The Opinions of Attractive People
dilbert.com
dilbert.com
Except I love "how it's made" type of show, and don't really care about the people involved. Put halloween masks on them all, and I'd still watch.
(In fact, I just tried "Animal Planet" on Google images, and got mostly face shots -- human and otherwise.)
Here's an idea for you: A service that you have to check in to periodically, you set up a number of actions that need to be done after you haven't checked in for 24 hours, 48 hours, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year and 5 years.
We'll call the thing 'deadmansknob', after the button in the locomotives that a train driver has to keep pressed to activate the system (if they have a heart attack they presumably let go).
Payment is on the signing up end (since obviously you won't be paying on the other end), $1 per action on file per year.
Your invention sounds like the perfect kind of thing to submit to the Halfbakery: http://www.halfbakery.com/
The difference between "this should be a blog post" and "this seems like something for people to use to amuse themselves with over lunch," I think, is that the blog-post kind of idea requires very little investment in time and labor to determine profitability. The kinds of things you see on the Halfbakery (and your idea) usually require large HR-investments, with employees either manufacturing the product, or directly serving the customer (or making sure that all the stuff you want to happen after your "death" actually happens.) You can't just sit down at your terminal and see if it's a great idea by morning, so it just becomes "something nice to think about" rather than "something nice to try out."
Interesting writing should contain both statements of fact and opinions. Having the writer provide cues to indicate which is which makes reading easier.
Otherwise, how does one quickly distinguish between an unsupported statement of fact vs. an opinion?
> If I have ten brilliant ideas, the best thing to do is to execute full-steam on one, instead of dividing my attention.
And this is the altered version:
> If I have (what I consider to be) ten brilliant ideas, the best thing for me, personally, to do, is to execute full-steam on one, instead of dividing my attention.
Now, there are things—aesthetic descriptors, like "brilliant" and "best"—that are completely subjective (except in certain jargon contexts, like "best-case efficiency.") Using an aesthetic descriptor is inherently implying that whatever you are saying is an opinion, because aesthetic descriptors have no other use—there is no way to "support" the "fact" that something is best, or most moral, or is the most dance-able, or tastes most nostalgic. These evaluations come from your utility function, not your model of the world.
All I did, here, was to add qualifiers to my aesthetic descriptors marking them as such. Frequently, I do the same to, say, a summary of a post by Zed Shaw, as a comment to that post, and people reply with "well why didn't he just say that?" It's bizarre to me, because these things are completely clear and never the subject of argument in spoken conversation—yet they seem to be points of ire almost always when online. I wonder if there's some sort of body-language cue that people normally rely on so subconsciously that they never realize they've avoided actually parsing any aesthetic qualifiers they've encountered, instead just inferring their meanings from analysis of tone and intent.
Now that I see what you were referring to, I fully agree with you.
Billing the site as a site where people can vote on attractiveness of the person giving the opinion would personally turn me off. Speculate as you wish about my attractiveness, but it's just not something I'd be crazy about participating in as either a person who is posting (my lack of desire to have many strangers judging how I look) or as consuming (my assumption that anyone posting a video would simply be an ego-maniac). Yes, those are quick and possibly unfair judgements, but with the myriad of sites out there vying for my attention, they'd be my first ones. A tweak would be to keep quiet about the attractiveness angle and have someone Academia point that out later in a groundbreaking study of influence on "FaceOpinionSpace" (best I could come up with in two seconds).
One might need to incorporate something to ensure that users are really posting a face (Imagine a /b/ campaign called "Post Your Penis's Opinion"). Or maybe that last part is a whole other business idea. Automated video analysis and Flagging of videos could help avoid this, but if it wasn't handled well I wouldn't visit the site.
Lastly, it would take a lot of capital. Video isn't a low bandwidth endeavor and if the big "feature" is attractiveness of the person posting their short opinion, quality would have to be somewhat reasonable.
It's called "radio" or "podcast".
It's more of the same here. Attractiveness is not universal and is often _tied_ to the opinions a person holds--so people that disagree with arguably attractive people will think them _ugly_.
The other big problem is that no one really cares about a pretty face repeating words they don't understand. Pretty faces might get famous just for being famous, but they don't get respected, only thronged.
The hell of it is, this could _work_. It wouldn't work by the mechanism he declares, though--it would work because we connect with real people, and it's fun to experience people in short snippets with no obligation. The problem is that we've just described Chatroulette, only decoupled from the present time--and sharing the present time is what makes chatroulette interesting.
From my own observations about how people react to amateur video productions on the Internet, eg. "omg who is that lecturer she is so cute!!", I think Mr Adams is onto something.
Your amateur video productions _prove my point_ because the attractiveness is in the ordinary, the "just a person at home making a video." It is in the fact that the person is presumably contributing something valuable. So why would people care if models were paid to say something?
This is why Adams articles frustrate me: because it provokes discussion without moving anything forward, because he's used a terrible model to abstract attraction and as a consequence our definitions are semantic (read: fucked) to begin with.
Oh, and I think twitter is a failed idea. It mostly has turned to another form of RSS feeds. The intended use-case has failed (small updates on your daily life, e.g. "I'm drinking tea with my wife").
This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service. If you allow people to post 30 second videos, they'll use it to send messages to each other instead of expressing opinions on public issues. Or, they might just post short funny videos ("epic fail" videos, etc).
Nobody cares about Twitter-the-idea, and that's never what anyone means any more when they use the term. What everyone loves is Twitter-the-platform, which is a huge success.
> This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service.
Yes, you can. When the site is small, you can manually moderate all submissions, literally telling people how they may use it. After the site grows, the "base" will continue to obey the site's culture. As long as the base has more power (in some metric or another) the site will continue in that direction without further work. (This is basically how HN has been set up.)
Note that this might keep the site small—like HN, and unlike Twitter. But that's still entirely monetizable, especially if you have a much larger viewing population than submitting population.
I mean, he thought the idea was silly and not very useful, but it was an actual implementation of micro blogging before twitter arrived. I am certain there were other implementations that I don't know about.
There's more pranksters out there than there are people who would take this seriously.