The good news is that the renewal rate was high enough for App.net to be profitable and self-sustaining on a forward basis…. The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees… including founders.
App.net is not shutting down, unlike photo hosting site MLKSHK, but the rhetoric around the announcement makes it sound like the lights could go out tomorrow, that App.net is a failure, and all of that. If it was a failure, they probably would turn out the lights.
I’m a paid App.Net member, and while it took me some time to get up to speed on the service, it’s where I go for conversation. From my initial skepticism, I became a champion of the service when it went freemium. As long as the server still runs, and my preferred apps still work, I’ll be sticking around on App.Net for a while. I might even pay to renew. I’ve got until October to decide.
But is conversation alone worth $36 a year for access? App.Net’s public face is that of a Twitter-like service, though it’s clear they want it to be more. There’s plenty of apps that build on the service as a backend, though nothing terribly groundbreaking. I’ve used a Foursquare clone, and two Instagram clones, and neither really stuck with me. I’m back on both original services now. I’m using a whopping 65.2 megabytes of the 10GB of storage I pay for. I have to wonder how many others have made better use of these features.
The value proposition of App.Net was a platform for social apps. I don’t know if they communicated this well enough, because as far as most people I know who aren’t in the ADN ecosystem think, it’s Twitter you have to pay for. Granted, it’s really hard to communicate what App.Net really is to ordinary people. One of the smarted moves the App.Net team did was move to a freemium model. The more people who use the service, the better the chance they’d use some of the third party services built on it. It didn’t work. People smarter than me have already opined about why.
And that sucks. I did my best to evangelize App.Net to my friends, but kept hitting the “Twitter you have to pay for” issue. I still follow more people on Twitter than on App.Net, because more people I care about are active there. I probably won’t leave App.Net—there’s still activity and friends using the service—but I don’t know if I’ll re-up my subscription. Am I getting $36 per year value? I don’t know yet. I have until October to decide. The real moment of truth will come in a year, when everyone who renewed this time get to decide if they’re getting their money’s worth. What I do in October will be a blip. May 2015 could kill the service, and I hope it doesn’t.
I maintain an unhealthy skepticism of anything that gets “buzz.” It makes me suspicious when lots of people suddenly like something, and the more I heard about CHVRCHES the less willing I was to listen, until I heard “The Mother We Share” in a turntable.fm room. At that moment, the scales fell from my eyes, and I could see. I bought all their stuff from iTunes the very same day. Their music is beautiful, powerful, and emotional, and proof that you can make art and make dance music at the same time. In concert, this comes through even stronger, but before I talk about CHVRCHES, I have to discuss the landscape of seeing live music in New York City.
There’s a dearth of of decent, large music venues in New York City. There are tons of small clubs, but most two to four-thousand capacity venues are theaters, not rock clubs. Because of this, too many bands, CHVRCHES included, are forced to perform at Terminal 5, on the West Side of Manhattan. Terminal 5 is a terrible venue. Before the venue doors open, fans are forced to wait in line crossing the active service entrance of a car dealership—mitigated slightly in warmer months when the venue lets people in to wait at their roof deck bar. Terminal 5’s sound is also notorious—it’s a three floor box converted from a warehouse, so everything echoes and becomes mud. For CHVRCHES, it was worse than usual: the low end was cranked up, often drowning out the backing vocals and more delicate keyboard parts.
To make matters worse, the crowd was terrible, too: a mix of drunk yuppies and kids who looked like they post on 4chan’s music board. The opening band was an awful DJ act, The Range, who at least tried to make a DJ set as visually appealing as possible, but failed. More than few people in the crowd mentally checked out, and spent his set staring down at their phones, or drunkenly arguing with their friends, depending on which group they were in. One positive moment between sets came when the sound person played “Someone Great” by LCD Soundsystem, and about twenty or so people around me sang along.
Once CHVRCHES hit the stage at 9:20, I forgot all about the terrible venue and the terrible crowd—except for one brief moment. Starting with “We Sink,” they tore through almost every song on The Bones of What You Believe, skipping only “Broken Bones.” The intensity was fierce, underscored by a simple, yet gorgeous light show. Being an electronic group, CHVRCHES don’t move a great deal behind their keyboards, though when Iain and Marten switched to guitar or bass, they did move around a bit more. Marten also got a moment to shine in the spotlight, taking the lead both on “Under The Tide” and “You Caught the Light”, and dancing like a madman.
…and before I realized it, it was over. CHVRCHES is the latest in a number of recent too-short shows. This will happen when you only have one album to promote, and you’re a headliner. When I saw Icona Pop, their show was over in about an hour. Savages, who also played Terminal 5 (with less sound trouble) played longer, though by adding in a cover song, a new song, and some extended live versions—not that I was complaining. Nor was I complaining about CHVRCHES, who, even when playing the weaker songs of their album, put on an impressive show, and clearly enjoying themselves. How many bands would take time between encore songs to recite the opening monologue from Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Only one, by my reckoning.
When the house lights rose, I felt wonderful. The terrible DJ, the awful people in the crowd, the overpriced beer, it all went away… Until I realized that I had to join 3000 people being crushed through two narrow hallways, and past the merch table. Terminal 5’s awfulness reasserted itself in the end. I’ve yet to reach the point where a terrible venue will overcome my desire to see an artist, and CHVRCHES are worth the hassle.
Something really set me off this morning, and it’s still setting me off. It came from reading a book by James Altucher, Choosing Yourself. I picked it up because of a glowing review from someone I respect and admire, Patrick Rhone. The book has some good points, especially around health (physical and mental) and well-being as a foundation for success.
It’s bad points come as some of the examples James Altucher upholds as examples for success. When I got to this description of how a friend of his made $300,000, I came as close to closing the book and throwing it across the room:
He basically looked at about a dozen other databases keeping track of all housing data and scraped specifically the rent-to-own houses off of them… Since people could potentially spend hundreds of thousands on the right house, they were willing to spend a few hundred on a subscription to his database…
In other words, he’s scraping someone else’s data, someone else’s work, and charging for access. This is data that a prospective home owner could get free with a cursory Google, or Craigslist search. The reason I didn’t throw the book across the room because I was reading it on my Kindle, on the subway. After discussing my indignation with Patrick on App.Net, I calmed down, and then later in the day I read this about the same friend’s current business:
He just launched a rent-to-own laptop product. He bulk buys the laptops for $200 apiece and rents-to-own them out for $20 a week for a year. BAM! Huge margins. He started just a few months ago. He’s bringing in $300,000 a month now…
I went back to re-read that passage to make sure I didn’t read “$20 a month” as “$20 a week.” Upon checking, I went from merely angry to outright infuriated.
Why does this make me angry? Because James Altucher is holding up as an example someone who’s business practices are shamefully exploitive. The rent-to-own business is part of a whole industry that exploits the poor in a shameful, disgusting way. It’s in the same bins as subprime credit cards and loans, tax refund loans, “opportunity pricing,” [1] and the granddaddy of them all: payday loans. These are business models that prey upon the poor, exploiting their difficulty in meeting basic needs, and extracting grotesque amounts of money from it.
I’m angry, most of all, at the implication that it’s all right to sell out your morals and ethics if it means you’re “choosing yourself” to get rich. I’m angry because it’s possible to do such a disgusting, exploitive thing, and not only get away with it, but be praised for it. This person is making money by actively causing harm to people, and that makes me angry enough to bang out 800-plus words about why.
If you have about fifty minutes, please watch Mike Monteiro’s excellent talk, “How Designers Destroyed the World.” If you do not have fifty minutes, the takeaway is this: “You are directly responsible for what you put into the world.” Mike rails against designers who actively, or passively, let things out into the world that cause harm to people. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re putting something into the world, too. The money may be rolling in, but you’re responsible for what effect it has on far more than your bottom line.
These are things we all need to think about. Making money is great, provided the people who are giving it to you get something of equal value in return. I do not begrudge anyone who makes their money by making people’s lives better in some small way. We’re in this together, and it’s possible to “choose yourself” in a way that doesn’t put other people further in the hole.
James Altucher has an email address set up to contact him if you read the book and want your money back. I reached out to him there, while writing this. I don’t want my money back. I don’t need to quibble over a dollar for an eBook. Life is too short, and I’ve probably gotten my money’s worth from the real advice in the book. I just explained my concerns over his choices of example, and how angry it made me. I hope he responds, and if he does, expect a follow-up.
I’m a lot less angry now, having explained myself.
In short: working backwards from a price to create a payment plan where it is actually more profitable if the buyer defaults, and the item is repossessed. ↩
I’m still new to the whole Quantified Self thing. The only wearable I have is a FitBit One, and I track all my food and water intake manually (when I remember). I use RescueTime to track what I do on my Mac. [1] I have Moves running to see where I went each day, and how I got there. I use Datalove to track how many words I write each day, and the numbers aren’t great. GoodReads tracks my books—and not well. That’s about it. I still end up collecting a lot of data about myself and my activities, but why? Data alone is useless. If RescueTime says I was 41% productive last week, but 24% productive this week, what does it mean? [2]
Data without context is meaningless. One of the reasons why personal fitness and Quantified Self applications go so well together is that if you’re trying to get healthier, knowing how much you move around during the day helps. If you get home, plop on the couch, and see you’ve only made 3238 steps during the day, it might motivate you to try and move around more. When I step on to the treadmill after work, or even just go for my post-lunch walk, I know it’s having an effect better than just returning to my seat and decomposing. I have a goal, and the data lets me know if I’m getting there or not. There’s no better measurement than how I feel—and writing this after a trip to the gym, I don’t feel great—but data helps back things up.
But correlating “steps taken” and “calories consumed” to general health is a lot simpler and easier to understand than a lot of other massive data-focused endeavors. So much of the talk around “big data” reminds me of Max Cohen’s assumptions in the movie Ï€. The idea that if we have enough data, set enough sets of eyes on it—or enough algorithms to parse it—we can discover patterns and gain insights into the future of whatever the data is about rings true. It plays to the innate human prediction for pattern recognition. We’re good at it, and by extension computers are good at it.
There’s just two problems. One: we often read patterns where no real patterns exist, as do our computer programs. Two: This can often lead us down the wrong rabbit hole, as we overgeneralize the pattern we discover, without being aware of its changes. By way of example, look at Google Flu Trends, and how it’s become increasingly out of whack with reality. The “big data” hypothesis, much like the “quantified self” hypothesis, is that the more information we have about something, the more insight we get into it. The problems above prove that this isn’t the case. Data alone does not lead to understanding. As a wise man once said, “You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.” Algorithms are just as subject to biases and ignorance as the people who make them. As long as that’s the case—and it will always be the case—we’ll have to do a lot more interpreting to find the answers, if they exist.
What I wouldn’t do for RescueTime-esque functionality on my iPhone and iPad. Except Jailbreak, I suppose. Maybe iOS 8 will support it… ↩
It means I bought the SimCity 4 re-release from the App Store is what it means. ↩
These ethical dilemmas, especially “Whether – and how – to transform users into products,” and “How much should future consequences influence present decisions” should be part of the dialogue. It seems, rather than try to figure out answers to these dilemmas, we go for the easy assumptions. Yes, we should transform users into products, and no, we shouldn't think about future consequences. The former is easily explained as a side effect of what drives returns on VC investments, the only thing close to a reliable big bet you can make in this market. The latter is an extension of the “fail early, fail often” ethos of the modern Silicon Valley and its children.
“Fail early, fail often"is dangerous, as it leads to extreme short-term thinking. It's often spun as incentive to try new ideas and refactor them if they don't pan out, which is a good strategy. However, when the bar for failure is set too low, a company can abandon a good idea for the new and shiny, even if there is potential for success by just giving it more time and effort. Some of this is an effect of the push for returns on VC investment if a company doesn't become a runaway success after a few rounds. In other cases, it's a get-rich-quick mentality on the part of the founders.
The lack of long-term thinking is also baked into the culture of some of the giants in the technology space. Google and Facebook alike put little thought into the ethics of what they have to do to drive more people into their ecosystem, collect data, and sell ads. Their bottom line is tied to it. Facebook expanding their company into virtual reality through the purchase of Oculus may imply Mark Zuckerberg wants to expand the possibilities of what Facebook can do beyond their current monetization strategy, but who can say? Google's various pie-in-the-sky projects seem to be more about goodwill in the tech community than finding a way improve what it tries to present as a core business. How do military robots help "organize all the world's information?”
We're living in a dangerous time. Heartbleed is a high profile example of the risks we're facing giving up so much of our data to these fast moving systems that spend far more time convincing us to disgorge our lives into them than they do protecting our data. It's easier to focus on getting us to surrender our information than it is to protect it, and the business case is stronger, too. I don't buy the argument that it's the “nature” of the network that things are how they are. We all define what this network is, whether we are a creator or a consumer—a line that is becoming increasingly blurred. We all have a voice in the debate over these ethical dilemmas, and it's time we actually had a debate about it.