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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 8 Apr 2018
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      Feels like traditional media (NYT, Atlantic) is awkwardly reinventing focus groups. Except, instead of ex-ante customer feedback on where local Overton window boundary should be, they are doing ex-post customer-driven second-guessing of editorial decisions. Can’t blame them

      4 replies 10 retweets 45 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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      The bind of media is that if you run a property large enough to earn meaningful ad revenue, it is too large to be served by a single auteur editorial sensibility. Basically, something like the NYT/Atlantic is too big for a single reality distortion field (ie local Overton window)

      1 reply 1 retweet 15 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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      A media property is somewhere inbetween a product company like Apple, and a political entity like a nation. It packages/curates news and opinion with an aesthetic. The reality distortion field of say Apple only needs to project auteur aesthetic over the design of objects.

      1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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      My hypothesis is that if the information flow rate packaged by an aesthetic is too high, you must necessarily go democratic in some form. An iPhone packages a tiny amount of design “information” every year or so, much of which is engineering information users don’t care about.

      8:22 AM - 8 Apr 2018
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      • 🎙 Piyush Maverick Tainguriya Customer Support 🎙 The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA Jeff Coleman rudy cloudman 🎀 sonyasupposedly.com 🤖 Dan listens to the last days of the first days Cyril Sam @henry Tristan Reynolds
      1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          But a magazine or newspaper must impose an auteur aesthetic on an information flow that is dozens to hundreds of individual items of news and opinion every day/week. Except for niches like The Onion, you can’t impose a single clear editorial aesthetic easily.

          1 reply 1 retweet 11 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          Ie, iPhones are platonic-minimalist. The Onion is funny. But the NYT or Atlantic can’t sustain a single-phrase signature aesthetic. The package contains too much increasingly dissonant messiness in the current polarized political environment. What do do?

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          The solution is simple. All you need is a coherent aesthetic of each complexity to structure an information flow too big for a single editorial vision. Answer: inherit the aesthetic from a crowd-sourced tribal reality. Comes complete with purity tests to ease editorial decisions

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          But why this messy way of pretending single auteur-editors can do the job, hiring out-of-reality writers, and then letting mob veto fire them? Why not just stick to the tribal boundary, or use a more tame mechanism like a popular vote?

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          It’s because the boundary is actually not easy to map and track. It is fuzzy, illegible, and constantly shifting. Today “hang abortionist women” is beyond the pale, tomorrow it is acceptable provocation. You have to keep testing the boundary. Know Your Tribe (KYT) like KYC.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          In case it isn’t obvious, this is the gradual Fox-ization of all media. The phrase “mainstream media” (MSM) has gone from a lame Fox projection to self-fulfilling industry-wide prophecy We are in a KYT shifting media landscape with “representative editorial democracy” governance

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          Apply basic business modeling here. As industries mature they evolve from product-driven (often with a driving auteur-CEO vision, legendary editors in this case) to customer-driven as the market gets too complex for one mind, and further to a basic commodity market.

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          The question is: what IS the basic commodity that traditional media delivers? Here is a radical thought: it isn’t the “facts” or basic news. That true commodity level of “dog bit man” already got separated out as wire services (and today twitter trends for pure sentiment news)

          2 replies 2 retweets 11 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          The basic commodity that media sells is a coherent cultural reality bubble. So long as there was sufficient harmony (narrow-band dissent) and a degeneracy (less than full possible complexity/dimensionality) in news coverage expectations, you could do this with a traditional model

          1 reply 4 retweets 27 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          Yes, Prime Minister captured this old media environment perfectly. One newspaper/one reality. In fact things were so degenerate, you could have multiple newspapers/magazines clustering in a single reality, so inhabits could claim to read *gasp* MORE than one perspective.pic.twitter.com/JDOHM5YErh

          1 reply 6 retweets 19 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          This is no longer possible. We are in a HIGHLY non-degenerate regime of news expectations because news discussion leaders in the audience (that’s us here on twitter) routinely see 6 impossibly different perspectives on a single screen before breakfast.

          1 reply 2 retweets 14 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          The only tractable way to serve this kind of audience at scale is to “carve the audience expectations at the joints” so to speak, and basically Pick a Tribe, Know Your Tribe, Create Reality for Tribe. PaT/KYT/CRfT. Then run editorial like you’re an elected rep. What kind of rep?

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          This is where it gets interesting and subtle. Here’s what has happened. The crowd has gerrymandered the editorial ranks! Legendary editors typically create a public via auteur editorial vision. This has been reversed. Crowds now create editors.https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Intellectuals-Create-a/234984 …

          1 reply 2 retweets 18 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          When politics is healthy, voters pick politicians. When politics is gerrymandered, politicians pick voters. When media is healthy, editors create audiences. When media is gerrymandered, audiences pick editors. (Maybe we should call the latter tribal reverse-gerrymandering)

          1 reply 5 retweets 17 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          You can’t resist this. You see what happens when you try: the NYT looks increasingly schizophrenic, trying to run a hybrid of an auteur-editorial and tribal mirror platform. Well you can, below a certain scale. Consider the blogosphere

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          It is no accident that the sub-critical blogosphere (ie below audience-mass needed for ad-based models) has not one but TWO key institutional forms. The blog itself, and the aggregator/discussion forum. They represent, respectively, the auteur-editorial and tribal mirror forms.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          This is by the way the reason (subconscious) I’ve never tried to build and attach a true discussion forum to ribbonfarm. It would be a hybrid mess. You can choose to project an auteur reality distortion field, or you can serve as a tribal mirror. Not both.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          If you try to do both, you introduce centripetal forces that pull the property apart. This may not be a bad thing. It is what happened to Less Wrong in a positive way. That started as an auteur blog, morphed into a tribal mirror, then exploded into a little universe of properties

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          The only thing that can keep a property together despite such growing centripetal forces? Money? If ad revenues continue collapsing as they are for many properties (not all), property either dies or explodes into the smaller survivable bits.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          The big takeaway from this whole evolutionary trajectory is that the civic function traditionally served by the media, ground-truthing and as a check-and-balance to government, has permanently shifted to the open aggregator/distributor channels.

          3 replies 2 retweets 15 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 8 Apr 2018
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          The media can no longer serve both functions it once did: create cultural reality bubbles (“and that’s the way it is”) AND ground-truth politics. The industry has chosen to specialize in former function and leave latter to basically open-source efforts on distribution channels.

          3 replies 2 retweets 17 likes
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        23. End of conversation

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