Dana Blankenhorn

Fixing Twitter on Mastodon

Twitter is broken beyond repair.

But it can be fixed. On Mastodon. If users learn something I learned back in 1988.

I’m @danablankenhorn@journa.host on Mastodon. Journa.host is run by Adam Davidson, formerly of The New Yorker. It’s one of thousands of servers supporting Mastodon on the Internet.

Users can block users on Twitter. But on Mastodon servers can also block servers. Users can also move between servers. This means people choose whatever server conforms to their standards on what should be blocked and what allowed. You can have alt-right servers, alt-left servers, and alt-bicycling servers.

A lot of people, looking at Mastodon over the last few weeks, have looked askance at this. People are isolating behind their server walls, they complain. Or they might.

But that was always true for Twitter. It was designed to be. The problem is that many people didn’t use their block commands aggressively enough. Journalists amplified extreme views by retweeting them. Hate was amplified by user outrage.

A Community Model for Web Publishing

Even before the Web was spun, I was arguing against the standard publishing model for the Internet. (Picture from Wikipedia.)

That model was built on advertising. You aggregated people based on their location, industry, or lifestyle, by covering their interests and advocating for them. You then sold billboards alongside that content and, if charging for the paper, only get back its distribution costs.

What I argued for instead, as early as the mid-1990s, was for a marketplace model. You’re still collecting readers, but your content leads them down a sales funnel, and you’re seeking commissions on those sales from your business partners based on your credibility.

One of my favorite memories is of the 1995 Christmas party of the Atlanta Press Club, where James Cox Kennedy, then the local paper’s publisher, claimed he could repurpose content online by putting different URLs in front of it, like yall.com. I laughed so hard I cried. I nearly doubled over.

By the time publishers expressed interest in the marketplace model, of course, it had become useless. This was thanks to Doubleclick, which was founded in Atlanta and later bought by Google. Google made it possible for anyone to aggregate their own audience and buy it at a run-of-network rate. The fact that you’d need 10 times more impressions to get the same impact was seen as a feature, not a bug. And the price of those ads continued falling, thanks to the Web’s unlimited inventory.

The Time Is Now

Here is what 45 years of studying business cycles has taught me.

Now is the time to work on your next great startup.

Right now. When the whole world is collapsing around us. When old business models are failing. When everyone is worried about their job, or about to lose it.

Look at the opportunities. I detailed them three years ago. The end of oil. The machine Internet. DNA as a programming language.

These boil down to renewable energy, control systems, and medicine.

Beyond the PC

I’m surprised more people didn’t anticipate this year’s tech wreck.

Once computing mastered video, as it did early in the last decade, there were no obvious new horizons. What resulted was crap without application. Crypto has no application. The metaverse has no application.

Without new files to deal with, this year is featuring a shakeout in how to deal with them. PCs were already being hurt by Chromebooks, which move most workloads to the cloud. PCs even accepted it. Most of my own PC’s files are now cloud-based.

But what I didn’t anticipate (and should have) was the death of writing.

Tech, Change and the Fed

Even 50 years on, we don’t understand Moore’s Law. 

Moore’s Law accelerates the pace of change in every direction. It’s not just about silicon. It’s not just about technology. It’s about what is enabled.

Two things that are enabled by technology are deflation and change. The first is a subset of the second. Technology lets consumers and businesses adjust to change rapidly. This is true not just because technology is improving, but because its adoption keeps increasing.

Moving technology from a desktop to a smartphone is a step change in its adoption. Smartphones let us compare prices inside a store. They let us route around traffic jams. They bring the office to the job site. You can find whatever you need to know, from anywhere, using a smartphone.

A world of instant answers means a world of instant adjustment. Demand can adjust faster than supply, but supply can adjust too. We all went into lockdown together, we all came out of it together, we all demanded products together, then we demanded services together. There was a lag, but by and large the economy has kept up.

Some changes are permanent. We don’t need offices the way we did. You can appear on TV from your living room, kitchen, or bedroom. What I’ve seen, as a business reporter, is that the economy can now react ahead of policymakers. Even the Federal Reserve, which can adjust policy every month or even within a month, can no longer keep up.

Bad News is Good News

A few weeks ago, I noted how the “bad news” at Snap, Twitter and other social media companies can easily be interpreted as good news.. If people are no longer interested in rage tweeting, they could be becoming more thoughtful. They could be reserving judgment. They could have found real lives.

The same is true, doubly so, with the recent “problems” at chip stocks like Nvidia, Micron and Qualcomm. Prices for commodity chips are falling. The “chip shortage” is easing. In the near term it means lower profits for big chip companies. Sell, sell, sell.

But it also means falling prices and more supply for companies that use chips. It means car prices could start declining. It means the Machine Internet can get a fresh start.

WFH

Malcolm Gladwell pulled the latest edition of his Revisionist History podcast, called Confessions of a CEO, after an outcry over his attitude toward working from home.

He’s against it.

I have worked from home for nearly 40 years. My wife has done it full-time since the pandemic started. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand where he’s coming from.

There are many jobs you can’t do from home. Factory jobs. Food jobs. Lab jobs. If you’re the one taking care of the cloud, you must go to the data center.

But for what the 20^th century called “office work,” it’s stupid. We have laptops. We have phones. Who cares where they are? If you must bring people together, for team-building or making decisions, you have an obligation to make it fun, and make it rare. If you want people to come into your store, make sure you deliver personal service and a buying experience they can’t get online.

Bad News Can Be Good News

Some very good news was misinterpreted yesterday.

It came from Snap, in the form of a very bad quarter. Growth slowed and losses jumped. The stock crashed, down by 25%.

This was good because Snap is a social media company. It’s known for Snapchat, and its CEO, tech bro Evan Spiegel, is a younger version of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

The numbers indicate that Madison Avenue, at least, is turning away from “social media,” and that users are starting to follow. The problem is “the algorithm’s” natural tendency to lead people down rabbit holes. You’re suspicious of government, we’ll make you paranoid. Then we’ll make you violent. Russia used this to install Trump, and Trump used it to create January 6.

The problem is that this is a feature, not a bug. If you watch mysteries on Netflix, then Netflix will offer you more mysteries. If you follow liberals on Twitter, it will offer you more liberals to follow. If you like medieval drama on Kindle Unlimited, you’ll be offered another medieval drama.

Amazon is (Health) Infrastructure

I bought stock in Amazon.Com stock almost a decade ago, and it’s one of the best investments I have ever made.

Not for the return. My Apple shares have done better. My Microsoft shares have done better. And over the last year, all three have tanked.

It’s because of what Amazon is, a secret no other financial analyst I’ve ever read seems to understand.

Amazon is Infrastructure.

Career Advice for Tough Times

No one wants to read the financial page right now.

I don’t. And I write for it.

For companies that cover finance, it’s a long march without water. Many companies will be lost, and so will many jobs.

It’s part of a natural cycle. If things were great all the time any idiot could succeed. We don’t want to see idiots succeed.

A market winter is a time of discipline. As was the case in the last two recessions, those who focused on the short term, who focused only on page views and not on branding, won’t make it through. What does get you through is a brand.

A brand knows its target market. A brand manager can picture their ideal customer, and the brand can go to that customer when things get tight, knowing there’s a base from which to build. A publication, or any company, without a brand can’t do that. They die.