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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      In a way, an idea space has a “capacity” of the number of minds that can usefully connect within it in a live conversation. Something analogous to Dunbar’s number but higher. Like 150,000 instead of 150. But it’s not infinite. At some point more minds don’t add more new thoughts.

      1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      Right now we’re hovering around the half-a-million visitors per year mark (whatever the hell that means; I never really understood web analytics). If the next scaling step is say 1 million, it needs a different *kind* of meta idea-space that can hold that many minds.

      1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      Operationally the blog just about breaks even. Hosting+paying non-editor writers = affiliate income. Editors aren’t paid. We average about $145/mo in hosting ($95/mo if paid annually plus $50 average overage). The next traffic tier works out to about $240/mo with no overages...

      3 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      Now, it’s not about the $... I could afford to throw another $1200/y at this without making it up in revenue, but that would feel like vanity publishing to me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to at least break even. I’m kinda vain about keeping the blog non-vanity 😎

      2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      But frankly, that seems very dumb to me because I know of better ways to make money if that’s the goal. Even taking on a dull consulting gig is a more interesting way to make money than this kind of shitty media-business thinking

      1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      Maybe I’m just rationalizing laziness. Maybe I’d think differently if I had to make payroll for even one full time staff writer. But I’m not *that* lazy. I think a lot of the problems with new media (are we still calling it that) is pursuing uninteresting growth.

      2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      I get why clickbait is popular and drives large, shitty media properties. At least for a while. Dumb demand is a constant. But I have to wonder about the supply side. How does someone who presumably enjoys writing choose to produce dreck rather than do almost anything else? 🤔

      3 replies 4 retweets 14 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      There *are* aspects of growth that attract me. Reading about Murdoch empire had me salivating at the thought of that much authoritah to boss the world around. Money per se is not that interesting, though it's nice to have a lot rather than a little.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1113491232452272128 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      This 3-part big read on the Murdoch empire is educational. Don’t @ me, but the phrase “Death Star of shit” crossed my mind reading it. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/rupert-murdoch-fox-news-trump.html …
      2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      But doing it the Murdoch way, by creating zombie armies of Fox News watchers... that's not that interesting.

      2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      I like to keep an eye open for media properties that are at the next tier of scale relative to ribbonfarm, AND interesting AND sustainable in ways I'd like to keep things interesting and sustainable. I honestly haven't found any.

      2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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      I was getting inspired by Nautilus for a while, then the sordid thing about owing writers 50k popped up. I never want to be in that situation. https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-magazine/ … http://nautil.us/blog/a-letter-from-the-publisher-of-nautilus …

      10:30 PM - 3 Apr 2019
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      • micah.fyi Rahul Ramchandani [。_°] Cyril Sam Rusa Kaki Enam
      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Sadly, *every single time* I get inspired by a larger site, either some shitty financial breakdown happens, or the site turns into a pandering, axe-grinding tool for some unsavory political or economic agenda. Overleveraged or deal-with-devil for growth.

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          (Apologies to anyone bored by one of my occasional inside-baseball think-out-loud threads... hopefully a few newer media ventures will get some good ideas/cues out of it)

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Whenever I tweet about this stuff, people invariably misunderstand it as a prompt seeking money-making ideas. No. Money is a) easy if that's what you want to solve for b) not what's worth solving for if you enjoy writing c) primarily useful as a way to monitor your own vanity.

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Actually, one reason I think about this stuff a lot is not for strategizing the future of my own sites, but trying to grok what sometimes strikes me as the completely bizarre decisions made by other, much bigger commercial scale media properties, like say Fox or NYT or Vox.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Basically, writing is pure ideas. There's nothing else there. No product, nothing to eat, nothing to use/do materially. So it is a real mystery to me how/why people can choose to grow without any clear ideas driving the growth. It's like empty growth.

          3 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          A million visit piece of content should in some sense be 10x the "idea size" in some memetic sense than a 100k visit piece of content. Trying to make a 100k idea artificially acquire a million visits seems kinda grimly nihilistic to me.

          2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          To change gears abruptly, there's this idea that aliens will never detect us because after a brief period, our radio emissions have been getting more efficient and therefore less powerful. Our planet will get electromagnetically quieter for its communication levels in the future.

          2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          This is a joules/bit/mile way of thinking about information and communication. Industrial age media models were very... energy intensive reach. "New media" is really "low wattage" media, properly understood. CFLs/LEDs instead of incandescent.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Let's say that you have an idea that, in a perfect information market, would have highest impact if it reached a set of 5 people randomly distributed across the world. Everybody else would be better off with 2nd or higher order reception. The 1st order bits would be noise to them

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          The *ideal* distribution/reach pattern for that idea is the one that reaches those 5, and only those 5 people, at the lowest joules/bit/mile cost. Anything more is waste. That's a sort of thermodynamic efficiency limit model for media. Kinda like Carnot cycle for engines.

          3 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          It's amazing the sheer amount of energy that went into information distribution and reach a century ago. An offset press producing a run of newspapers to be distributed even at a city scale... it's a HUGE cost of joules/bit/mile... only justifiable for very high-value bits

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Even the worst of yellow journalism and penny-dreadful bits were, I think, on average higher value than stuff we put up on the internet simply because the cost is so low. Jevon's paradox. We're almost at the thermodynamic limit, putting pure noise into distribution.

          2 replies 2 retweets 20 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          In fact, even the very ideas of reach and distribution smack of industrial age thinking. They evoke metaphors of dumb pipes connecting static producer brains to static consumer brains. There is no room in "reach" and "distribution" for context-awareness, relevance/salience etc

          1 reply 1 retweet 11 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Really what we want is ideas that are produced just in time, and intruding on the attention of the right people, juxtaposed against just the right context at just the right time to produce maximum "aha!". Max redpilling per joule or something.

          1 reply 1 retweet 17 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          In a way, though we like to hate on modern targeted advertising, that's really the cutting edge. Unlike other bits, advertising bits MUST seek out the lowest redpilling (=buy decision/conversion) costs.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Ironically, the way to get past the trap of ad-supported models might be for "real" content to become more energy/targeting efficient than ads themselves. Today "real" content at scale rides advertising rather than the other way around because it is dumber. It has to.

          3 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          John Wanamaker famously said "I know 50% of my advertising works, I just don't know which 50%" ... I'd guess, historically, "real" content has always had lower, and less legible, effectiveness than the advertising it rode.

          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Thought experiment about the challenge of media in the future. Rupert Murdoch started like 60 years ago and is shaping global geopolitics in 2019. If you are in your early 20s today and want to be the Murdoch of 2079 geopolitics, how would you go about building the empire?

          2 replies 1 retweet 7 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          Would you try to build a max-reach/min-brain zombie army led by generals like Tucker Carlson etc.? Forget about the ethics/morality of it... would that even be the most effective path to influence via the pen? To make it clearer, consider the pen-and-sword analogy...

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          "The pen is mightier than the sword" they say. Well, "swords" evolved from literal swords through precision firearms to smart missiles. "Reach" with swords evolved from a large mass rushing screaming at the enemy and dying in large numbers to pushing a button to launch a missile

          2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          The pen, by contrast, is still in the "screaming melee rush" stage of evolution in reach. We have just invented the precision firearm. Long way to go to get guided missile level reach smarts. If you were young Murdoch today, you'd be building media missiles, not forging swords.

          3 replies 2 retweets 15 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Apr 2019
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          As a random aside, technically, fiction has gotten sophisticated far faster than nonfiction, but has hit an earlier fundamental ceiling. Nonfiction tech is lagging but has fewer obvious limits (and here I mean tech at the level of humans handling language, not computers)

          0 replies 2 retweets 10 likes
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        24. End of conversation

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