The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
cluetrain.com
cluetrain.com
People are much more empowered to know the truth: Amazon reviews, restaurant reviews etc. Yes they can be manipulated, and yes counterfeit products can make their way into the supply chain, but we are forgetting that before the internet the lack of scaled reviews meant many more bad meals at restaurants.
Reviews accelerated evolutionary pressures on businesses. They got better!
Companies are more open and don’t / can’t keep secrets as they previously did. While imperfect, Glassdoor changed things for the better.
I’d even posit that while many huge brands still corpspeak, many are much more casual and some (Tesla, via Musk for example) are radically open and engage with their customers directly- truly listening and interacting and taking advice.
Lastly if you are reading this, I hope you have a great day today. :)
I think the problem is worse that you state. For instance, IIRC pretty much all the sites in the "independent" online mattress review industry are either owned by some particular mattress company and shill for them or are pay-for-play. There's a huge amount of astroturfing, even for now-end no name products.
As to Yelp, I don't recall the era before Yelp as an era of going to bad restaurants. For informal restaurants, we'd go to wherever friends had been, if the friends said they'd had a good experience. And for fancier restaurants, those were reviewed in the newspapers. Or if you lived in a college town, then every restaurant, even the informal ones, would get a review in the weekly. Like, for instance, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Independent would post a review of every restaurant, both the informal and the formal.
I think an honest appraisal of the Internet would have to look hard at its failure to live up to its promise, and why that happened. For most of the 20th Century it was assumed that if knowledge could become universal, then economic growth would increase, and yet the opposite has happened. The years since 2000 have seen below average economic growth and below average productivity growth. Figuring out why economic growth faltered when information was becoming abundant has to be one of the big questions that economics needs to answer.
Economics is not a science. It's not really possible to apply the scientific method. How we value things has a serious impact too.
Don't get me wrong here. The study of economics is high value and definitely can yield insight we can put to good use, but it's not on par with science in the sense of getting answers.
I would argue the answers we seek lie more along the lines of corruption and how money in politics has empowered large enterprises to shape society to a much larger degree than we can say was generally intended. Surely, carving society into a bunch of what looks like a bunch of fiefdoms impacted growth in a negative way.
Secondly, the lack of effective representation ordinary people see in politics today has not made things better. Corruption has competed very well, pushing the voice of ordinary people, the weight of their concerns, off the table, leaving us all with a poor environment to prosper in.
He's still speaking out against the idiocy of the world. He also takes good photos.
We've been at Gandhicon 1, 2, and 3 for decades now. But we'll get to 4.
There are simply better ways for demand and supply to signal each other than what adtech provides. When we prove that, we'll win.
I think that for a while, the distribution model of choice is about to go underground for a lot of topics, due to the weird politics of the day. Preference falsification is in high gear now.
Think Memex, the 1945 idea, where you stored everything you ever read locally, and could spool of a dump of all of it (with context, annotation trails, etc) with no need for the internet to grant you that access again.
This gives the finger to the ideas of copyright, intellectual property, and all manner of gatekeeping. It might be the only way for free thinking people to have free discussions for the next decade or so.
The idiotic rise of the "influencer" and all the surrounding cultures show we aren't just not immune to advertising, we crave it.
Edit: removed pointless snark/retained essential cynicism.
Of course, I’m sure it was mostly just me being young vs the market really being that different.
I listened to this on cd and remember having the case in my car for years and years. I feel like it influenced me in how I design products and projects and stuff but don’t remember anything specific from the book.
The Cluetrain Manifesto reminds me of another text from the same era -- World of Ends <https://worldofends.com/>, about how the internet is an agreement not a thing and how the intelligence is all at the ends.
Of course, that's no longer true. The internet as it was no longer exists, it's been castrated, tamed and made safe for corporations and governments working hand-in-hand to take the power, and control us.
I realized I don't know all the parts: I've met a couple of influential people in that world but there are still a lot of trends that confuse me. Is there a history of modern software practices?
Instead all the corporations doubled down on treating us like idiots.
Maybe someday.
Let's not forget about A&W and their famous 1/3 pounder debacle.
Unfortunately, treating customers like intelligent human beings is currently not a scalable business tactic.
> Maybe someday
I think we'll always get what we deserve. Some day that'll be better.
Smaller companies are a place where the ideas in that book can be put to significant advantage.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
and 2 competitors for the "aged like milk" title:
24. Bombastic boasts —We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ— do not constitute a position.
74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
> 6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
Though the implication is what would be positive; while it's arguable that, on the whole, it's actually been pretty corrosive.
Tech columnist John C Dvorak disliked The Cluetrain Manifesto and wrote a very entertaining book review in PC Magazine from 2002:
Cult of the Cluetrain Manifesto: https://www.pcmag.com/archive/cult-of-the-cluetrain-manifest...
Over time, I have had success applying many of the ideas in the book. Small enterprises remain a place where the trends can be pushed back and more out of the way. Doing that makes for great customer relationships, high value communication and work being fun, even when it's responding to someone having trouble with the product and or service.
The least quoted and most important "clue" in The Cluetrain Manifesto is the "one clue" listed above the "95 theses." Written by the very sadly late Chris Locke, it says,"we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it."
Sadly, that has not yet been proven true. Their grasp far exceeds our reach. But that doesn't mean it always will. Our Digital Age is three decades old at most and will last dozens or thousands of decades more. So it's early.
Here's to hoping better becomes a more dominant norm!
My take on this is simple: Live and work as example. This is powerful advocacy.
Doing that does improve our corner of the world and it can be catchy. Sometimes others will go seeking and sometimes they come to us.
While that door is open, people are receptive and sharing the good ideas can have an impact. Pushing on this stuff rarely works, and it is often painful. But, when they ask, "how" or "why" in such a context, being able to speak from a solid basis often gets the idea through and into their more serious consideration.
Thanks for your efforts. I got a lot of good out of that book. I myself was seeking when I bought a copy while on business travel. The advocacy idea I put here comes from my thoughts on how to apply the ideas I found in the book.
And wow! Who knew we would be having this discussion so many years later. I appreciate you and it is nice to be able to tell you directly.
I guess I'll have to find my dusty copy hidden in some forgotten corner.
And while you're at it, try The Intention Economy as well. :-)
> Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
Instagram does not strike me as "open, natural, uncontrived". Nor does any other social media. Does that mean our de facto modes of interpersonal communication online are no longer authentically human? Probably. How the hell did we get here from there?
> Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
Hyperlinks have been used to create hierarchy. It's the point of PageRank. SEO and backlinks are the currency of half the digital economy now. There are hundreds of thousands of people on Earth employed to worry about _nothing else_ for 40+ hours a week.
> Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
Does anybody believe this is completely true in any organisation anywhere on earth today?
> Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
The market has rewarded companies getting in the way of everything. Personally owned and hosted blogs were replaced by social media companies, digital marketers prioritised making Google's crawlers happy over making human beings happy, public mailing lists outside of open source projects are basically dead because now we need to have our conversations on corporate owned web properties - from LinkedIn to Quora, Stack Exchange to this very site we engage with each other via, today.
Some are better than others. I don't think any of them are better than what we once had, other than search has become the starting point of any enquiry, and they often facilitate search better than what they replaced.
> We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
The defining technology sector of the last 20 years - when we look back it in 100 years - must be considered adtech. The market had the conversation, and most people decided they'd click "Accept" on those banners and wave it all away. The majority of online humanity is not just not immune to advertising, we're happy to be spied on to facilitate it just so long as we don't have to pay for content, thanks.
In some ways companies did adjust to this siren call, but they did it through the safe silos of social media accounts and advertising. Individual brands (celebrities you like), now may have teams of people curating "natural" conversations, while marketing departments and companies have realised that they need to have "conversations" to support their traditional models.
I truly believe it is the efforts of these people, teams and organisations that resist personal ownership of the web: the return to the personal website as the de facto presence online. They can't have a conversation with you like that. They have no way to inject themselves into the experience of you reading somebody's blog the same way they do if you're reading their Facebook or Twitter comments.
So, what now?
This has been a deeply depressing comment to right. The web was wonderful. The internet was so full of promise. This journey back to the early days which I remember with so much fondness has now reminded me: we lost. It's over. I don't know how we'll ever get it back.
I would add loyalty programs linked to "get the APP for dealz!" to your quality comment here. Marketing wants to get their message into your mobile notifications badly. Of course, if they want it that bad, they probably should not have it.
Yes, I do not use company apps. Sometimes that is ultra expensive!! Shows us just what that access to our mobile devices and digital lives is worth too.
When the only way to get a good price is to use the app, I just quit doing business with that organization. I did install an app just once. So. Many. Notifications. Never again.
Nope. We're here. You and me. You wrote a thoughtful comment, and now we're having a conversation about it. We, two people who have never met (so far as I know). This right here is about what we had when we said "The web was wonderful. The internet was so full of promise."
Now, true, much of the web turned into ads/corporate/shill/propaganda. And it takes dang being superhuman to keep this place from being overrun. So the larger battle may be lost.
But I think The Cluetrain Manifesto still had (and has) a fairly good point. We want the human voice on the internet, even if the corporations give us corporate-speak. (We want it even more now, with Covid having reduced the amount of in-person interaction.) We want the human touch. Corporations found that they could extract more money from us by other approaches, but we humans still want human interaction. And, I think, that's part of the charm of HN. It's mostly human talk rather than talking points or corporate-speak. (That's part of why people just repeating talking points feels so jarring here - it's out of place.)
So I think there are still pockets of what made the web so wonderful back in the day. It's not the majority any more, but there is still a fair amount of it around, if you look for it.
Perhaps I need to go and think about how to support making that happen more rather than just complaining...
I remember seeing this stuff growing up. I’ve been online for a few years at that point so I got some parts of what they were talking about, but mostly it was green to me.
I think the kind of things that came around in the early 00s after the bubble were very much in this spirit.
We truly thought we’d get a voice and things would change.
Now I’m depressed.