Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 162)
This week : The great de-platforming, NFT's, Twitter Superfollows, Faceoff : Facebook/Australia, Uber in UK, Product tools, Apple and lobbying, IBM's history, and Influencer marketing, Coupang...
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you aren’t new then again) to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …
The great de-platforming debate …
Can social media companies de-platform? A look at historical cases where private actors have been said to have quasi government duties and responsibilities and as such cannot de-platform their users
After the “Great Deplatforming”: Reconsidering the Shape of the First Amendment
NFT’s. Enough said.
A couple of weekends ago I read this article on NFT’s and how Beeple (an artist) made $3.5M(yes Million) in one weekend and Packy M has done a fine job of tying this back to the creator/passion economy in Power to the Person. And right on track Dorsey NFT’s his first tweet! Which as of this writing is valued at a cool $2.5M
Twitter Superfollows:
Good read on Twitter’s “Patreon” play with “Super Follows”. I wrote about this prior to the announcement and I think it's an ideal play for Twitter. Competition is back in Social Networks. Remains to be seen how Twitter actually executes this! Casey Newton covers this amazingly well in Twitter pulls a Patreon
Killing news in Australia : Facebook a boon or menace?
Alex Kantrowitz writes about the bump that ABC News got in Australia after the recent news fiasco. This is very much a situation of lets see who blinks first, setting bad precedent, and in the long run I think weaning of Facebook for news would have been good. Anyway, Australia blinked and Facebook “cut a deal” to “restore news”
Great read from NFX on reinventing existing markets vs creating new ones.
Uber and UK
Some bad news for Uber in the UK as courts rule that workers are NOT contractors. Expect to see similar legislation pass in other countries. I wrote about how upsetting it was to see CA not pass Prop 22 in Edition 157
Speaking of the election I have to say I was mighty upset that Prop 22 was passed. All the gig economy companies Uber and Doordash included had way more money. Interesting data point here is that most of the Bay Area counties did not vote in favor of passing Prop 22.
The below graph is from The Times.
The other very interesting thing to note about this is that Uber and Lyft used their apps to promote to no end Prop 22. From Andrew Hawkins at the Verge:
But the gig companies’ digital reach and their use of in-app messages to reach voters was unique, setting it apart from ballot fights of the past. In the weeks leading up to the vote, Uber and Lyft served users with a pop-up message threatening longer wait times and higher prices if Prop 22 failed. They also claimed drivers would lose their livelihoods. In order to request a ride, users had to tap the “confirm” button on the message.
Uber and Lyft’s use of their apps to push a political message may be legal, but it still felt improper, said Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs for Justice, a nonprofit that opposed Prop 22. “If anyone else collected data from people for one reason, and then used it for another political purpose, they would be in a world of trouble,” she said.
The fact of the matter is that people (as users) do love gig economy companies such as Uber and Lyft. What is not to love, it’s a beautiful, brilliant product that serves a user every time.
Do Product Tools matter?
Ken Norton on product tools. Key point is the tools don't matter as much as good product practices. The mistake a lot of us make is we try to overfit the tools to our use cases which results in the tools managing the work instead of the tool enabling the work that needs to be done. While this is written for product management its applicable across the board!
Apple and lobbying
The recent Arizona bill with reference to preventing app store operators from forcing a developer based in the state to use a preferred payment system, putting up a significant roadblock to Apple and Google’s ability to collect $ on app store sales has advanced and this could be the beginning of the end as far as App Store commissions are concerned. Of course Apple and Google sent out a bunch of lobbyists to help their case but it looks like it may not work in their favor…Apparently Arizona was the second such threat, but they were able to threaten North Dakota. As Matt Stoller has written (and this is a great read)
More than that, he said, “a lot of it is just fear.” Apple implied, though did not state, that it might have to pull its app store out of North Dakota if the bill passed, much as Facebook punished Australia. Moreover, even before you get to an implied threat like that, many legislators were intimidated into thinking that North Dakota simply isn’t big enough for the fight. “Apple has deeper pockets than the state of North Dakota,” Davison told me. The entire North Dakota budget is less than $8 billion a year, while Apple spends roughly a billion dollars a year just on legal costs. And the threats aren’t idle; in all likelihood, Davison told me “Apple would just ignore the law and proceed until they get sued.” If Apple did so, then state legislators feared they would have to spend taxpayer money trying to bring Apple to heel, money that would otherwise go to schools or roads.
States of course need a LOT of money to fight and win such cases and ultimately it is not worth it for the state.
A history of IBM from Bryne Hobart. Fun read. When IBM Was The Center of Gravity
How to do influencer marketing the right way from Means of Creation. Good read on the three levels of influencer marketing. Key point is to tie the product, creator, and community are all intertwined and making the message organic by ceding control to the creator : The Creator Whisperer - Means of Creation
Deep dive into Coupang by the Generalist(South Korea’s Amazon)
Third party cookies are dying and Google is trying to be at the forefront of the replacement with Privacy Sandbox. One of the ideas is something called FLoC. FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.
Square buys Tidal
I mean I am still scratching my head. Why would Square buy Tidal? Protocol makes a case for why this might be a good idea. I mean it could play a part in the creator/passion economy . As the article states:
Square can offer valuable services to musicians and artists in what has become a more complex entertainment market, and let them avoid "exploitation and bad treatment" from the major labels, he said.
I am still extremely skeptical to be honest .. but time will tell.
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