More than that, Tesla’s lack of car-making experience was actually an advantage: the company’s mission, internal incentives, and bottom line were all dependent on getting electric right. This has already been proven out on platforms like Twitch in the West, and is a massive success in China (there is a reason, I should note, why the best available live streaming technology was offered by a Chinese company). Again, as I noted above, Facebook made the 2013 decision to increase the value of newsworthy links for a reason, and in the time since, BuzzFeed in particular has proven that there is a consistent and repeatable way to not only reach a large number of people but to compel them to share content as well. I'm considering the subscription. Stratechery book. Still, this outcome depends on Facebook driving ever-more engagement, and I’m not convinced that more “content posted by the friends [I] care about” is the best path to success. That, though, is the case for all user-generated content. What actually happened — to the extent anything meaningful happened at all — is that instead of storming the barricades of Wall Street i.e. The crucial missing piece, though, is that TikTok isn’t really a social network…. I was definitely more right than Krugman — easy to say about an article written in 2015 versus 1998, of course — but the truth is that I too missed the boat, both narrowly in the case of Facebook, and broadly in the case of the Internet. The power of memes is not simply the amount of information they convey, but the malleability with which they convey it. October 12, 2019 Shenzhen, Naomi “Sexy Cyborg” the queen of warez. Facebook’s Story Problem — and Opportunity, Stanford Internet Observatory investigated, disappointing for a service launching in 2020, blocking and user-reported content violations, has announced its intention to help creators monetize, Clubhouse and AirPods; Twitter, Meerkat, and Clubhouse; Clubhouse Monetization, Mistakes, Memes, and Foreign Ground; Coronavirus Context; The New York Times and the China Model, Google Earnings, Google’s Response to ATT, Google Cloud Losses, An Interview with Eric Seufert about Apple, Facebook, and Mobile Advertising. The iPad was designed to be better at web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and ebooks. living in a tent two blocks away from a building long since removed from actual trading, /r/WallStreetBets used the system against itself. Mistakes and Memes – Stratechery by Ben Thompson. I noted in a Daily Update last year: What I got right [in that 2015 Article] is that your social network doesn’t generate enough compelling content, but, like Facebook, I assumed that the alternative was professional content makers. They have shades of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in that the very meaning of a meme is altered based on where it is encountered, and from whom. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds a collective capacities among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation. It didn’t matter that Stories were not nearly as well-composed as pictures in the Instagram feed; in fact, that made them even more valuable, because Stories were easier to both produce and consume. ByteDance’s 2016 launch of Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — revealed another, even more important benefit to relying purely on the algorithm: by expanding the library of available video from those made by your network to any video made by anyone on the service, Douyin/TikTok leverages the sheer scale of user-generated content to generate far more compelling content than professionals could ever generate, and relies on its algorithms to ensure that users are only seeing the cream of the crop. [. On the business, strategy, and impact of technology. Remember, in a Facebook world, information suppliers are modularized and commoditized as most people get their news from their feed. My personal bet is that podcasts will follow a similar path. Start with text: Twitter is not discrete articles but a stream of thoughts, 280 characters long. Posted on Tuesday, February 9, 2021 Wednesday, February 10, 2021 Author by Ben Thompson Manage your Stratechery subscription. But if you spin it — it’s got a chance of landing on heads, and a chance of landing on tails. February 9, 2021; Paul Krugman, back in 1998, was pretty sure he had this Internet thing figured out: To put it another way, I was too focused on demand — the key to Aggregation Theory — and didn’t think deeply enough about the evolution of supply. (The last third is more regrettable, but I’ll address that, too.) When humanitarian aid to Yugoslavia started getting intercepted by bandits, Danish special forces operative Helge Meyer personally delivered food from the cockpit of an armor-plated stealth Camaro. I almost fell out of my chair while playing board games when my not-at-all-technical sister-in-law started listening to a Clubhouse while we were playing board games over the weekend, and by all accounts Taiwan is one of a whole host of markets where the app has taken off. The one social network that I have barely mentioned in this Article is the social network that the FTC has sued for being a monopoly. I was impressed by, and enjoyed, the first two-thirds of Ben Thompson’s response to my critique of his work related to tech platforms and the Google antitrust case. This is hardly a profound observation. It has been clear for many years that the Internet made it possible for new communities to form, sometimes with astonishing speed. And, after this past weekend’s “blogging-is-dead” overdose, I almost feel compelled to note that my conclusion — and experience — is the exact opposite of Klein’s and all the others’: I believe that Sullivan’s The Daily Dish will in the long run be remembered not as the last of a dying breed but as the pioneer of a new, sustainable journalism that strikes an essential balance to the corporate-backed advertising-based “scale” businesses that Klein (and the afore-linked Smith) is pursuing. January 27, 2021; Andreessen Horowitz is going direct. Remember, in Noel and company’s description party actors care more about their policy preferences than they do voter preferences, but in an aggregated world it is voters aka users who decide which issues get traction and which don’t. But a dream world follows different rules from those we know from the real one, which only increases its powers of attraction…, In an interview for the podcast Pod Save America in August 2019, Ocasio-Cortez explained the foundations of her political philosophy: “We have to become master storytellers. ... We grow GBV by attracting new guests to book stays and experiences on our platform and through past guests who return to our platform to make new bookings. It is obviously easy to dunk on this statement, but back in 2015, I came, ever so slightly, to Krugman’s defense; my argument was that the reason he was wrong was not because he overrated user-generated content, but rather because he underrated the effectiveness of Aggregators giving people what they wanted:1. Photo: Nordiske Mediedager B en Thompson is the author of Stratechery, a popular newsletter that “provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media.”Thompson, who has an MBA, is a former tech industry worker who has spent time at various tech firms, including Apple and Microsoft. Just as important, though, particularly in terms of the impact on society, is the drastic reduction in fixed costs. In many mediums this feature would be fatal: one isn’t always free to watch a live video, and believe me, it is not very exciting to watch me type. There have been a thousand stories about what the GameStop saga has been about: a genuine belief in GameStop, a planned-out short squeeze, populist anger against Wall Street, boredom and quarantine, greed, hedge fund pile-ons, you name it there is an article arguing it. Being live also feeds back into the first quality: Clubhouse is far better suited than podcasts to discuss events as they are happening, or immediately afterwards. according to a profile in the Wall Street Journal, embrace the Green New Deal on his campaign website, insisting he didn’t support it in a debate, Clubhouse and AirPods; Twitter, Meerkat, and Clubhouse; Clubhouse Monetization, Mistakes, Memes, and Foreign Ground; Coronavirus Context; The New York Times and the China Model, Google Earnings, Google’s Response to ATT, Google Cloud Losses, An Interview with Eric Seufert about Apple, Facebook, and Mobile Advertising, All news sources are competing on an equal footing; those controlled or bought by a party are not inherently privileged, The likelihood any particular message will “break out” is based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it. That certainly puts Clubhouse’s aggressive contact collection in a more sinister light; it also very much fits the stereotype of a new social network scrambling to capture the market first, and worrying about potential downsides later. Moreover, they don’t even need a publication: social media gives everyone the means to broadcast to the entire world. One of the takeaways of that piece was that monetization was holding podcasts back, and that Spotify appeared to be positioning itself to expand the podcast advertising market via centralization. For my part, though, I’m not so sure. “We actually elected a meme as president.”. The end result is that instead of infrastructure leading to a movement, a movement, via the stock market, funded the building out of infrastructure. All companies start with the espoused beliefs and values of their founder(s), but until those beliefs and values are proven correct and successful they are open to debate and change. An even more important reason, though, is probably COVID. It turns out that the literal meaning of “going viral” was, in fact, more accurate than its initial meaning of having an article or image or video spread far-and-wide. Defining Information – Stratechery by Ben Thompson. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. It is also likely possible to connect Clubhouse IDs with user profiles. We have to tell the story of the crossroads.”. I just recounted how the printing press effectively overthrew the First Estate, leading to the establishment of nation-states and the creation and empowerment of a new nobility. I don’t know, I love memes, I think they can be very insightful, and you know throughout history, symbolism in general has powerfully affected people. But you could also share on Instagram’s network, which of course became the preferred way to use Instagram over time. Stratechery by Ben Thompson Feed since 25 Mar 2019 100 bookmarks 17 karma points 13 subscribers. September 22, 2019 The Care and Feeding of the Uffington White Horse Through More Than 100 Generations. That is how the service has evolved from text to images to video and, I wouldn’t be surprised, to audio. Thriving in a Digital World: My Conversation with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson [The Knowledge Project Ep. If Software really is Eating the World, there needs to be a … This makes the hassle of coordinating ad reads and sponsorship codes across a plethora of podcasts worth the trouble; it’s the same story with other prominent podcast sponsors like ZipRecruiter or SimpliSafe. February 3, 2021; ... and I chose books for lots of different reasons, but one primary reason. The fact that Clubhouse makes it so easy to drop in and out of conversation is matched by how easy AirPods make it to drop into and out of audio-listening mode. Ben Thompson Culture is not something that begets success, rather, it is a product of it. Does anyone subscribe to Stratechery? The Internet and the Third Estate – Stratechery by Ben Thompson. Still, the discussion of all of these different networks really does highlight how Facebook is unique: while Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are all first and foremost about the medium, and only then the network, Facebook is about the network first. That sounds a lot like how I have described memes, which means to master memes is to stop the coin on your terms, and there is no better example of what this means than Tesla. Conveniently, this fits with his mission for the company. A qubit allows for uncertainty. Now, though, I realize that this confusion stems from making the same mistake I did in that old analysis of Facebook: I was looking to the real world as a guide to understanding the Internet, when it was in fact inevitable that the Internet would, over time, come to impact the real world. Links. However, the fact that audio can be consumed while you are doing something else allows the immediacy and vibrancy of live conversation to shine. Ben Thompson / Stratechery: Actions taken by Big Tech after violence at the Capitol may have sowed the seeds for Internet 3.0, which will be defined by open protocols and decentralization — Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is, particularly relative to its prescience, one of the most misunderstood books of all time. Go back to the time before the printing press: while a limited number of texts were laboriously preserved by monks copying by hand, the vast majority of information transfer was verbal; this left room for information to evolve over time, but that evolution and its impact was limited by just how long it took to spread. Posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2017 Tuesday, March 27, 2018 Author by Ben Thompson There was a sort of symbolism in the way President Donald Trump and his inner circle formulated and rolled out last Friday’s executive order blocking entry to the United States from seven Muslim-majority nations; according to Politico :