Platforms vs. Plumbing: Weeknotes #37
A bit of a week. I appreciate there is no audience for these posts. But I feel like I’m letting myself down by not writing them. The connections that emerge between stimulus, observations, reflections make weeknotes worth writing.
Lots to reflect on this week. Before that though, something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Over on Substack, where I seem to be spending more and more time as both a writer and a consumer, things seem to be changing. Two things characterise that change. Firstly, a wider range of ‘products’ are now available to users there: following & subscription, a feed, shorter form ‘notes’ and the ability to clip and ‘restack’…. Essentially a wide range of stuff that sits round the outside of their core newsletter product. The second thing to change is what I can best describe as an awakening. Users on the plattform - especially in the feed - seem to be talking mainly about how to win at substack, rather than pushing or promoting independent ideas. Now, this prominence might be due to the fact that whatever algorithm governs visibility on the platform is making this content more prominent rather than a shift in absolute volume, but it’s still interesting. And all very meta.
A long time ago, John V Willshire wrote about ‘fracking the social web’. Fracking is a useful analogy or frame, being as it is “an aggressive, invasive technique for extracting valuable raw materials out of hard to reach places”. In the context of Willsh’s post - the material being extracted was attention. Arguably the question of who is trying to frack attention is the most important one. As he pointed out - social platforms quickly woke up to the fact that ads were the way they could monetise their audiences and moved quickly to incorporate some form of message transmission style product. In doing so, they kind of stopped being social.
In it’s purest form, Substack is a means of distributing email. It represents a set of pipes or a plumbing system for getting information unschathed from point a to point b, from author to audience. But, it’s clearly decided - that in the hunt to attract, retain and ‘extract’ more consumer attention (and therefore revenue) it has to develop it’s product set and start behaving more like a platform - not just a means of distributing email, but a place where users spend time engaging and interacting with ideas, authors and each other. This normally signals a significant change (perhaps an IPO) and normally the product (in this case authors) don’t thrive. Just look at Meta’s user experience post IPO…. or even better, some of their very questionable business decisions.
In other news:
Conclusion of a pitch this week. Working with colleagues from outside the core team. Am fascinated by how other people, teams, organisations work. Great to see a new approach to new business. Altogether more labour intensive and resource intensive, but much more smooth, more quiet….
To the point about ‘how people work’ - we have published the second installment in a series of newsletters about how different people work. Phil Adams is next cab off the rank. It’s been a fascinating experiment and one I’m super interested in developing further.
Went to Barcelona for Monocle’s Quality of Life Conference. Stimulating, refreshing and lots of fun. We had a client on stage talking about the evolution of a british institution. Interested in media brands as clubs or communities. At a time when everyone is talking about world building, I wonder if we might already know where to look for the best examples. So much of the content is driven by taste. And in an algorithmic world, maybe this is a business critical muscle to develop. In the before times we might have just called this editorial values.
