I was working on this as a link post about Paul Graham's essay, but then someone beat me to it (#1449020) and so now you get it as a stand alone discussion...which is probably what it should have been all along.
"Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.""Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal."
Graham uses the story of Swiss Watches in the 20th Century to explain how many products have started leaning more on brand than on their ability to fix a problem.
He starts with this inevitable path:
Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.
As more people figured out how to make very precise, lightweight, reliable watches, such craftmanship became less valuable - it's either a race to the bottom with no profit margin or you can give up competing on craftmanship and compete on brand alone.
The three most prestigious brands of the golden age were the so-called "holy trinity" of Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and Audemars Piguet. Their prestige was mostly deserved; they had earned it by the exceptional quality of their work. By the 1960s they stood on two legs, prestige and performance. And what they learned in the next two decades was that they had to put all their weight on the first leg, because they could no longer win at either of the two things watchmakers had historically striven to achieve. Quartz movements were not only more accurate than any mechanical movement, but thinner too.
The most expensive watches have always cost a lot, but why they cost a lot and what buyers got in return have changed completely. In 1960 expensive watches cost a lot because they cost a lot to manufacture, and what the buyer got in return was the most accurate timekeeping device, for its size, that could be made. Now they cost a lot because brands spend a lot on advertising and use tricks to limit supply, and what the buyer gets in return is an expensive status symbol.
The Swiss watch industry probably makes more now from selling brand than they would have if they were still selling engineering.
Graham documents how these three watchmakers pivoted from making very thin, very precise watches to making status symbols. I'm not a watch guy, but this is apparently what the fancy watches look like now (same three watchmakers):
The golden age of watchmaking is clearly over, and Graham believes we are in the brand age of watch making, characterized not by good design that best solves a problem, but rather by the weirdness of human psychology:
Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world.
"Avoid buying brand...but avoid selling it too""Avoid buying brand...but avoid selling it too"
Here's where Graham thinks this leaves us:
One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. Indeed it's probably a good idea not just to avoid buying brand, but to avoid selling it too. Sure, you might be able to make money this way — though I bet it's harder than it looks — but pushing people's brand buttons is just not a good problem to work on, and it's hard to do good work without a good problem.
Solving problems seems like it is still a good north star:
In fact there's a single principle that will both save you from working on things like brand, and also automatically find golden ages for you. Follow the problems.
Are we in the social media brand age?Are we in the social media brand age?
As I said, I'm not too interested in watches. I am interested in what this article would have looked like if it had been written about social media.
I think it is the case that there isn't really much to distinguish social media platforms from each other technically: they each have a different feel or flow,
Perhaps, a decade ago, each social media platform really was creating a distinct way of interacting with other people online. I don't think this is the case anymore. I have a feeling it wouldn't be hard for TikTok to add more text or for Reddit to add more visual media.
Solving a specific problem isn't what distinguishes a social media platform anymore.
It might be the case that the community is what distinguishes a given social media platform from others (the LinkedIn people are very different from the people on X or TikTok). But I have a feeling all that keeps a community in place is momentum.
This feels a lot like saying it's all about brand. The TikTokkers are on TikTok because it feels like the kind of place you do TikTok stuff...whatever that is. Many Bitcoiners are on X because X has the brand that aligns with those kind of Bitcoiners.
Stacker News is (trying) to solve a problemStacker News is (trying) to solve a problem
All of this sounds dreary to me. Kind of like thinking about everyone just being content to interact with their bots and not caring anymore if they have real human interaction.
However, one thing that I think is true is that Stacker News isn't doomed to a weird fate where we are just competing with other social media on brand. We've got a problem to solve.
There is clearly a problem with social media: figuring out what content people see is a mess. People have tried to solve this problem with algorithms and moderation and web of trust, but none of that has really worked for very long. It's just an ugly game of cat and mouse where really bad sides of humanity are featured.
SN, in my opinion, proposes a new solution for this: solve it with a market. Just like a free market produces the things people want in the quantities they want them, perhaps introducing prices to online social interactions will help people get the content and interactions they want in the quantities they want them.
QuestionsQuestions
- What would be evidence that SN actually is solving this problem?
- How can we use SN's particular solution to the problem to influence the SN brand?
https://stacker.news/SimpleStacker#research-in-public, obvi
I think it already does influence the brand. From what I can tell, users who like to write are attracted to SN. This makes sense: you get rewarded for writing.
That being said, I imagine the percentage of people who like to write, or to read long writing, is pretty small. That's why every social media trend has been to go after the people with lower attention spans.
Regarding solving things with a market, I am wondering what you are trying to solve. It needs to be understood that the users on Tik Tok are not Tik Tok's customers. Tik Tok's customers are the advertisers. So the market is really between content creators and advertisers, with TikTok providing the market infrastructure. The viewers are like an environmental variable.
On SN, the marketplace is between posters and readers (with the understanding that everyone is both sometimes a poster and sometimes a reader.)
They are fundamentally different markets, so much so that I wonder if it's even appropriate to compare them as being in the same business.
I'm not sure I agree with how you're framing this. It doesn't seem relevant to me who TikTok's customers are, nor what it's business model is. I think we're talking about aspect of the product.
TikTok's product is a platform that lets users upload and view videos from other users, and interact with each other via this platform.
SN's product is similarly a platform on which users can interact with each other (primarily via text). What do I think the problem is that this product solves? Hopefully, the mess that is a platform based on user generated content. If it isn't highly constrained, it turns into internet flame-war-porno-bot-swamp.
For instance, Polymarket has some amount of user generated content (the individual shares people buy). They don't have to worry about moderation much. If they were to do what Predyx does and allow users to create their own markets, they'd have to put a lot of budget toward dealing with the crazy things users do.
But in most cases, users are attracted to social media that allows them to be creative and do what they want with less constraint. So social media requires moderation or algorithms or the other things I listed in the OP. I think that SN is using markets to solve this problem just like reddit uses mods or X uses an algo.
I don't think it's relevant then who inhabits the role of customer, nor is it particularly relevant what SN's business model is.
Now this sounds like a promising platform
I think it's relevant because it implies that the platforms are trying to solve different problems. The choice of what moderation tools to use, how to set the boundaries of user generated content, are all motivated by who their customers are.
My fear is that SN is trying to solve an impossible problem. If there's anything thing worse than a Brand Age, it's an Impossible Age.
Perhaps markets are the best approximate solution to such a problem, but I wonder if markets, within this domain, improve upon the dictatorships and communism of other solutions (at scale), and improve them enough to earn a golden age. We'll find out.
@SimpleStacker may have mentioned it in that post, but when you introduce money and side payments, you can solve some of those impossible problems.
That's very theoretical though, and it usually requires that all the possible outcomes can be listed and ranked and assigned values over. For something as nebulous as "what a user wants to see on social media, and how that affects the rest of society", it's not obvious how to implement the optimal set of side payments to make everyone better off.
But that being said, just because it's impossible to meet a certain set of optimality criteria, doesn't mean we can't meet a weaker set of optimality criteria.
I guess my point is more that, absent payments, how to order content is an impossible problem because there is no meaningful intersubjective comparison of utility.
With payments, there is an actual optimal point that we can think about our distance from.
...if they can figure out how to use lightning. And if they knew about SN. My personal feeling is that getting a lightning wallet and attaching it to SN are pretty big blockers. Having done a number of in-person on-boardings, I've seen people really struggle with this. And I'm mostly talking about bitcoiners.
I need to make a point of doing outreach to non-bitcoin people and seeing what it's like for them to try to get started on SN.
true, that'd actually be kind of fun.
Seed them with enough CC/shitcoins to start doing stuff, give them a blink/alby/Primal address to receive the sats.
Yes, that's my prior too. different platforms, for whatever odd momentum or random reason become dominated by one set of ideas -- and then that core basically consumes the platform.
I'm not convinced it's a "set of ideas" so much as a "type of interaction" (although I'm not confident in this phrasing either):
The people on LinkedIn are very much career driven. The platform encourages this: you can see people's work history. You make "connections" there's lots of functionality around hiring and getting hired.
I'm less familiar with TikTok, but my naive impression is that it is aimed at people who want to become influencers.
Maybe reddit is about forming communities around different niche topics.
I'm sure we could go through most of the popular platforms and kind of pick what their type of interaction is. So, maybe they are distinguishing themselves on something more than brand in they way Graham is talking about it.
It certainly gets fuzzy when we're talking about communities. Because it doesn't do any good to go to a new place that has beter social media tech, but doesn't have your community.
~lol awesome. I should've reached out and asked if you had read it yet.
Not at all! I was dinking around on it since yesterday and I thought at first it was just going to be a link post, but then it get kept getting longer. So it makes better sense as a discussion.
'What would be evidence that SN actually is solving this problem?'
Is SNs a hotbed of hypocrisy with Libertarian virtue signalling 'BTC Maxis' who can't be fucked attaching LN wallets?
'How can we use SN's particular solution to the problem to influence the SN brand?'
Has the V4V model resulted in endless hollow man virtue signalling and echo chamber circle jerking?
Are any views contrary to the loud virtue signalling troll minority ever responded to with reasoned arguments and a genuine contest of ideas, or has SNs been largely dominated by a small group of self serving hypocrits who relentlessly troll and attack any one presenting ideas that challenge their hypocrisy?