2/ One heuristic that keeps popping up: "[N]ew products won't succeed if they are marginal improvements [...] They need to be ten times better or ten times cheaper than the current best in class to compel companies and consumers to adopt (p.49, @kupor).
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3/ Setting aside the implicit high growth needs of VCs and the founders who approach them which do color this statement a bit, it seems like a pretty sound product heuristic. (Fuck, up until recently, I was still using Dotster for my domains because of switching costs to my AWS!)
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4/ Meanwhile, I'm a sophisticated computer user who thinks endlessly about the harmful interactions between social media, surveillance capitalism, and the attention economy. I care about privacy — my own and everyone else's. And...I still use fucking Gmail.
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5/ Spoiler alert: I can't imagine strong privacy as anything other than a perceived marginal improvement, if it's even perceived as an improvement at all.
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6/ I have so many smart and passionate friends working on solutions to the problem of privacy but even in the era of endless mass data breaches and intentional exploitation, people express the same kind of concern for it as they do for alternative Alternate Side Parking rules.
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7/ Again, I *want* privacy advocates to win — I am one of them! But privacy-first design seems like an exercise in futility *if the goal is mass adoption.* And, if that's not the goal, then you're just selling a luxury good which is a far less useful thing to advocate for.
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Replying to @generativist
I'm currently working on a talk called Against Web Scale, and I think you're making a classic fallacy here: you're equating "success" with "mass adoption", which is only a victory if you're using monetized adoption as your success metric. The problem is success metrics.
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Replying to @mykola
Maybe? The
#indieweb folks make a similar point, trying to say you move it by the accretion of new norms and mediums that aren't captured or capturable by platforms. I'm just not convinced that's viable.2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @generativist @mykola
In an arena where web-scale platforms face off against the indieweb, I think the former wins most of the time, and evolutionary out-competes. I'm looking for products that can forge transformative ecosystems at an accelerated rate, and is capable of fending off the giants.
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Replying to @generativist
I think "fending off" is a mistake. I think the win is in a solution that lives client-side and acts as an intermediary between any number of services. I shouldn't go to https://twitter.com for my twitter access I should go to localhost:3000 and do twitter, mastodon, email
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But you do have to *fend off* in the sense that this is more attractive than twitter for people, and in a way that twitter can't tweek something and shift the flow of users back towards them (assuming you got an outflow.)
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Replying to @generativist
The exact problem is that the minute this works as intended the tech cos will change their policies and APIs to break it. But that's okay, because we can do this incrementally and work around it any number of ways - we just accept them as actively hostile agents.
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Replying to @mykola @generativist
Maybe I just don't know enough about browser guts, but I keep envisioning an emulator indistinguishable from a browser, which scrapes whatever is visible on the virtual screen, using ocr if it has to.
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