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Comment by goodmachine | Hacker News Reader

Oh, to be young again and believe in palpable nonsense like this: "markets are conversations" or "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" or "we are immune to advertising" etc. Happy days.

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I was thinking more like "Oh, to be young again and be able to have the memory of a twenty-something me again. Happy days."

I saw the headline, and struggled to remember any details of the book, and ended up having to read a summary of it. I only remember reading the book and talking about it with coworkers during the dot-com craze.

Perhaps that's a clue to its actual significance?

Perhaps you remember the feeling and perhaps that you had fun buzzy conversations? That would mean those were the important parts, not the actual substance of the essay. Nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps you changed a bit as a result, even if you can't remember precisely what spurred the change. Nothing wrong with that either.

And I bet there are books you read back then chunks of which you remember (and other parts that are gone). Probably you remember the good parts.

I don't think your memory has necessarily gotten any worse -- if anything (given you're in your 40s by inference) it's probably gotten functionally better.

But I have a benchmark to compare to. Any book that made a significant impact on me, I can remember some key points. Not everything, certainly not many of the details, but at least some key points.

Cluetrain Manifesto? I can't remember anything at all.

edit: Maybe it's like The World Is Flat? I've heard that people who read the book when it came out thought it was incredible, preposterous, and amazing. But if people read it for the first time today, they're like, "why is this so special?" Perhaps it's difficult to remember what Cluetrain was about because the world became Cluetrain? Except judging from all the comments, I'm guessing a lot of people were disappointed that it didn't. So I don't know.

All three of those notions failed because nobody yet understood the awesome power of network effects compounded by aspects of digital communication (incompatibility, fragility, performance benefits of hierarchical trees, security concerns) that encourage the formation of gravity wells in networks.

There's been a lot of work on non-hierarchical networks but it's still a little too early. Unfortunately the block chain bubble also sucked all the air out of the room by causing decentralization to be connected with financial scams in many laypeople's minds and redirecting everyone's attention toward cryptocurrency me-too projects.

All of them failed because they're all wrong. Markets aren't conversations, they're power relationships. Hyperlinks reinforce hierarchy (see: what news is surfaced vs. what is hidden,) And nobody is immune to advertising, behavioural science relies on this

Beware of the defeatism imported by pretending these problems are intractable.

Markets are conversations when the participants are relatively equal. Barter and informal commerce in voluntarist/anarchist communities would be somewhat close to a pure example. Power relationships can be thought of as external to markets but markets are certainly influenced by them very heavily.

Hyperlinks do create hierarchy but for the network effect reasons I discussed. I also think the hierarchical nature of the DNS system is a culprit. I prefer non-hierarchical cryptographic addressing for this reason, but it has yet to see a mainstream implementation.

I agree that nobody is immune to advertising. You're right about that one. I didn't highlight it as different from the others.

I have always felt that "markets are conversations" is why social media became what it is now. Markets are still conversations, we are having them out in the open. I also honestly believe that the ideas in cluetrain were taken to heart and perverted into the landscape we see now. I think that they are still relevant but need to be considered for a new generation of people.

Even if it doesn't always feel like there is as much opportunity as there was 15 years ago on the open web, these are still important and timeless principles. It's still one of the most important books on marketing ever written, and it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading it.

It is like one of those movies that did not age well. Sort of like Mighty Ducks and Fight Club.

Oh I was about to watch Fight Club again, sad to hear that it didn't age well.

I can't see it as anything now except foreshadowing of the emergence of radical fascist brown shirt gangs into the semi-mainstream.

I think there are things about it that still work, like the scene where the narrator breaks down how recalls work. And, especially, the meet-cute where the narrator makes the "single-serving friend" joke, and Durden replies "That's very clever. How's that working out for you, being clever?" I think that's one of the best lines in a movie ever.

What do you believe now?

I'm not the one you're asking. But what I believe now is this: The Cluetrain approach largely lost. But the Manifesto did in fact represent how a lot of people felt. The complaints about what the net has become are, in essence, because the human approach lost and the impersonal corporations took over.

Indeed. And that's a sad testament about humanity.

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