> In social media's early days, Mr. Williams said, "addiction was the goal."<p>> "Not in the cigarette sense — it wasn't as cynical," he added. "It was just a game, like: 'This is fun. How do we make it more fun and addictive?'"<p>> But he is not convinced that the problems with social platforms can ever be fully solved, nor does he believe it's entirely incumbent upon tech companies to solve them. Ultimately, Mr. Williams said, it will be up to users to choose, and stick to, their own information diets.<p>Sounds a lot more like cigarette companies than Williams thinks.<p>They, too, tend to operate under a philosophy of, "Hey, we're just giving people a CHOICE to smoke tobacco. Why blame us if people take us up on it?"
Oh, now he's fixing it, not salvaging it?<p>May last year in NY Times: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/technology/evan-williams-medium-twitter-internet.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/technology/evan-williams-...</a>
"Fix"? With Medium? They replace free blogs with a site where you have to pay to read them.<p><i>People like you helping people like us help themselves.</i>
It's worth noting that this profile was published at about the same time Medium started cutting off publisher memberships: <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/medium-abruptly-cancels-the-membership-programs-of-its-21-remaining-publisher-partners/" rel="nofollow">http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/medium-abruptly-cancels-the...</a><p>The NYTimes author's response: <a href="https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/994634637451415601" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/994634637451415601</a><p>> Gotten a lot of smart criticism since this piece ran. Agree that @ev’s grand plans should be evaluated in light of Medium’s history of sudden strategy shifts and the writers/publishers who get hurt by them.
>As a co-founder of Blogger and Twitter and, more recently, as the chief executive of the digital publishing platform Medium, Mr. Williams transformed the way millions of people publish and consume information online.<p>>But as his empire grew, he started to get a gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right. High-quality publishers were losing out to sketchy clickbait factories.<p>How anyone can write these three sentences in that order without their head exploding from irony is beyond me. Medium is just Upworthy with a shave and a breath mint.
Like many tech executives, Ev's view is that it's up to users to demand more from social media algorithms and tech products:<p>> But he is not convinced that the problems with social platforms can ever be fully solved, nor does he believe it's entirely incumbent upon tech companies to solve them. ... [It] will be up to users to choose, and stick to, their own information diets.<p>This echoes FB's VP of Ads, Rob Goldman, who blamed lack of media literacy and Benedict Evans at a16z, who argued that engagement must be king at FB.* To me, this feels remarkably self serving.<p>Regardless, I made an engineer media literacy guide to encourage a shift in user behavior, and contributions are welcome:<p><a href="https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer</a><p>-------------------------------------------------<p>* <a href="https://twitter.com/robjective/status/964680128092504065" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/robjective/status/964680128092504065</a><p>* <a href="https://www.nemil.com/s/benedict-evans.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nemil.com/s/benedict-evans.html</a> (my response to Benedict Evan's post)
Theres an interview (iirc) with him in Tim Ferris's Tribe of Mentors. He said something that stuck with me, that made me think slightly less of him.<p>I'm trying to recall from memory here since the book isn't in front of me.<p>He's talking about selling his first company, its all about making hard choices and such. The company is dying so he had two options either sell the company now (for a smaller amount) or fire most of the staff and sell later. He mentions how he had to let go of the staff but later sold it for a larger amount of money. He then says something to the degree of considering it a "win".<p>I don't know that I consider laying off a ton of people for a greater exit a win. I consider it a move to get more money, but I doubt anyone chasing money is going to "fix the internet".
This article rings hollow with how Medium has slipped down in to the pit of unending, user-hostile A/B tests meant to increase "engagement" and sign ups. I absolutely <i>hate</i> medium now.
Each time I end up on one of the medium-based articles I get dizzy - I get bombarded with full-screen nag screen and after closing it roughly 1/3-1/2 of the screen is hidden behind fixed navbar (often) and another nag-bar to sign-up.<p>Really - I do miss old days where blogs/articles were, to put it weirdly "simplistic" (tech-wise)
> High-quality publishers were losing out to sketchy clickbait factories. Users were spending tons of time on social media, but they weren’t necessarily happier or better informed. Platforms built to empower the masses were rewarding extremists and attention seekers instead.<p>In order to believe that technology will solve the problem, you have to also believe that technology is the problem. It's not, though. We are the problem.<p>We were already extremists and attention seekers. Social media just amplified that. Any platform, no matter how set up, will be gamed to take advantage of human nature.
This highlights the dangers of booking your future on the back of another company. Enthusiasm for partnerships comes and goes.<p>Could it be that Ev’s best moments are behind him?
"It [technology] creates feedback loops that can fundamentally change the nature of how people interact and societies move (in ways that probably none of us predicted)."<p>1) Marxists have been writing about this for decades...<p>2) Ev Williams seems to think that moving (back) to a subscription model is the right move. It's not, and it's kind of an archaic model (even though it's still widely used). I'd argue the best business model for authors and content creators at this point in time is the Twitch model. While it shares similarities to a traditional subscription model, it goes above and beyond that. The biggest difference is that a subscription is optional though is incentivized through other means (ie: access to a creator's Discord server, custom emojis, merch giveaways, etc). There is no barrier for access to content. Users get to opt in to financially supporting creators, but are not required to. It combines the best of both an ad-based model and a subscription model by allowing ads on free content and removing them for subscribers.<p>This is similar to YouTube Red, but I think where YouTube went wrong is that a subscription is for the whole platform, not for specific creators. Many would rather individually support the creators that they enjoy and not support the one they dislike (which is why many creators on YouTube get financial support from consumers through other platforms such as Patreon, tours, MAGs, and merchandise sales).<p>3) Look at how other companies are changing their business models and the way they publish content and how it affects the way they are perceived. You have networks like Viceland that started out posting a bunch of web series on YouTube and then they decided to try being a cable network and in the process alienated a large number of their viewer base. They are becoming perceived as a network for millennials run by your grandparents. Myself and many others that I know used to watch many of their web series, but now don't because we don't want to pay for a cable subscription just to watch a few shows on a single network. At the same time, you have traditional cable networks posting clips and sometimes full episodes of their shows on YouTube making a cable subscription even less exclusive or valuable. Lastly, you have other services that allow users to illegally stream copyrighted material for free. These services wouldn't exist if there wasn't a barrier to entry from the source of the content they are streaming.
I think social media critics forget the days when everyone felt like they were wasting their life obsessively checking their email or refreshing the news. This has been there from the beginning. The only difference now is that we pretend there's someone to blame other than ourselves. As evidence, here's the history of Randall Monroe dealing with internet addiction in his comics.<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/862/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/862/</a>
<a href="https://xkcd.com/597/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/597/</a>
<a href="https://xkcd.com/187/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/187/</a>
<a href="https://xkcd.com/77/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/77/</a>
Read "Ev Williams" and thought of "Evan Williams" the bourbon and was like I don't see how the maker of a cheap alcohol is going to help fix the internet.