worth discussing in the first place. Lessig might appeal the takedown, at which point an actual attorney might review it and decide whether or not it’s important enough for them to worry about. I really have no idea there.
But it’s also possible they’re looking for a fight, and if they are, you can be 100% sure it’s because they understand what they’re getting into and think they can win it. And if they think they can win it, there’s a good chance they’re right because they aren’t stupid. In fact they’re probably very bright, and they are very knowledgeable about and experienced in the subject area. If I had to bet on one side or the other, I’d bet on them.
That never occurred to a single person in the entire tech industry though, because they think anyone who can’t code an iPhone app, or doesn’t at least have the common sense to work mostly with people who can, is an idiot. So they go off spouting about how "Not Smart" Warner is, or how they’re in danger of setting some sort of shooting themselves in the foot "if they lose, which I think they will despite my not being a lawyer". It never occurs to them that the people who are a lawyer might be a little better at making that judgment, or even that not being a lawyer might make you a fool for even having an opinion on intricate legal matters such as who would win a case about Fair Use.
In some cases, I think the belief in the stupidity of people in other industries comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which people are compensated and therefore motivated. Take, for instance, the most flagrant example of this in recent years: the music industry. Over the last decade, they’ve fought technology tooth and nail, despite the fact that any teenager in 1999 could tell you it was a losing battle. It’s easy to look at what appears to be people tilting at windmills and see stupidity, but what you realize if you dig a little deeper is that they’re largely just intelligent people reacting in a rational manner to their own incentives.
Suppose you’re the CEO of a publicly traded record label circa 2000 and Napster is taking off. You realize that P2P file sharing is going to make a big dent in your sales increasingly over the next decade. What do you do?
You have two options. Behind door number one is fundamentally restructuring your entire company. Remember, this is still years before the iPod achieved the sort of ubiquity that led to the iTunes store and eventual copycats, so at this point, there doesn’t seem to be any real hope of long-term music sales. The CD is plainly marked for extinction, to be replaced by digital downloads, most of which will be traded from one person to another for free. You can see right away that revenues are going to have to come from something else down the line, like product placement in music videos, live performances, etc. You don’t know what you’ll be making money off of in 10 or 20 years, or how much, or even if you’ll be able to make any at all, because really you’re nothing but a middleman between the artist and the fans and maybe, just maybe, the internet is going to cut you out the way it did to computer retailers when Dell took over that industry.
Or you can sue every corporation that tries to get in on the P2P game, which won’t save you the end, but will definitely disorganize the community enough to staunch the bleeding for awhile, possibly a long while. (It’s actually done far better than most of us ever would have guessed.) You’re not stupid; you know that every time you obliterate one Napster another Kazaa will just pop up in its place, but between suing each one out of business and scaring customers by suing a few of them too, you’ll at least be able to hang on to something for a while.
And hell, the average tenure of an executive at a large corporation is only 5 or 6 years and you’ve already been on the job for two. You’re getting paid a huge salary with tons of stock options that vest over a relatively short period (such as 2 or 3 years) with a strike price low enough that your shares can slowly sink and you’ll still make millions for as long as you keep your board happy enough to not fire you, which you’ll do by pointing out that despite millions more people stealing your product daily, you’re still bringing in almost as much money as you did last year, and if you can just have a little more time you’ll sue your way back to revenue growth.
So what do you do? Do you destroy your major source of revenue, that’s brining in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, because you realize it’s going to die one way or another in the next 10-20 years and you might as well get on with it, and then start giving away the music for free and scrounging for ways to monetize in the hopes that some time, long after you’ve moved on to run a car company or a retail chain, your record label will be the one left standing? Or do you use your legal muscle to keep revenues as high as you can for as long as you can and keep collecting your multi-million-dollar salary and options package while doing lines off of naked starlets on the weekends before you move on to run a car company or a retail chain?
When you look at it from that perspective, it’s a no-brainer. You sue everyone and everything you can. If a 65 year old woman’s grandson downloads a CD of songs from Sesame Street on her computer, you sue her, sue the kid who spawned the little bastard, take the grandkid to juvenile court, and sue everyone on their block just for being within a reasonable proximity. Then you have your PR department spread the word that file sharing is illegal and if you do it, or ever even shake hands with anyone who did, we’re going to take your retirement, your house, your car, and even your $3 Timex wristwatch just like we did to this little old lady, and you’ll be spending your golden years working a second job at McDonald’s just to pay off what you owe us, all because you just had to have that Britney Spears CD but couldn’t pay $9.99 for it like a good law-abiding citizen.
That’s what they did, and it’s what I’d do too, and I have standardized tests to prove that I’m at least not an idiot. But everyone in the tech industry just assumes they’re stupid and they don’t get it. They’re not, and they do. It’s just that they don’t get paid to get it. Getting it isn’t what pays the mortgage on a $20 million mansion in Beverly Hills and the lease on a yacht. The job of getting it and actually doing something about it will fall to the next guy.
And now, a decade later, the next guys are taking over the record labels, TV networks, and movie studios, and we’re seeing things like Last.fm and Hulu and 360 degree music contracts which I said were going to be the future of that industry a year before anyone else. They’re adapting to the changing situation because the new guys, unlike the old ones, get paid for that. Their market caps are sinking faster than their boards can reprice the executives’ options, and the investors finally realize that all of the king’s lawyers can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so they have to be patient and plan for the long term. And that restructuring is what we’re seeing now.
Everyone on both sides of the coin wants to work this out, because there’s enough gold there for all of us. But for those of us in the tech industry, if we’re going to get there we’re going to have to realize that they’re smart too, and they know things we don’t, just as we know things they don’t. We have to work together, and leverage their knowledge of how to produce quality content, which they do better than anyone in the world, with our knowledge of how to package it up and deliver it to consumers in the most appealing manner.
And when Hulu says they don’t want their content appearing on Boxee, or Warner issues a take down notice, or the RIAA sues our favorite music startup, instead of calling them idiots and assuming they’re out of touch with their customers and the changing world they live in, we should realize they have smart, knowledgeable people who know much that we don’t putting a lot of thought into what they’re doing, ask why, and see if we can find a workable compromise.
It’s going to be a long, bumpy road, and some of the industries (like music) that are struggling to keep up with the times will probably fare much better than others (like newspapers) in the end. We in the tech industry will do our best to step up and fill the gap, and try to make it work for everyone, but to do it well we’re going to have to stop assuming that everyone else is stupid and doesn’t get it. We’re going to have to inoculate ourselves against Hacker News Disease and work on meaningful solutions together.
