Media

Followup to: Style and Matter, Part 1

…great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar.

–Mark Twain

To give you some insight about my website idea, it makes sense to look at the rough draft of my About page:

My name is Ian Claudius, and I’m the founder of Style and Matter. I’m thrilled that you want to learn about our community. The premises here couldn’t be any simpler:

1. Writing. Real writing, and that’s it. No news, no product releases, no pictures, no video. The internet is flooded with this content already, and separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I love the chaff too. But how often do you find a link that you would revisit a month later, like a good book? Forget a month–how about ever again? After the initial laugh, shock, or shrug, do you care anymore? Style and Matter exists to fill this void. Great writing needs a venue of its own in which to compete.

2. Discussion. Community. Great conversation belongs under the same roof. Of course, a lot of the same trends that govern content apply here. There is a lot of potential on the internet for insight and intelligent discourse, and 1000 times the potential for everything else. The difference here is that we make an effort–just as the writers and bloggers we’re talking about did. Spamming, trolling, stupidity and everything else that makes 99% of the internet unreadable is not tolerated here.

3. Competition. Here, a blogger doesn’t have to worry about his latest story being buried under the torrent of a new Apple product launch. He only has to worry about improving his craft to compete with other writers doing the same. Voting isn’t a particularly original idea. For that matter, neither are any of these premises. But they are powerful indeed, and useful for discovering art. Combine them, and you have us.

And we’d love to have you. So if you’ve read this far, read two words further: Join us.

Ugh. You could tell I believed my own bullshit. I even chose a puffy, self-important name (I’m talking about Style and Matter, not my own name, which is badass). But ironically, all the style couldn’t hide the matter: it was a Digg-clone. Sure, it was a niche, and might have done all right (like sk*rt or Sphinn), but ultimately my decision to quit before serious investment came down to this:

I’m way too proud to claim a spot on the Long Tail. I want the head. I want to be the best. Do I have the resources and innovation to really make this happen?

It took some introspection, and some prodding from Ryan Holiday (really, I mention him a lot, but it’s because I badger him with questions even more), but the answer was no. Shifting the mediocrity from one area of my life to another wasn’t going to cut it. I wasn’t going to out-Digg Digg, and I couldn’t think of a different aggregation route (like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon) or anything that similarly changed the game.

My ideas were polarized in a sense anyway. The Digg framework is really one that caters to attention deficit. My goal of quality, lasting content would never have flourished in this environment. It would have required constant micromanagement, constant steering toward an ideal that didn’t belong. For a supposedly open venue, this made even less sense. I wanted moderation, not dictatorship.

So I quit. I should’ve quit before I started, but I was too caught up in the story of the press release, rather than the one people actually listen to (or don’t care about). My persistence was also fueled by the bias of wanting to do something. Anything creative or interesting or self-empowering. I just wanted to put my talent somewhere, because I certainly wasn’t using it at work. But once that high wore off, I recognized the folly.

Lesson learned.

Followup to: Good > Evil

So I was watching this episode of Kitchen Nightmares on Hulu after I wrote about it, and it reminded me of the reasons I admire Gordon Ramsay. It also reminded me of Sudafed. 5 times. Not even in various ways, mind you–but the exact same dumbshit commercial 5 times in a row. Now, what do you think was the result?

1. I immediately went out and purchased Sudafed.
2. I immediately went out and purchased the cheaper, generic version conveniently placed next to Sudafed.
3. I left the site in frustration.

If you guessed #3, you’re right of course, but Hulu loses with all 3–because I left, and I’m a lot less likely to return knowing their service is meant to be endured rather than enjoyed. I left thinking, is this really the best they can do? Well, the short answer is yes, since “they” happens to be Hollywood, and their preconceptions are backwards and obsolete, but it got me thinking about The Dip, an awesome book by Seth Godin. It’s about the strategies of quitting and persisting, and gaining the awareness to do each effectively. Seth is a master of concision (the book is about 80 pages long), and provides a good summary in this passage:

The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

This got me thinking about other things: an idea I had for a website several months ago, why I quit, and why it was the right decision. I’ll write about that next.

Lisa: “Beware the Ides of March.”

Homer: “No.”

Hulu has a strategy problem. So do we; people are often myopic with things like this. They judge the merit of the service in a vacuum, using it to predict success, and altogether miss the larger issues. It’s easy to be distracted by usable iterations that dot the graph between revolutions.

But with $15 million in development costs alone and hundreds of millions more tied into the venture, “usable iteration” probably wasn’t the desired result.

I’m only beginning to understand the ideas presented by Seth, Umair, etc., but central to their business philosophy is a simple maxim: good beats evil.

A pre-roll advertisement or spam email may not be as intuitively bad as baby seal clubbing. It’s simply annoying. But if you look deeper, into the core of the organization (or DNA, as Umair puts it), you see an evil that most of us, at least historically are familiar with: control. A primary interest in exploiting value, not creating it. Ryan Holiday put it well:

“The problem with Hulu is that ultimately, everything about it was designed around the question of ‘How can we stick more ads in this?’ Was YouTube designed that way?”

That sort of model worked when I couldn’t skip commercials, shop at Amazon, or download whatever I want for free. I only gave you my attention when I didn’t have a choice.

So what happens when this assumption is no longer true? When the wall is dilapidated from innovation and market forces? Organizations like Google come along and pulverize it.

Understand that this is not New Hippie Economics. It’s not about moral imperatives or airy coffeehouse talk. It is simply the model that works given the economic machinery we now have. Do unto others, or they’ll find another way. You can choose to be that way–the new way–or you can bitch when somebody else eats your lunch.