You Either Die A Hero Or You Become The Villain

I'm not an app.net fanboi, nor am I particularly hopeful about its chances of success. I have not backed it (though I'm considering it.)

This article is full of bullshit.

  > Because the reality of the situation is that if App.net 
  > ever was successful, it would face many of the same hard 
  > choices that Twitter now does. Or it would fade away.

Most of the challenges Twitter has come from its inability to monetize, and much of the criticism coming from app.net and supporters is that Twitter is sacrificing its openness in its quest to squeeze money out of the service. App.net aims to avoid these challenges by being a paid service. Further, since App.net has a built-in business model, it doesn't need huge traffic to turn into advertising dollars.

  > The truth is that these things rarely work because it’s simply not how 
  > the world works. People tend to flock to the best services. And the best 
  > services tend to sprout from the best entrepreneurs. And the best 
  > entrepreneurs eventually realize they need to build the best businesses, 
  > lest their services die or worse — linger in mediocrity.

There are a whole bunch wholly unqualified, unsupported opinions and logical leaps here. For one, I don't think people actually flock to the best services (maybe most popular, most exclusive, best marketed, best timed, pick any number of things.) But two, only MG Siegler is defining "best" to be biggest. Dalton Caldwell quite clearly thinks that "best" would account for some things like openness and a straightforward business model. I'm sure he'd love for app.net to be a billion dollar company. I'm not sure that's his definition of success.

  > Even if App.net hits its money goal and gets fully built (an early alpha is 
  > here), it won’t ever grow big enough to truly challenge Twitter. Maybe you 
  > think that’s fine. Maybe it could exist as a self-sustaining smaller network. 
  > That’s nice — but that’s not what drives anyone. No one sets out to be 
  > second-rate. And the best people don’t flock to those services. That’s why 
  > these things tend to not work.

Same thing here. MG Siegler has decided on a goal for Dalton Caldwell that Dalton doesn't necessarily share.

  > App.net looks like the hero right now only because it 
  > hasn’t had the opportunity to become the 
  > villain. And it probably never will.

Finally, the world is not a fucking comic book or TV show. There are nuances of decision and balances to be struck that don't translate into comically reductionist ideas of good versus evil.

This article hits the nail on the head.

The system of one person or company doing something wrong and another making a promise to do things right is exactly why politics never improves. What is to stop the next person from turning evil too? A promise made by a person? Seriously?

If the new company were to come up with some decentralized architecture that would systemically prevent them from doing ads and would just establish an open protocol that anyone can use for a small licensing fee etc or some new way of making money, that would at least be something worth trying.

If the only difference is a promise that they won't do ads, hah. I don't know.

Not related directly to the article, and therefor, perhaps a poor HN comment, but it drives me insane when people change the text highlight color -- especially to yellow. I highlight nearly everything as I read online. For whatever reason, I find white text on the blue highlighted background to be much easier to quickly parse without loosing my place.

The blue highlight is so ingrained in my browser mind that seeing yellow just throws me for a complete loop.

Some on alpha.app.net are arguing that app.net is "an infrastructure play for a million new networks to bloom. It's AWS not Twitter."

Not sure I completely got that message from Dalton's posts. He could simply have a marketing problem at this point, although he's done pretty well thus far if that's the case.

I agree. As much as some people in the world want App.net to be, the majority of the world doesn't care. After all, even Twitter took years to be accepted by the main stream users. Are your mom and dad on Twitter? If the answer is no, then even Twitter hasn't succeeded yet. Without millions of users, neither will App.net

The majority of the population is used to paying money for services, but they pay to the services where they have no other choices - telecom companies. They do so because phones used to be a luxury, then a necessity, and I think they still are a necessity. You can't just wish your iphone into sending a message, you got to have it connected to some network.

Even if Dalton raised the .5mil and built the network, the network won't grow and without growth it will soon stagnate and die. He could then, of course, open the network up on a freemium model, which may be an interesting experiment, but chances are at the end of the day advertising money will be the only source of truly meaningful revenue. After all, if Facebook and Twitter are giving you everything for free and only asking for your ad clicks, why would you want to pay? I mean, I know why, because you want an open network without ads. I mean, if you had a choice to buy milk and cookies for your child or to buy a month's worth of social networking ... I sure hope you pick the cookies.

How about sites like Wikipedia or Wordpress? Aren't they non-profit (Not entirely sure about Wordpress), community-driven sites that have succeeded despite their altruistic intentions?

I don't agree with the notion that companies or non-profits have to eventually become sinister and closed-off to maintain market-share. I think Twitter and Facebook just happened to be sites that did take this path-likely because they involved individuals who wanted large profits.

First of all: This comment has nothing to do with the content of the article, just the timing.

You seriously couldn't wait 5 days to publish this? What's the point, do you want to be a hipster pessimist or do you just want to screw with the effort these people are putting into it?

Even if you are right on every point, why the hell would you publish it now? Do you want it to fail? Do you want to actively have a part?

What the hell is wrong with you dude.

You know how FaceBook won? By being cooler than MySpace with a key demographic, and using that as a wedge to bring in everyone else. But FaceBook isn't cool now, just normalized: your Mom is there, and so are a million spammy ads and apps and games, with the open secret that somebody somewhere is probably doing something creepy. Sooner or later, another social network will become the next digital status symbol, and having it be paid-for might actually be a benefit in that regard.

Also, with enough paying customers, app.net doesn't have to win, so long as it offers real value beyond just network effects. If enough cool services are built on top of it, it can be valuable enough that people will pay to keep it afloat even if FaceBook and Twitter are still king numbers-wise. (Bearing in mind that one can trivially cross-post between services.)

Also: I really hope app.net pays attention to pricing psychology if they get funded. To most people $5/month doesn't feel like much and $50/year feels like real money, even though the former is actually more expensive.

"You Either Die A Hero Or You Become The Villain"

Or you suffer the fate 99.99% of people face: disappearing into the void as an unknown, without a soul caring about you. Actually, it's more like 100%.

In disclosure, I'm a "backer" of app.net and am on the alpha. And as a hardcore Dark Knight fan, I can fall for any DK quote.

But while I respect MG's other writing, I don't agree with all of his conclusions here.

Some thoughts:

1. He states that "the web is simply not conducive to a user-supported service reaching the scale of a Twitter" to imply that success = scale. I actually believe the app.net could become a lot like HN - a relatively (web-wise) small group of people who all get value from the service - enough to pay for it. Does it kill twitter then? Probably not? But does that mean it's a failure? I don't think so.

2. Furthermore, let's examine this point that the only services that can get to scale are ad-supported. He certainly has good empirical data (facebook, twitter, etc.) to back him up. But in the software world, open, non-commercial efforts (e.g., linux, smtp email and more broadly the internet) have had gigantic impacts in terms of scale. As others pointed out, wikipedia is an example of a service in this vein. I think we haven't played out the experiment yet of what do open, non-commercial distributed services look like. I wouldn't give up on that. I personally think that any true communications utility long-term needs to be open (like email). app.net is still commercial so not fully there - but clearly (IMHO) more transparent and open than an ad-supported model.

3. MG also doesn't talk about one of dalton's meta-points which I also feel passionately about. The conventional wisdom seems to have accepted that an ad-supported future state - where ads follow us around, personalized to what they think we want, making us think our services we're getting are "free" when they really aren't - is the only possible future state. I know Tom Cruise got followed around by ads in "Minority Report", but that doesn't mean it has to be our future. I personally believe that humans will recognize over time the real cost of advertising and eventually converge to a more balanced world of paid and faux-free (ad-supported) services. I'm not saying ad-supported will go away - just that there will be choice (which was actually the main point dalton made in the first blog post he wrote on this topic).

Overall, I think Dalton should be commended whether his effort works or not. He re-sparked some very important discussions and was willing to take a chance on his ideas.

I think we can have an 'Open Twitter' without anyone needing to fund it, or own it, or monetize it.

1 to Many short messages are a powerful concept, but as with email - a spec is all we need.

In a nutshell: we define a layer on top of email and mailing lists for short broadcast messages and discovery.

I jotted down my rambling, incoherent thoughts on the subject here: http://www.aschroder.com/2012/07/an-open-twitter-like-networ...

1) Never heard of App.net until now. I don't like the name. It's too technical. I prefer the name Quitter (Qwitter, kwitter). If you want to build something for the people, make it appealing in name and image to a 7-year-old.

2) Does the service have an API, similar or the same as Twitter's? "the structure of the Java APIs that Oracle was trying to assert can't be copyrighted at all" http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/google-wins-cruci...

3) Status.net is open-source microblogging. http://status.net/packages - it became a hero, but for businesses.

4) There should be a way to give or pledge bitcoins. I don't care for state-backed fiat currency anymore - it's just like twitter, manipulated for economic gain by its issuers to the point of breaking its users.

5) There should be a "pledge to quit" .. something like "I'll pledge to quit but only if accounts up to 500,000 followers do the same" http://www.pledgebank.com/

6) Who's going to commercially benefit most from the service in the long-run?

7) Can this site just copy my existing twitter feed, until I am ready to close that one down?

I remember hearing "who the hell is dumb enough to pay for television?" when I was young.

..somewhere along the line, someone (smartly) decided that PAID television might just work. That people were tired of what was broadcast over the air for free and all of the attendant issues that "free" brought to the table.

How big a market is paid TV now?

I guess it speaks to the erosion of values and the disappearance of "words have meaning" to call app.net an altruistic project. I mean, really. They are offering to take money in exchange for providing a service.. so that the core values of the business arrangement remain focused on the people using (and building) the service. If a quid-pro-quo arrangement like that is the new version of altruistic heroism, no wonder things in the US are so #^&*ed up.

False dichotomies are fun and all, but let's be honest. Does it really either have to "die a hero" or "become the villain"?

The whole point is that Twitter has become the villain, and that App.net is providing an API infrastructure, not a closed social media experience owned by advertisers.

While I disagree with much of what is said in the article, I think this is an important point:

  And the best services tend to sprout from the best 
  entrepreneurs. And the best entrepreneurs eventually realize
  they need to build the best businesses, lest their services
  die or worse — linger in mediocrity.

We need another Richard Stallman or another Linus Torvalds for the internet age. This time, however, it's going to be much harder for such people to appear because in this day and age it seems like it's easier to make a lot of money from software - you don't need to build another Microsoft - so software developers are much more easily tempted.

A narrow world view where entrepreneurs and businesses produce all the successful software in the world. The irony is that almost all of the software used to produce and host this blog post is made up of free and open source.

All the people I want to interact with regularly use Twitter/Facebook. There have been a few more attractive options that I would like them to move to (G+, Path, etc.), but they haven't budged. Now here's a new alternative that thinks they should pay to use a service they're already getting for free. Good luck trying to convince them, because I'm not going to bother this time.

Since we're using movie analogies, let's say that app.net has decided not to "end the party early" because there is no party to begin with. (That quote is from "The Social Network.") App.net has a very similar business model to the first online community, the WeLL. The WeLL is still around after 25 years.

I don't agree. At least, I don't see the problem the same way.

Companies become more complex as they get bigger, and morally ambiguous as they get larger, and once a company reaches the point that it's making hundreds of decisions per day that affect other peoples' lives, it's impossible for it not to fuck a few up. Look at what happened to Google. It hasn't actually become "a villain", but they've made some very public mistakes (Real Names policy, dropping the ball on "Real Games") and some catastrophic private ones (implementing Welch-style stack-ranking in "calibration scores"). Google was designed by good people with the best intentions, and this stuff still happened. It seems hard not to have cataclysmic fuckups on a daily basis at a certain size.

For a semi-related side note, I'm starting to agree with the Yegge hypothesis on codebase size: it's not that certain programming techniques (IDE vs. no IDE) or language properties (static vs. dynamically typed) fail "at scale" and others don't. All do. Largeness in a codebase is uniformly undesirable; it makes pretty much any programming environment, language choice, and development methodology go to hell. I've yet to see a programming environment where programmers (a) have to interact with a genuinely large codebase (and aren't working in a well-carved-out walled garden) and (b) enjoy their jobs. Once you have too much code, maintenance becomes the majority of the job, and per-programmer productivity falls to 10% speed (~15 LoC per day is commonly cited, although LoC is actually a horrible measure seeing as codebase size is a problem, not accomplishment) and morale goes into the toilet; programmers are unusual in the working world in that their happiness is positively correlated with how hard they are working (or, I should say, able to work). The only long-term solution is the Unix philosophy and small-program methodology, but MBA types seem to prefer huge, over-ambitious, all-or-nothing monolithic projects. So small-program Unix philosophy has been losing for a long time in favor of huge, object-oriented mudballs, even though the small-program way (each program does one thing and does it well; and if you need complexity, you build a system and give it the respect-- modularity, thought given to robustness and fault-tolerance-- that a system deserves) is an objectively much better way of doing things.

Companies may have the same illness. Bigness may become terminally inefficient in the near future. To make large companies work well, you have to carve out "honor's colleges" (to get the best people) and walled gardens and sandboxes and research labs, but that effort is guaranteed to meet political resistance simply on account of the complexity of the company. Imagine if a large, boring technology company decided to reinvent itself and really get behind R&D and put 10% of its engineers into blue-sky R&D work. It would be great for the company and society in the long run, but the political fighting would be immense. You'd have a sudden airdrop of desirable work/jobs, you'd have powerful people pledging to support the change only if their proteges got jobs in this sexy new research division (so the positions of power would be allocated politically rather than on merit and leadership) and the conflicting demands and requirements coming out of big-company complexity (any time an initiative needs approval, the gate-keeper will ask for some payoff, and usually an inappropriate one that compromises the initiative) might end up miring it in a bog from the start. I'm not saying it couldn't work. It easily could. But the political problem would be harder than anything else.

It wasn't always this way with companies-- a lot of things were achieved by large companies because only huge corporations could even attempt them-- but it might be becoming that way. With the rapidly increasing technical complexity of modern work, we might be reaching a point where for a company to hold $10 billion worth of value and employ 15,000 people is no longer effective or desirable. Old-style huge companies were a lot simpler, because the bulk of their people were doing the same grunt work. In a modern "knowledge economy" where people are doing different work, and in which the work of poorly-motivated or unskilled people is of negative value (rather than merely low positive value coming from the weakest performers in typical "commodity" labor) huge companies may just be unmanageable.

It's not about becoming "the villain" or having to make "hard choices". It's just about complexity. It's about the fact large, powerful things pretty much always underperform relative to our expectations of them because complexity imposes so much drag, and it's hard to see this until one has a good sense of what unmanaged, undesirable complexity (that's 99% of all complexity) looks like and where it comes from. Huge organizations don't become "villainous" by intent. They become complex and inefficient and reach a point where the only thing anyone can agree on is growth-for-growth's-sake, which macroscopically makes it look like the firm is driven by sociopathy and hubris. But it's not that simple. There are a lot of well-intended, talented people in these megalithic companies with great ideas they'd love to implement. The problem is that the only thing that seems to come out of the company macroscopically (instead of being cancelled out by internal forces and drag) is the one thing everything in the company can agree on: more money and power and headcount and just flat-out size for the company, under the assumption that increasing the firm's "bigness" will improve the position (and compensation) of each person within it.

So what does all this amount to then ... ?

A carte blanche to do what you want to do anyway, regardless of the negative consequences spread through ruthless self-interest.

(I must admit, I wasn't overly surprised when I discovered it's written by Mr Siegler ...)

I have trouble taking a concrete prediction seriously when it's deduced from such vagaries.

These are all the same things that people wrote back when Myspace was the 800 pound gorilla of social networking. Having expressed that, I think app.net's funding methodology sucks for a direct delivery to customer project.

This site and the ones hosted on the same platform have a body font that is extremely blurry on my Android phone. Very annoying as there are regularly articles posted I would like to read.

Wow, to call your own site massivegreatness, that's something!

Here is the thing that tech writers seem to forget... You don't need to be Facebook or Twitter to be successful, especially if you have paying customers.

People will pay for hosting. Look at Wordpress. Wordpress is a nice free platform, but plenty of companies make great money hosting Wordpress for paying customers.

Why wouldn't people pay for their own hosted twitter like service? If App.net can pull that off, then there is probably a business there. It isn't maybe a billion dollar a year business, but with a small team 7 or 8 figures a year is nothing to sneeze at.