One can refuse to pay bills, bully employees, steal credit, work the refs and look for shortcuts…
or pay bills ahead of time, elevate employees, amplify the credit of others and take the long road.
While both are modern signifiers of a certain kind of success, only one is a resilient way forward.
Ancient emperors that aspired to power often had their enemies beheaded.
The ones with real power gave them clemency.
Gratitude might be the way forward.
So much of what ails us gets a bit better when we say ‘thank you.’
Even when it’s hard.
Especially then.
It changes. It changes as we age, and it changes depending on the situation.
A second-grader might think that a boring class is never going to end.
A bad cold might feel endless, unless we have the perspective of someone who has experienced a chronic problem.
Some things actually deserve “never.” But most of what we’re worried about probably would be better categorized as “eventually.”
Engineering problems are difficult, but they have a right answer.
People problems, by their nature, are on a spectrum, a distribution of possible forward paths. But they’re complicated. A situation might not fit a person, and vice versa. Add a second person and now you have two people, and two people interacting exponentially increase the number of possibilities.
Knowing this takes the pressure off. Because there isn’t a perfect solution to a people problem. Simply an available path forward that helps us get to the next step.
A written contract benefits the party with the least power.
Power might be in the form of money, access to plenty of lawyers or simply a willingness to burn it all down to the ground.
In the moment before a contract is signed, the lower-powered party momentarily has more power. That’s because the other entity wants what you have. But as soon as they have it, it’s only the contract that offers concrete protection against future events.
Handshake agreements are great when there’s an ongoing, stable interaction. As long as each side is honorable, the other party can continue to do what they said they were going to do. But when priorities or outside factors shift, an at-will arrangement can end up harming the person who can least afford it.
The two things to focus on are:
This is why adding a binding informal arbitration clause to a contract is a smart idea. Why it makes sense for there to be worker and other protections in the law. And why we need to reinforce and applaud judicial systems that enforce clearly defined agreements.
There’s no competition for cookbooks on making food out of soccer balls and hockey pucks.
There’s no competition for software that charges you to find out the temperature on Mars.
There’s no competition for a service that counts how many pairs of shoes you own.
In fact, in every market that’s worth entering, there’s competition. That’s what you’re looking for. It’s a sign that people have a problem that they’re trying to solve through commerce.
The goal isn’t to find no competition. It’s to find a better way to solve the problem.
This is a problem that comes up every year or two, but no one has implemented a useful solution yet.
Advertising is a surprisingly bad way for a culture to pay for content, because the kind of content that gets rewarded is often dumbed down for a large audience or is optimized for a small audience of people eager to buy something that makes a profit.
It’s also inefficient, as advertisers can’t know in advance what’s going to work, and creators get a very small share of the ad spend.
An alternative is to pay for what you get, the way we treat carrots, baseballs and clarinets. Instead of buying a baseball, though, you’re buying a chance to watch a video.
Micropayments are a system where you pay a penny or a nickel or a dollar for a piece of content.
It introduces two kinds of friction, though:
About thirty years ago, I described a simple solution to both problems:
For $25 you can buy a content passport. It’s available for purchase on any website that is part of the content network, and you need one to read the content on their site. The site that sells it to you gets $10 in commission for selling it to you.
It keeps track of every member site you visit (that’s really easy now, with a cookie). And then the coordinator of the system allocates, on a percentage basis, $10 to the sites you visit. It’s all gonna go somewhere, whether you visit one site or a thousand. There’s no friction, because it’s a buffet, just like it is now. Read all you want, no ads, no hassles.
The sites that get visited the most get the most aggregate money from the monthly distributions of royalties.
Each site has an incentive to sell a lot of passports (the commission is significant) and the coordinator of the network is making 25% as well.
It’s really clear who the customer is (the reader) and it’s easy for any site to join the network. Aligned incentives, a simple and resilient solution.
Have fun. (PS this is unrelated to yesterday’s post about federations, just a coincidence.)
It is, by far, the fastest-growing social network in history, growing more than 20% in about a week.
And yet it didn’t stutter much.
How can this be?
It’s a network in the real internet sense of the word. It’s not just a network of users, it’s a network of servers as well. No one owns it. Like email, it’s a set of principles and rules, not a place. A federation is different than a corporation. It might not be as shiny, but it’s far more resilient.
It’s inconvenient. You can’t get started in ten seconds. This leads to less initial stickiness. It means that the people who get through the learning curve are more likely to be committed and perhaps generous. In the early days of email, of Compuserve, of AOL, of the web, of just about every network I’ve been part of, these early users created a different sort of magic. It never lasts, but it’s great to see.
I started one of the first internet companies in 1990, and the new frontiers tend to rhyme with each other. This might be one.
Part of the power of a network is its distributed nature. That’s a plus when it comes to tech and innovation. It’s a minus when it comes to the speed of central agreement as well as the potential for abuse. Email never quite recovered from the open nature of inputs, which meant that spammers, scammers and hustlers could do what they liked, and the defense was imperfect filters.
The intentional decentralization of the Mastodon federation seems designed to make those filters more natural and effective, at the expense of a super loud amplifier in the middle. You can discover new voices and ideas, but there isn’t a megaphone at work, just begging to be hacked by selfish behavior. It’s a bit more like life and a bit less like traditional social networks that create controversy to earn a profit.
And finally–the culture of this federation is still being created. A lot of the folks who just arrived will be the authors of that culture, and if they figure out how to be generous and kind, that’s what will get built. Alas, as is often the case, culture is up to us, particularly when the commercial bias is removed.
I’m reposting my daily blog here, and might dip in from time to time, and I’m eager to see how this peer to peer experiment unfolds.
If you’re a developer with chops in APIs, apps, and what’s happening in the Mastodon world, I’d love to hear from you for some future projects I’m noodling on. Simple form is here.
If you often find yourself saying “sorry” in a way that doesn’t advance the conversation, it might be interesting to substitute “thank you” instead.
So, “I’m sorry this came out of the kitchen after your other dishes,” becomes, “thank you for waiting so patiently.”
And, “I’m sorry we got disconnected,” becomes, “thank you for calling back.”
It’s a subtle shift, from separation to connection.
It’s tempting to imagine that mixing half a glass of milk and half a glass of orange juice might get you a hybrid that’s better than either.
Alas, not so much.
The goal is to find something that is in and of itself. That becomes the very best version of what you’re trying to do, the solution to the consumer/user/member problem you’ve identified.
Here works. There works. But here and there and everywhere generally doesn’t.
In a world filled with choices, specificity in service of extraordinary results tends to outperform.
