If you can’t succeed without first getting mass adoption, then you can’t succeed. See the ‘success’ of Medium, and how it required losing everything they set out to do.
If Arbital has failed, Arbital has failed. Building neoTumblr and hoping to turn it into Arbital later won’t make it fail any less, it will just produce neoTumblr.
Somewhat recently Medium laid off about a third of their team as they tried to re-orient to figure out what happened when their original vision went away.
Isn’t this a pretty well-worn path by now? Start with lofty visions, discover that your incentive system rewards for eyeballs and clicks, start to optimize for eyeballs and clicks, become shit soon afterwards.
I do think we see this pattern across a lot of content platforms, like YouTube, as well. My impression is that earnest creators who try to make quality things often get out-competed by attention-hijackers / things that optimize for the action rather than the intent (ala Goodhart’s Law).
See my reply to gjm: http://lesswrong.com/lw/otq/whats_up_with_arbital/dqa0?context=3
If you can’t succeed without first getting mass adoption, then you can’t succeed. See the ‘success’ of Medium, and how it required losing everything they set out to do.
If Arbital has failed, Arbital has failed. Building neoTumblr and hoping to turn it into Arbital later won’t make it fail any less, it will just produce neoTumblr.
Could you detail what you mean about Medium? This doesn’t sound like a claim that is very easy to look up.
Somewhat recently Medium laid off about a third of their team as they tried to re-orient to figure out what happened when their original vision went away.
Isn’t this a pretty well-worn path by now? Start with lofty visions, discover that your incentive system rewards for eyeballs and clicks, start to optimize for eyeballs and clicks, become shit soon afterwards.
I do think we see this pattern across a lot of content platforms, like YouTube, as well. My impression is that earnest creators who try to make quality things often get out-competed by attention-hijackers / things that optimize for the action rather than the intent (ala Goodhart’s Law).
Noted, but I disagree.