
And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet - adam
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/business/ev-williams-twitter-medium.html
======
jawns
> In social media's early days, Mr. Williams said, "addiction was the goal."

> "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?'"

> 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.

Sounds a lot more like cigarette companies than Williams thinks.

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?"

~~~
rhizome
You can't make big money on the Internet by being honest.

~~~
greymeister
Optimistically I'd like to think you can but there's always more to be made if
you're not.

~~~
rhizome
We have 25 years of .com history to reflect upon, surely there should be some
obvious examples by now.

------
r3bl
Oh, now he's fixing it, not salvaging it?

May last year in NY Times:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/technology/evan-
williams-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/technology/evan-williams-
medium-twitter-internet.html)

~~~
telltruth
Ev Williams is one of the great entrepreneural scammer of our time. He is
gifted master of bootstrapping same old run of the mill blogging web sites
slapped with ultra-gradios vision and then sell it to deep pocketed buyers
while leaving his user base high and dry. His tech is almost always subpar,
ideas half backed, business model broken but he gets billions anyway for his
ability to generate massive followers out of thin air. I suppose Medium is up
for sale. The idea of paid premium content has been tried so many times...
Someone needs to make a case study of how he does bootstrapping.

------
Animats
"Fix"? With Medium? They replace free blogs with a site where you have to pay
to read them.

 _People like you helping people like us help themselves._

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Not to mention Medium is reader hostile with all the _stuff_ they put on the
screen.

~~~
TremendousJudge
Since I started using the Web Annoyances Ultralist[1], sites like medium blogs
became extremely minimalist. I recommend it

[1]
[https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances](https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances)

~~~
bachmeier
Firefox Reader View works well for me.

------
minimaxir
It's worth noting that this profile was published at about the same time
Medium started cutting off publisher memberships:
[http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/medium-abruptly-cancels-
the...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/medium-abruptly-cancels-the-
membership-programs-of-its-21-remaining-publisher-partners/)

The NYTimes author's response:
[https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/994634637451415601](https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/994634637451415601)

> 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.

------
minikites
>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.

>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.

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.

~~~
justicezyx
Not an irony

Seems a perfect example of modern media...

------
nemild
Like many tech executives, Ev's view is that it's up to users to demand more
from social media algorithms and tech products:

> 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.

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.

Regardless, I made an engineer media literacy guide to encourage a shift in
user behavior, and contributions are welcome:

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer](https://github.com/nemild/hack-
an-engineer)

\-------------------------------------------------

* [https://twitter.com/robjective/status/964680128092504065](https://twitter.com/robjective/status/964680128092504065)

* [https://www.nemil.com/s/benedict-evans.html](https://www.nemil.com/s/benedict-evans.html) (my response to Benedict Evan's post)

------
Sk1pp
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.

I'm trying to recall from memory here since the book isn't in front of me.

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".

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".

~~~
overcast
Business is business, it's not personal. What should concern you is his
attitude in thinking that he knows best for everyone. He's created a lot of
toxic environments, most notably Twitter, that would go a long way in cleaning
up the internet.

~~~
scrollbar
"Business is business, it's not personal."

OK, Laurie Bream...

Culturally, thankfully, it seems the negative outcomes from this attitude are
on display right now. Mainstream life is very partitioned, dissociated, maybe.
I think of my parents who can't stand BLM protests at football games because
"there's no place for politics at work." #metoo is somehow related here, too.

The walls are coming down; I believe we need to take a more holistic approach
to life to truly survive, succeed, and thrive. I'm sorry if this sounds a
little scattered to the more thinking-oriented type, as I'm more of a
feeling/intuitive personality myself.

~~~
BLKNSLVR
I'm explaining this to myself as much as anyone else, but the end-result of
"Business is business, it's not personal." is AI / Machines continuing the
business at the expense of all human employees resulting in massively
efficient business and corporations that slowly congeal into a single mega-
corporation that does all products end-to-end, and then attempting to sell
these products to the humans who no longer have any money because none of them
have any work to earn it.

Heyyyy, it's just Business. Capiche?

------
kelukelugames
Why don't he fix medium or twitter first? This guy talks a lot.

~~~
jessaustin
Twitter is kind of amazing as an example of something that was never fixed and
never will be fixed [0], yet has managed to survive for many years.

[0] e.g. the problems with harassment that existed in the first year still
exist and indeed have never been curtailed in any way...

------
mmanfrin
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 _hate_ medium now.

------
ktosobcy
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.

Really - I do miss old days where blogs/articles were, to put it weirdly
"simplistic" (tech-wise)

------
fortythirteen
> 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.

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.

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.

------
telltruth
Ev Williams personal paid PR piece aside, it is actually possible to solve the
problem: have it done by large company as in “free parking” model.

------
mathattack
This highlights the dangers of booking your future on the back of another
company. Enthusiasm for partnerships comes and goes.

Could it be that Ev’s best moments are behind him?

------
svnsets
"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)."

1) Marxists have been writing about this for decades...

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.

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).

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.

------
moultano
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.

[https://xkcd.com/862/](https://xkcd.com/862/)
[https://xkcd.com/597/](https://xkcd.com/597/)
[https://xkcd.com/187/](https://xkcd.com/187/)
[https://xkcd.com/77/](https://xkcd.com/77/)

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ejlangev
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.

