

You Either Die A Hero Or You Become The Villain - rvcamo
http://massivegreatness.com/walter-white

======
notJim
I'm not an app.net fanboi, nor am I particularly hopeful about its chances of
success. I have not backed it (though I'm considering it.)

This article is full of bullshit.

    
    
      > Because the reality of the situation is that if App.net 
      > ever was successful, it would face many of the same hard 
      > choices that Twitter now does. Or it would fade away.
    

Most of the challenges Twitter has come from its inability to monetize, and
much of the criticism coming from app.net and supporters is that Twitter is
sacrificing its openness in its quest to squeeze money out of the service.
App.net aims to avoid these challenges by being a paid service. Further, since
App.net has a built-in business model, it doesn't need huge traffic to turn
into advertising dollars.

    
    
      > The truth is that these things rarely work because it’s simply not how 
      > the world works. People tend to flock to the best services. And the best 
      > services tend to sprout from the best entrepreneurs. And the best 
      > entrepreneurs eventually realize they need to build the best businesses, 
      > lest their services die or worse — linger in mediocrity.
    

There are a whole bunch wholly unqualified, unsupported opinions and logical
leaps here. For one, I don't think people actually flock to the best services
(maybe most popular, most exclusive, best marketed, best timed, pick any
number of things.) But two, only MG Siegler is defining "best" to be biggest.
Dalton Caldwell quite clearly thinks that "best" would account for some things
like openness and a straightforward business model. I'm sure he'd love for
app.net to be a billion dollar company. I'm not sure that's his definition of
success.

    
    
      > Even if App.net hits its money goal and gets fully built (an early alpha is 
      > here), it won’t ever grow big enough to truly challenge Twitter. Maybe you 
      > think that’s fine. Maybe it could exist as a self-sustaining smaller network. 
      > That’s nice — but that’s not what drives anyone. No one sets out to be 
      > second-rate. And the best people don’t flock to those services. That’s why 
      > these things tend to not work.
    

Same thing here. MG Siegler has decided on a goal for Dalton Caldwell that
Dalton doesn't necessarily share.

    
    
      > App.net looks like the hero right now only because it 
      > hasn’t had the opportunity to become the 
      > villain. And it probably never will.
    

Finally, the world is not a fucking comic book or TV show. There are nuances
of decision and balances to be struck that don't translate into comically
reductionist ideas of good versus evil.

~~~
jbigelow76

        Most of the challenges Twitter has come from its inability to monetize
    

Per Crunchbase Twitter has had 8 rounds of funding for a total 1.16 BILLION
dollars. Twitter actually did figure out how to monetize, they monetized an
extremely small population (VCs) for an extremely large amount of money.
Anything they'll get from consumers and brands will be peanuts unless you are
looking at horizon much further out than any of those VCs wanted to be in on
the deal. Sponsored tweets are going to be feeding the operating expenses
monkey.

Looking at the FB/ZNGA/GRPN prices Twitter won't IPO so barring a deus ex
machina in the form of an Apple purchase VCs are going to have to accept that
they were the monetization vehicle, but nobody will want to talk about it
publicly because it doesn't fit the standard narrative.

~~~
gph
Seriously? Getting VC funding isn't monetizing. That's not profit, it's an
investment. I don't know if this needs to be spelled out, but generally when
people make investments they expect the investment to be returned with
additional profits on top. Or do you think the VCs are in the business of
giving money away?

Breaking even on sponsored tweets is not a sustainable business model just
because they got VC funding. If they can't start turning actual profits, that
VC money will be pulled out faster than you can type a 140 character message
about it.

~~~
theorique
I think jbigelow76 is talking about 'monetizing' for the founders and early
investors with tongue in cheek, and the fact that twitter doesn't have an
obvious income stream. Obviously this is not the intended outcome for the VCs.

------
padmanabhan01
This article hits the nail on the head.

The system of one person or company doing something wrong and another making a
promise to do things right is exactly why politics never improves. What is to
stop the next person from turning evil too? A promise made by a person?
Seriously?

If the new company were to come up with some decentralized architecture that
would systemically prevent them from doing ads and would just establish an
open protocol that anyone can use for a small licensing fee etc or some new
way of making money, that would at least be something worth trying.

If the only difference is a promise that they won't do ads, hah. I don't know.

~~~
TimJRobinson
I really really want someone to build an open source decentralised peer to
peer piece of software that does this. Something similar to bitcoin in that
it's not controlled by any one person or system and anyone can join in. There
are a lot of hurdles but I think it could be done and that's something I'd
definitely put money towards.

~~~
surrealize
That's pretty much what identi.ca was supposed to be.

~~~
jmathai
We're trying to do this specifically around Photos using OStatus.
<http://theopenphotoproject.org>

------
goostavos
Not related directly to the article, and therefor, perhaps a poor HN comment,
but it drives me insane when people change the text highlight color --
especially to yellow. I highlight nearly everything as I read online. For
whatever reason, I find white text on the blue highlighted background to be
much easier to quickly parse without loosing my place.

The blue highlight is so ingrained in my browser mind that seeing yellow just
throws me for a complete loop.

~~~
EvilTerran
If you're using Firefox, you could do something like this with your
userContent.css[1]:

    
    
      ::-moz-selection {
          color: #FFF !important;
          background-color: #00A /* or your color of choice */ !important;
      }
    

[1] <http://www-archive.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#usercss>

~~~
EvilTerran
... not that that lets this guy off using a yellow highlight, of course. I
think "highlighting looks the same on all sites" is a pretty ingrained UI
expectation on the web, and so one that you shouldn't be breaking without very
good reason.

------
lylemckeany
Some on alpha.app.net are arguing that app.net is "an infrastructure play for
a million new networks to bloom. It's AWS not Twitter."

Not sure I completely got that message from Dalton's posts. He could simply
have a marketing problem at this point, although he's done pretty well thus
far if that's the case.

~~~
elmuchoprez
"He could simply have a marketing problem at this point, although he's done
pretty well thus far if that's the case."

The message may by cloudy, but it's out there, which is the most impressive
part of this in my opinion. App.net may be a good idea, but it's not really an
original idea. And I had honestly never heard of Dalton Caldwell before this,
and even now, he doesn't quite seem a Silicon Valley A-lister.

I'm not trying to knock him or the service, but I can't figure out how he got
everyone talking about this so much. There's a million kinda-good-sounding
start up ideas floating around out there and even the best of them often die
due to lack of traction or being drowned out. And yet even though app.net
doesn't even look like it's going to get through initial funding, it's all
over the tech community.

~~~
lylemckeany
He's relatively plugged into the SV tech scene. He also struck a cord with his
original blog post[1]. App.net was obviously just a reaction to the outpouring
of support for the ideas he expressed in that post. This could just be proof
that 80,000+ page views of a blog post does not equal $500K in paid users at
$50, $100, or $1,000 a pop.

More recently he received a ton of attention from his open letter to Zuck[2].

[1]<http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been>
[2]<http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg>

------
kirillzubovsky
I agree. As much as some people in the world want App.net to be, the majority
of the world doesn't care. After all, even Twitter took years to be accepted
by the main stream users. Are your mom and dad on Twitter? If the answer is
no, then even Twitter hasn't succeeded yet. Without millions of users, neither
will App.net

The majority of the population is used to paying money for services, but they
pay to the services where they have no other choices - telecom companies. They
do so because phones used to be a luxury, then a necessity, and I think they
still are a necessity. You can't just wish your iphone into sending a message,
you got to have it connected to some network.

Even if Dalton raised the .5mil and built the network, the network won't grow
and without growth it will soon stagnate and die. He could then, of course,
open the network up on a freemium model, which may be an interesting
experiment, but chances are at the end of the day advertising money will be
the only source of truly meaningful revenue. After all, if Facebook and
Twitter are giving you everything for free and only asking for your ad clicks,
why would you want to pay? I mean, I know why, because you want an open
network without ads. I mean, if you had a choice to buy milk and cookies for
your child or to buy a month's worth of social networking ... I sure hope you
pick the cookies.

------
EricDeb
How about sites like Wikipedia or Wordpress? Aren't they non-profit (Not
entirely sure about Wordpress), community-driven sites that have succeeded
despite their altruistic intentions?

I don't agree with the notion that companies or non-profits have to eventually
become sinister and closed-off to maintain market-share. I think Twitter and
Facebook just happened to be sites that did take this path-likely because they
involved individuals who wanted large profits.

~~~
andrewflnr
IIRC, Wordpress makes money selling ads on Wordpress.com hosting.

~~~
nikcub
But the project wasn't started in order to sell ads on wordpress.com hosting

I think the point from reply above is that the line about all successful
projects being 'for-profit' projects is clearly bogus, and I would totally
agree with that.

------
batgaijin
First of all: This comment has nothing to do with the content of the article,
just the timing.

You seriously couldn't wait 5 days to publish this? What's the point, do you
want to be a hipster pessimist or do you just want to screw with the effort
these people are putting into it?

Even if you are right on every point, why the hell would you publish it now?
Do you want it to fail? Do you want to actively have a part?

What the hell is wrong with you dude.

~~~
jbigelow76
I think 5 days from now would have been too late. At that point it would have
seemed like they typical "hindsight is 20/20" Monday morning quarterbacking.
At least by making a statement now, as forgone a conclusion as it may be, he
can at least pretend that he isn't the 30th person on a bandwagon that seats
60.

Like MG or the other marketers of the silicon valley dream there is the
perception that it's a meritocracy, and we all want app.net to succeed on
merit. But if were really merit as opposed to execution + opportunism we
wouldn't have companies like Zynga (current share price be damned, Pincus got
his). MG is just perpetuating the trend: execution (leveraging svbtle/TC cred)
+ opportunism (pretending he isn't telling the audience what they already
know).

~~~
batgaijin
To the first part: that's obvious and stupid, but I agree that's the
motivating factor.

In regards to the 2nd: what?

~~~
jbigelow76
RE: what?

My point was, we all want app.net to succeed, because it means our success is
mostly in our own hands and our faith in people's ability to see past the
quick, easy and free. I like that thought too, I don't have much faith in it
but I like it. MG is cynically playing off that hope as well.

------
lukifer
You know how FaceBook won? By being cooler than MySpace with a key
demographic, and using that as a wedge to bring in everyone else. But FaceBook
isn't cool now, just normalized: your Mom is there, and so are a million
spammy ads and apps and games, with the open secret that somebody somewhere is
probably doing something creepy. Sooner or later, another social network will
become the next digital status symbol, and having it be paid-for might
actually be a benefit in that regard.

Also, with enough paying customers, app.net doesn't have to win, so long as it
offers real value beyond just network effects. If enough cool services are
built on top of it, it can be valuable enough that people will pay to keep it
afloat even if FaceBook and Twitter are still king numbers-wise. (Bearing in
mind that one can trivially cross-post between services.)

Also: I really hope app.net pays attention to pricing psychology if they get
funded. To most people $5/month doesn't feel like much and $50/year feels like
real money, even though the former is actually more expensive.

~~~
sigkill
I'm interested in this pricing psychology? Till what point would people say,
"Fuck it, I don't care". $9.95? $14.95? or even $19.95? I think $20 bucks is
pushing it. Maybe $15 might be the largest "throwaway" money for most people.

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
There is no "one point" for all.

For you $20 is the threshold. But for Warren Buffet? But for a small business
that could earn $2000 more a year with a great social service? For a
Venezuelan person whose same $20 means a ton of work?

It depends. 20% of Americans have 80% of the wealth.

~~~
lmm
Unfortunately for appwhateveritis, I suspect the cool wedge users that got
facebook where it is are _more_ price-sensitive than the old folks they want
to get away from.

------
AznHisoka
"You Either Die A Hero Or You Become The Villain"

Or you suffer the fate 99.99% of people face: disappearing into the void as an
unknown, without a soul caring about you. Actually, it's more like 100%.

~~~
EvilTerran
It'll be exactly 100% in the end. Heat death of the universe, if nothing else
wipes us out first.

 _Sic transit gloria mundi._

------
nrmehta
In disclosure, I'm a "backer" of app.net and am on the alpha. And as a
hardcore Dark Knight fan, I can fall for any DK quote.

But while I respect MG's other writing, I don't agree with all of his
conclusions here.

Some thoughts:

1\. He states that "the web is simply not conducive to a user-supported
service reaching the scale of a Twitter" to imply that success = scale. I
actually believe the app.net could become a lot like HN - a relatively (web-
wise) small group of people who all get value from the service - enough to pay
for it. Does it kill twitter then? Probably not? But does that mean it's a
failure? I don't think so.

2\. Furthermore, let's examine this point that the only services that can get
to scale are ad-supported. He certainly has good empirical data (facebook,
twitter, etc.) to back him up. But in the software world, open, non-commercial
efforts (e.g., linux, smtp email and more broadly the internet) have had
gigantic impacts in terms of scale. As others pointed out, wikipedia is an
example of a service in this vein. I think we haven't played out the
experiment yet of what do open, non-commercial distributed services look like.
I wouldn't give up on that. I personally think that any true communications
utility long-term needs to be open (like email). app.net is still commercial
so not fully there - but clearly (IMHO) more transparent and open than an ad-
supported model.

3\. MG also doesn't talk about one of dalton's meta-points which I also feel
passionately about. The conventional wisdom seems to have accepted that an ad-
supported future state - where ads follow us around, personalized to what they
think we want, making us think our services we're getting are "free" when they
really aren't - is the only possible future state. I know Tom Cruise got
followed around by ads in "Minority Report", but that doesn't mean it has to
be our future. I personally believe that humans will recognize over time the
real cost of advertising and eventually converge to a more balanced world of
paid and faux-free (ad-supported) services. I'm not saying ad-supported will
go away - just that there will be choice (which was actually the main point
dalton made in the first blog post he wrote on this topic).

Overall, I think Dalton should be commended whether his effort works or not.
He re-sparked some very important discussions and was willing to take a chance
on his ideas.

------
aschroder
I think we can have an 'Open Twitter' without anyone needing to fund it, or
own it, or monetize it.

1 to Many short messages are a powerful concept, but as with email - a spec is
all we need.

In a nutshell: we define a layer on top of email and mailing lists for short
broadcast messages and discovery.

I jotted down my rambling, incoherent thoughts on the subject here:
[http://www.aschroder.com/2012/07/an-open-twitter-like-
networ...](http://www.aschroder.com/2012/07/an-open-twitter-like-network-
powered-by-email/)

------
adrianwaj
1) Never heard of App.net until now. I don't like the name. It's too
technical. I prefer the name Quitter (Qwitter, kwitter). If you want to build
something for the people, make it appealing in name and image to a 7-year-old.

2) Does the service have an API, similar or the same as Twitter's? "the
structure of the Java APIs that Oracle was trying to assert can't be
copyrighted at all" [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/google-wins-
cruci...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/google-wins-crucial-api-
ruling-oracles-case-decimated/)

3) Status.net is open-source microblogging. <http://status.net/packages> \- it
became a hero, but for businesses.

4) There should be a way to give or pledge bitcoins. I don't care for state-
backed fiat currency anymore - it's just like twitter, manipulated for
economic gain by its issuers to the point of breaking its users.

5) There should be a "pledge to quit" .. something like "I'll pledge to quit
but only if accounts up to 500,000 followers do the same"
<http://www.pledgebank.com/>

6) Who's going to commercially benefit most from the service in the long-run?

7) Can this site just copy my existing twitter feed, until I am ready to close
that one down?

~~~
jyap
Why would you give it a name with such negative connotations like Quitter?

Yes, it has an API. Even MG's article mentioned it.

~~~
adrianwaj
I run a small site called <http://twitya.com> \- maybe that'd be a better name
for it, named after the Twitya river in Canada.

------
aniro
I remember hearing "who the hell is dumb enough to pay for television?" when I
was young.

..somewhere along the line, someone (smartly) decided that PAID television
might just work. That people were tired of what was broadcast over the air for
free and all of the attendant issues that "free" brought to the table.

How big a market is paid TV now?

I guess it speaks to the erosion of values and the disappearance of "words
have meaning" to call app.net an altruistic project. I mean, really. They are
offering to take money in exchange for providing a service.. so that the core
values of the business arrangement remain focused on the people using (and
building) the service. If a quid-pro-quo arrangement like that is the new
version of altruistic heroism, no wonder things in the US are so #^&*ed up.

------
H_L
False dichotomies are fun and all, but let's be honest. Does it really either
have to "die a hero" or "become the villain"?

The whole point is that Twitter has become the villain, and that App.net is
providing an API infrastructure, not a closed social media experience owned by
advertisers.

~~~
whatusername
Can you think of examples where companies have succeeded and not "become the
villian". I can't think of one from the top of my head.

------
pron
While I disagree with much of what is said in the article, I think this is an
important point:

    
    
      And the best services tend to sprout from the best 
      entrepreneurs. And the best entrepreneurs eventually realize
      they need to build the best businesses, lest their services
      die or worse — linger in mediocrity.
    

We need another Richard Stallman or another Linus Torvalds for the internet
age. This time, however, it's going to be much harder for such people to
appear because in this day and age it seems like it's easier to make a lot of
money from software - you don't need to build another Microsoft - so software
developers are much more easily tempted.

~~~
dasil003
Yes that quote was key to the whole article. If you subscribe to the view that
success is defined by scale, then pretty much everything he said follows
logically from that.

Of course we know that App.net will not compete with Twitter on volume. But
leave it to a guy with a blog titled Massive Greatness to assume that's the
only thing an A-player would want to do. One has to wonder what would happen
to MG Siegler exposed to the Apple of the mid 80s if his Apple fanboyism was
forced to confront his idea that greatness is by definition massive.

As for giant figures like Linus or RMS, remember, Linus is still around, and
the work he does creates more value than probably any single company, because
his software is everywhere. Probably 95% of all companies are realizing some
value from the existence and maintenance of Linux. The economics of this work
because the work he does is just manipulating a small number of bits and
publishing those changes for everyone to take advantage of. The economics of
this are completely different from running a service where costs scale
linearly with adoption. There have been many attempts to make distributed
versions of Twitter to gain the economics of open source, but a centralized
service is too valuable.

What Dalton is doing here is seeing if he can create something sustainable for
developers that has the benefits of a centralized service without the risk of
users being outbid by advertisers. It doesn't have to go anywhere near Twitter
to be a massive success. Just validating the business model at a small scale
will already be producing proportionately orders of magnitude more value than
the huge volumes of banal shit floating through Twitter's tubes.

------
nikcub
A narrow world view where entrepreneurs and businesses produce all the
successful software in the world. The irony is that almost all of the software
used to produce and host this blog post is made up of free and open source.

------
killwhitey
All the people I want to interact with regularly use Twitter/Facebook. There
have been a few more attractive options that I would like them to move to (G+,
Path, etc.), but they haven't budged. Now here's a new alternative that thinks
they should pay to use a service they're already getting for free. Good luck
trying to convince them, because I'm not going to bother this time.

~~~
drcube
All the people I want to email are on hotmail. I'd like them to switch to
gmail but they haven't budged. Well, I guess I have to stick with the email my
friends use.

Does this sound ridiculous? It should. It is equally ridiculous that users of
one social network can't interact with users on another. This is the problem
that needs to be fixed, not ads.

~~~
rehack
Can't agree with you more. I had written the following about 3 months ago:

 _In an Internet 1.0 world "Facebook", would have happened via a 'social'
protocol on the Internet just like SMTP, and Zuckerberg would have been a
hacker icon just like a Tim Berners Lee._

And I went on to write:

 _PS: If mails had happened in Internet 2.0 world. We would have gmail users
only mailing to other gmail users and hotmail users only mailing to other
hotmail users ... but actually gmail would not have happened as Sabeer Bhatia
or Microsoft would have been still ruling the mail world ;-) ... But
thankfully it did not turn out that way, as there was already a protocol
called SMTP!_

The comment was this one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3949048>

Edit: Added more relevant text

------
barce
Since we're using movie analogies, let's say that app.net has decided not to
"end the party early" because there is no party to begin with. (That quote is
from "The Social Network.") App.net has a very similar business model to the
first online community, the WeLL. The WeLL is still around after 25 years.

------
michaelochurch
I don't agree. At least, I don't see the problem the same way.

Companies become more complex as they get bigger, and morally ambiguous as
they get larger, and once a company reaches the point that it's making
hundreds of decisions per day that affect other peoples' lives, it's
impossible for it not to fuck a few up. Look at what happened to Google. It
hasn't actually become "a villain", but they've made some very public mistakes
(Real Names policy, dropping the ball on "Real Games") and some catastrophic
private ones (implementing Welch-style stack-ranking in "calibration scores").
Google was designed by good people with the best intentions, and this stuff
still happened. It seems hard not to have cataclysmic fuckups on a daily basis
at a certain size.

For a semi-related side note, I'm starting to agree with the Yegge hypothesis
on codebase size: it's not that certain programming techniques (IDE vs. no
IDE) or language properties (static vs. dynamically typed) fail "at scale" and
others don't. All do. Largeness in a codebase is uniformly undesirable; it
makes pretty much any programming environment, language choice, and
development methodology go to hell. I've yet to see a programming environment
where programmers (a) have to interact with a genuinely large codebase (and
aren't working in a well-carved-out walled garden) and (b) enjoy their jobs.
Once you have too much code, maintenance becomes the majority of the job, and
per-programmer productivity falls to 10% speed (~15 LoC per day is commonly
cited, although LoC is actually a horrible measure seeing as codebase size is
a problem, not accomplishment) and morale goes into the toilet; programmers
are unusual in the working world in that their happiness is _positively_
correlated with how hard they are working (or, I should say, able to work).
The only long-term solution is the Unix philosophy and small-program
methodology, but MBA types seem to prefer huge, over-ambitious, all-or-nothing
monolithic projects. So small-program Unix philosophy has been losing for a
long time in favor of huge, object-oriented mudballs, even though the small-
program way (each program does one thing and does it well; and if you need
complexity, you build a _system_ and give it the respect-- modularity, thought
given to robustness and fault-tolerance-- that a system deserves) is an
objectively much better way of doing things.

Companies may have the same illness. Bigness may become terminally inefficient
in the near future. To make large companies work well, you have to carve out
"honor's colleges" (to get the best people) and walled gardens and sandboxes
and research labs, but that effort is guaranteed to meet political resistance
simply on account of the complexity of the company. Imagine if a large, boring
technology company decided to reinvent itself and really get behind R&D and
put 10% of its engineers into blue-sky R&D work. It would be great for the
company and society in the long run, but the political fighting would be
immense. You'd have a sudden airdrop of desirable work/jobs, you'd have
powerful people pledging to support the change only if their proteges got jobs
in this sexy new research division (so the positions of power would be
allocated politically rather than on merit and leadership) and the conflicting
demands and requirements coming out of big-company complexity (any time an
initiative needs approval, the gate-keeper _will_ ask for some payoff, and
usually an inappropriate one that compromises the initiative) might end up
miring it in a bog from the start. I'm not saying it couldn't work. It easily
could. But the political problem would be harder than anything else.

It wasn't always this way with companies-- a lot of things were achieved by
large companies because only huge corporations could even attempt them-- but
it might be becoming that way. With the rapidly increasing technical
complexity of modern work, we might be reaching a point where for a company to
hold $10 billion worth of value and employ 15,000 people is no longer
effective or desirable. Old-style huge companies were a lot simpler, because
the bulk of their people were doing the same grunt work. In a modern
"knowledge economy" where people are doing different work, and in which the
work of poorly-motivated or unskilled people is of negative value (rather than
merely low positive value coming from the weakest performers in typical
"commodity" labor) huge companies may just be unmanageable.

It's not about becoming "the villain" or having to make "hard choices". It's
just about complexity. It's about the fact large, powerful things pretty much
always underperform relative to our expectations of them because complexity
imposes so much drag, and it's hard to see this until one has a good sense of
what unmanaged, undesirable complexity (that's 99% of all complexity) looks
like and where it comes from. Huge organizations don't become "villainous" by
intent. They become complex and inefficient and reach a point where the only
thing anyone can agree on is growth-for-growth's-sake, which macroscopically
makes it look like the firm is driven by sociopathy and hubris. But it's not
that simple. There are a lot of well-intended, talented people in these
megalithic companies with great ideas they'd love to implement. The problem is
that the only thing that seems to come out of the company macroscopically
(instead of being cancelled out by internal forces and drag) is the one thing
everything in the company can agree on: more money and power and headcount and
just flat-out size for the company, under the assumption that increasing the
firm's "bigness" will improve the position (and compensation) of each person
within it.

~~~
akkartik
The biggest problem facing humanity today isn't the singularity or global
warming. It is that we don't know how to grow successful things without making
them suck. For want of a better name, I tend to call this gravity-like
tendency 'the tragedy of the commons'. But I think I'm interpreting it more
broadly than is conventional[1]. Some examples that aren't generally
associated with the idea:

a) The patent system. It has decayed because it's an externality to be dumped
to, in the interest of individuals to overload and to game[2].

b) The cat signal[3]. We have a tendency to flatten nuanced subjects (apathy)
into flat memes (here lolcats) and fight them with a single weapon (here
blackouts[4]) that grows ineffective with use. Blackouts are an externality;
people will eventually grow sick of them. Everyone knows this. So the game-
theoretic optimum strategy is to exploit them as quickly as possible before
they're milked dry.

c) Code becomes an externality as the collaborators grow. Think of the last
time you saw someone bolt an argument onto a function. The number of arguments
isn't 'important'. It doesn't affect anyone's performance metrics. Everyone
has a vision for the codebase, needs to mould it somehow to further his
ambitions. The codebase becomes a mute vehicle for everyone's ambitions, and
as such an externality to be dumped to. Bolting arguments onto functions is
merely the smallest sin that can be committed[5].

There's elements of regulatory capture here[6]. I think the two together serve
to explain the fall of Rome, the rise of bureaucracies and the decay of the
reddit frontpage.

But the problem is solvable. I think the solution will come from software. But
not the kind of software we tend to write today. Something is deeply broken
about how we write software, and I've been trying to tease out what it is. My
current hypothesis is that the enemy is abstraction. We tend to prematurely
freeze interfaces. Everytime you freeze an interface in your code you give up
ownership over its future evolution. You can't take things out, so it's going
to get polluted over time, get things bolted on. It immediately turns into an
ugly step child of your otherwise beautiful code. And so we neglect
interfaces, treat them as externalities, bolt features on, make simple
interfaces ugly and complex. Interfaces are like walls separating
jurisdictions. Neither jurisdiction cares about the wall.

Every now and again someone says, "this interface is too complex; I'm going to
simplify it". And creates a new simple interface. But they then commit the
Great Error: they freeze their interface in its turn, and the cycle repeats
with it. All we've done is add another layer of crap atop all our layers[7].
As we add layers on top the bloat compounds. I think if you truly looked at
the tower of abstractions in your codebase today, and took out everything that
didn't serve _your_ use _today_ , you'd end up with a codebase two or three
orders of magnitude smaller.

I've been exploring replacing backwards compatibility with unit tests. Imagine
a world where code sharing took place but with no guarantees for the future.
This version here makes certain guarantees, but if you upgrade or do a git
pull, all bets are off. It might delete a function you rely heavily on. Or it
may make it work differently one time in a thousand[8] and cause subtle,
insidious bugs. The only way for you to guard against this is by having a
_comprehensive_ suite of unit tests. You have to be certain that if the tests
pass the software is safe for public consumption. It's a very different
discipline; the wall can now move, and both sides watch its evolution closely
using the barbed wire of tests. But it could lead to far smaller codebases,
and our lives as software developers would be less circumscribed. Every
interface we have to support is a line drawn through the state space
constraining our movement, the kinds of software we could write. It's a wall
limiting our jurisdiction. Fewer interfaces imply fewer walls, greater freedom
of movement across mental terrain, better software.

And if our software is better, less hamstrung, more responsive, we may be able
to automate more. We may be able to think about all the dysfunctions in the
real world, constantly seek new externalities and create sensors to monitor
their health.[9]

\---

Related (if you squint a little): [http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/06/11/artisan-
chocolate-and-soc...](http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/06/11/artisan-chocolate-
and-social-revolution)

[1] The traditional motifs
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons>) are both more concrete
and more libertarian. I don't think the tragedy can be solved by eliminating
all commons.

[2] <http://akkartik.name/blog/2010-12-19-18-19-59-soc>

[3] <http://internetdefenseleague.org>

[4] Another example is our overuse of anti-biotics.

[5] No judgement; I'm as guilty of this as anyone can be.

[6] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture>

[7] Think of the xkcd on standards: <http://xkcd.com/927>

[8] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295681>

[9] But we have to guard against tying everything to a single metric. The last
thing I want is a manager reading this and deciding to flatly limit the number
of arguments to a function by diktat. The moment you create a metric you
encourage people to stop exercising judgement and simply game the metric.
Metrics to fight externalities can themselves become externalities.

~~~
Zak
I'm reading your thesis as "stable APIs are bad because it's hard to get rid
of cruft, and if we just test enough, stability won't matter". As a net-
consumer of APIs, I'm not sure I can get behind that.

Of course, an API can be expected to change rapidly early in its life. Such
APIs are usually not considered ready for serious production use and breaking
changes aren't really a big deal. Later on, people tend to expect more
stability out of APIs and tend to stop using (or if that's not possible, post
strongly-worded rants to HN about) APIs that remove features unexpectedly.

There are extreme cases to be sure. Microsoft is famous for keeping new
versions of Windows bug-for-bug compatible with the past. Apple, on the other
hand regularly deprecates and removes features that see little use. In light
of Steve Yegge's recent post about liberal and conservative attitudes in
software, I would call Microsoft's position on this issue very conservative
and Apple's centrist.

I think what the world you're envisioning would actually look like is massive
fragmentation, with people maintaining many more forks of libraries that have
since removed some important functionality.

That's not to say the problem you describe doesn't exist or that there aren't
solutions. An appropriate deprecation policy is certainly one part. Another
component could be wider use of dynamic binding to help keep certain code out
of APIs and in clients. A third could be more effort to keep APIs _simple_ in
the sense that Rich Hickey uses the word.

~~~
akkartik
Yeah, I should clarify: I'm a lot less certain of the solution than of the
problem.

I was implicitly assuming some preconditions: a) You're a programmer trying to
solve a problem, b) You have access to the source code of your dependencies.
It might be a web API, but you must be able to setup your own server to
service the API. If you _can't_ fork a project my points are irrelevant.

If you _can_ in fact fork, my idea is to explicitly deemphasize eco-system
health and fragmentation in favor of just keeping your integrated stack clean.
I think it's an approach worth trying out.

OSS people love to say, "you have the source, you can change it to do what you
want." On the one hand it ignores that it takes more than just the sources to
accomplish something in the presence of real-world constraints (time,
resources). On the other hand, when you _do_ take the steps to change it to do
what you want there's a negativity associated with 'forking a project'.

I want to raise a counter-point that encourages people to fork projects rather
than trying to work around issues with hacks atop black-box dependencies. This
does already happen in the real world. Ubuntu does patch packages rather than
wait for upstream to accept them. I think there's benefit to more people
trying this in all parts of the eco-system.

The eco-system would be better off if projects were partly chosen based on how
encouraging they are of forking. Sometimes the appropriate response to a patch
may be, "thanks, this is great, but it's a little outside our ambit, so why
don't you fork the project?" And baking this choice into the workflow would
encourage simpler architectures that are easier for others to understand and
start forking.

------
lwhi
So what does all this amount to then ... ?

A carte blanche to do what you want to do anyway, regardless of the negative
consequences spread through ruthless self-interest.

(I must admit, I wasn't overly surprised when I discovered it's written by Mr
Siegler ...)

------
monochromatic
I have trouble taking a concrete prediction seriously when it's deduced from
such vagaries.

~~~
Andrex
This may not be the place for attacks on an author's writing style, but I
really find it hard to take any of MG Siegler's "I'm hyped about Movie X and
so I'll make up an article or story around it"-type posts seriously. Some of
the articles even make some decent points, but the article as a whole is a
bitter pill wrapped in insistence to swallow.

------
smashing
These are all the same things that people wrote back when Myspace was the 800
pound gorilla of social networking. Having expressed that, I think app.net's
funding methodology sucks for a direct delivery to customer project.

~~~
elmuchoprez
Myspace just got replaced with a different version of Myspace (facebook). If
some community funded, privacy secure, no ad service like Diaspora had
replaced it, that would be a different story because the core model would have
changed. But it didn't.

I don't think anyone is saying Twitter will never fall; they just don't think
it will fall to this profit model.

------
gamzer
This site and the ones hosted on the same platform have a body font that is
extremely blurry on my Android phone. Very annoying as there are regularly
articles posted I would like to read.

------
stuaxo
Wow, to call your own site massivegreatness, that's something!

------
programminggeek
Here is the thing that tech writers seem to forget... You don't need to be
Facebook or Twitter to be successful, especially if you have paying customers.

People will pay for hosting. Look at Wordpress. Wordpress is a nice free
platform, but plenty of companies make great money hosting Wordpress for
paying customers.

Why wouldn't people pay for their own hosted twitter like service? If App.net
can pull that off, then there is probably a business there. It isn't maybe a
billion dollar a year business, but with a small team 7 or 8 figures a year is
nothing to sneeze at.

