Iterating on the tech in P2P networks (outside of web3) still feels like it’s attainable.
Feels like a lot of the innovation stopped when Pirate Bay was repeatedly targeted, but there’s still lots possible in that space (outside of torrenting).
4,647 karma · joined August 8, 2011
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/mijustin
My blog: http://justinjackson.ca
My podcast: https://saas.transistor.fm
Feels like a lot of the innovation stopped when Pirate Bay was repeatedly targeted, but there’s still lots possible in that space (outside of torrenting).
What’s missing is a truly decentralized portal for discovering that content. ;)
"We have had decentralised ownership and distribution of our own content since the early 90s. I own my own domain, but that doesn’t get me traffic. The question is in the networks that sort, filter and organise that, and those aren’t our tokens that we can move." – Benedict Evans [0]
web3 can't deliver on its promise of "freedom from the big platforms" as long as we're beholden to big platforms (Google, OpenSea, Twitter, YouTube, etc) for distribution/discoverability.
The web3 world still hasn't figured out how to decentralize discoverability.
0: https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1476285185557774337
Torrent sites like 1337x were born out of previously popular indexes (Kickass Torrents, h33t). [0]
It's not dissimilar to when a GitHub fork becomes more popular than the original project. [1]
To me, the biggest disappointment with web3 is they never cracked "distributed discoverability." It still relied on the old model, of proprietary indexes/marketplaces.
I'm way more inspired by the P2P efforts, especially Gnutella's initial attempts at distributed search. [2] Feels like this tech could still be iterated on and improved.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1337x
1: http://gitpop2.herokuapp.com/tobi/delayed_job
2: http://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/developer/share/intro.ht...
Countries like Japan have taken a profoundly different approach to urban development, and have more mixed-use zones (single-family, multi-family, high-rise, etc).
I often say that most of my career advancements came from knowing the right people (or having the right people know me).
Many of the people that helped me advance found me through something I made (blog post, tutorial, podcast, project, etc).
Creating stuff (and telling people about it) is a great way to connect with more people.
Once I discovered this underlying truth, that it's the existing momentum the market that matters most, everything changed. I quite trying to make a business work on my own energy; instead I let the energy in the market pull the business forward.
1. Any plans for an API and bulk pricing?
2. Any plans to add loudness normalization, balancing, etc to the processing?
It's too bad we have to resort to this kind of hack, but I appreciate having a solution.
The company's gone on to do better than we could have dreamed. We're profitable, paying ourselves well, have hired two people, and have a pretty calm existence (during the pandemic we averaged 25 hours per week).
Three things that helped:
1. Self-funding meant we needed to get to profitability as quick as possible.
2. We targeted a market we understood, where there was demonstrated demand. We weren't trying to invent a new category.
3. Having a co-founder (Jon). We had complimentary strengths (full stack dev for him, marketing and sales for me) that really helped us run fast.
This is the key distinction. If you charge money, from the beginning, most of your content moderation woes go away.
At Transistor.fm we host podcasts and charge money for it (starting at $19/month). We've had very little problems with questionable content.
We're a counterpoint to the narrative here: small (4 full-time people), profitable, and calm.
> Even if you just hosted audio
Most DMCA takedown requests these days are handled through the big podcast directories (Spotify, Apple Podcasts). We haven't had to write/implement any fingerprinting tech.
About a year ago Stripe came out with a really simple way for companies to contribute a % of their revenue towards fighting climate change by removing carbon from the atmosphere. https://stripe.com/climate
We're trying to convince 25 startups to enable it on their account!
"But since launching an Android version this month, Clubhouse has seen one million Android users join."
We don't know if these 1 million Android users downloaded the app just to check out what all the hype was about, how many times they've returned, and their participation rate.
App downloads ≠ usage
However, there's been lots of misinformation about Apple "killing RSS feeds." As far as I can tell, the majority of podcasts on Apple Podcasts will still be driven by RSS (hosted on 3rd-party platforms).
This video explains how it works now: https://youtu.be/g9ZVucX0J80
What advice would you give other self-funded companies? I'm trying to compete with much larger players in our space as well.
Now, Ghostery says I have "zero trackers" on my personal site.
Fathom doesn't collect personal info about my visitors. They just show me my aggregate metrics (popular pages, top referrers) which is all I need anyway.
And best of all: a checklist of actions (ranked by efficacy).
Listening to that has made me doubt that we're in the era of "big podcasting."
Here's a quote from Alex Blumberg:
"Just nine months earlier, we at Gimlet raised a big round of funding, 15 million dollars. The plan was to invest a lot of that into making more shows, hiring more people. We wanted that big chunk of money to last for a while: two and a half years. Meaning, we wanted to burn about 6 million a year. But at this meeting, Jim is telling us that right now in early 2018, it's looking like we're going to burn a lot more than that: 10-11 million a month."
He goes on to explain why:
"And that's because a lot of the things we assumed would happen, didn't. We assumed audiences would grow, but instead they plateaued. Our launches had not done as well as they had in the past. And some of our biggest shows, with the largest audiences, still weren't making money because we couldn't sell ads on them."
I like that I can scroll down and see top episodes for each day.
(As a comparison, Automattic bought a small bootstrapped startup [WooCommerce] in 2015 for $30 million)
Sadly I think oldgeekjobs.com shut down.
It's hard to show up every day, by yourself. When there's no one to cheer you on and no one to be accountable to, it's easier to give up.
For years, I tried building projects on my own. But I had to limit myself because I didn't have the technical expertise to bring all my ideas to life.
Then I met Jon at XOXO festival.
Over the years, we became friends. We collaborated on a few projects. And then, we decided to work together on https://transistor.fm (a podcast hosting and analytics platform).
Jon is a gifted software developer. He has a good eye for design.
My expertise is in customer research, marketing, and product development.
Combined, we've been able to build Transistor into something much greater than we could have achieved on our own.