Unauthoritative Pronouncements

This is not a light-hearted episode. It is, however, a heartfelt one. I have an enormous amount of respect for these three.

No, I’m not referring to that time that James T. Kirk asked an industrial computer an impossible question. I’m talking about how things everyone is interested in, aren’t generating sustainable income.

This morning, Twitter started to circulate stories about the staff of Macworld being laid off. I read Jason Snell’s heartfelt post about his reasons for leaving his position, as well as the optimism he has for making things again.

Jason Snell was my metaphorical white whale. I think he’s the cat’s pajamas, the bee’s knees — that’s a lot of conflicting animals, but bear with me — He’s a real standup gent. He’s also been professionally successful in a geeky business doing geeky stuff. He’s hobnobbed with all sorts of Apple people that I would just gawk at, mouth agape. He’s a real pro, through and through. What I admire most of all, is his side project, The Incomparable. What started as a nerdy, panel discussion of rotating topics has turned in to a bit of a nerdy empire. He obviously draws great satisfaction from creating things for audiences.

I used to love buying Macworld issues. I was not a subscriber, but I would spend a few bucks, when I could, to read Mac magazines (I also read MacUser before it was acquired by Macworld, but honestly I couldn’t mentally distinguish specific articles from one or the other right now). This was, of course, during the dark times at Apple when they weren’t doing too well. You would not know that from the issues. They contained delightful spreads about upcoming projects. Glossy photos of Apple’s hardware (which they made look interesting, even though they were mostly reused cases) with artfully placed copy. Everything about it was a real, honest-to-goodness experience. How can you make an unimaginative product name like, “603e” sound interesting? They did! There were huge comparisons of all the Mac clones (they were mostly identical in performance). I vividly recall an image of a prototype Apple notebook that had a detachable screen (never shipped) as well as a special Japanese Powerbook that never shipped to the US. I lusted after these amazing things. That magazine is where I first saw Rhapsody, and read about Yellow Box and Blue Box. There was so much there, and it was all dressed to the nines, despite Apple teetering on the edge of oblivion.

However, Macworld, like almost every publication that existed, botched the internet. (Jason Snell talks a little about urging MacUser, and Macworld, to take the internet seriously in an interview with Anže Tomić.) I moved away from Macworld. Their monthly issues were still beautiful, but the information was often not current. When things around Apple changed quickly, the news lagged behind — something you wouldn’t notice in the 90s.

I started to go back to Macworld after I started listening to Jason’s creative outlet, The Incomparable, since many panelists were writers, editors, and contributors to the stories on the site. They revised their site to be less-bad, and I often refer to it for content that you don’t find on those “BREAKING! EXCLUSIVE!”, Betteridge’s-Law-breaking, feeding troughs of “Sources close to”, triple-paraphrased tech sites. Serenity Caldwell wrote great stuff about ebooks, because she was in charge of making them for Macworld. Lex Friedman (who left to go in to podcasting ad sales) has in-depth articles on things you don’t think you need to know, like managing your Gmail through Fluid app instances. It’s all really great, really geeky stuff, and not eHow stuff. Philip Michaels even made fun of this crazy, media world in his Macworld Pundit Showdown series. It’s not all news, it’s life, it’s meta.

It is strange that while Apple has risen to a level that surpassed where it was in the 80s, and interest in Apple has increased to match that, the old media outlets that covered Apple in the 90s declined. Layoffs, and turning around and publishing the web items as next month’s issue, have done very little to balance the books for Macworld. It’s a very cruel irony that the fortunes of these people, and this company, are moving in a direction opposite to the products they cover.

As someone that has gone through layoffs, I know that hearing things like, “good luck”, and “land on your feet” can sound kind of hollow, but it’s often the only thing we can think to say to one another^1. It’s certainly what I said to the Macworld people I follow on Twitter. I wasn’t sure what else to say, even though I’ve been on the receiving end. (While there are more VFX shots in films than there ever have been, almost all the work in California left with our water.)

From Jason’s interview with Anže around 47 minutes in:

There was a time when I thought that the media companies in the future would be all sales people, and that the editors would just all be fired, and that they would have freelancers, you know, computers writing things, and databases — and, and my job would be over, and it would just be the sales people. They would rule the Earth. But for the last five or ten years, I’ve been thinking: no, the future of the media is that the sales people are all gonna disappear, and it’s just gonna be the editors and writers because they make the thing that has value. And Google, and it’s ilk, are going to completely invalidate all the ways that things get sold. That’s probably extreme, but some of that is happening. It is — It is really hard to use those old sales approaches in a world where there are ad networks, and ad exchanges, and Google out there to do this stuff. So that will be interesting to see. What is the right model for a media company? Is it a bunch of single people? Is it a collective of, like, five writers? Or is there room for a fifty, or a hundred person company with sales people, marketing people, and an editorial staff, and some staff writers, and some freelancers? That’s what we are, and I don’t know if that’s a shape that will fit in the landscape in five years. I honestly don’t know, it might. But it might be that what you really want is a staff of five or ten editors, and writers, and then a couple business people, and then an ad network. I really don’t know what the economics are going to be like.

Jason goes on to say that the middle-ground has dried up. That small places can get by, because they’re small, and big places can get by because they are eyeball/content mills. The stuff between those extremes is not making money. Paywalls scare people away, requiring larger fees, there need to be huge ads, or creepy advertorials, etc. Someone needs to pay for the stuff, and it’s not the traditional advertising sales model of “We’ll print X of these.” There are rumblings around Kickstarter, and Patreon, but they’re not fully tested, and Patreon can often be about financing someone that has a proven track record. People that seek funding often turn to swag, like shirts, and mugs, to gather money. It seems dubious, and unsustainable, to encourage people to make things for free, for a living, until they make money (cough). It’s also unstable. There need to be rainy-day funds, there needs to be capital. Dramatic ups and downs are no way for people to live. Project-based freelancing, without benefits, is not comfortable for many humans over the age of 30. Retirement benefits sound silly, when you’re young, because it feels like it’s a long way off. It’s not.

Jason says we can’t all be Daring Fireball, surely no one is going to read 18 Daring Fireballs. Text has a very low barrier to entry (hi) but that is no guarantee it’s any good (I need an editor!) or that it will satisfy the specific, steady intervals people want writing released in.

The written word is definitely still a part of our society, despite print’s ever-demising demise. People still lie in bed, scrolling through text, sit at work (totally on a break!) reading news, or enjoy their commutes with all the things they want to catch up on. The former Macworld writers, and editors, are still capable of offering that crucial service they offered before. Hopefully, they are satisfied by whatever options presented, or the options they make for themselves.

Jason’s desire to create for audiences rings true to me. Even when I work as an artist, I don’t always feel artistic. Silly things that can fulfill me in ways that I don’t always get from working on movies. That’s not to say that I hate movies, or that the writers hate writing, or the editors hate editing — but when the industry you are in is crumbling, while the industry that benefits from your work is excelling, it can make you bummed about your work, and your career. (I should have gone to business school, then I could finally art-direct movies.)

^1: I hope no one said that, “When God closes a door, he opens a window” line because that is just the worst. “This could be a good thing for you.” Is my runner-up.

Stephen Hackett, of 512pixels.net and Relay FM fame, was kind enough to be a guest on our silly podcast. He’s a former Apple Genius, and has a love for all things Apple. ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’ seemed like a natural fit. We love to have guests on that are excited, and passionate about the movie they want to talk about. (Casey Liss and ‘Collateral’, and Myke Hurley and ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. The World’.) Unfortunately, the movie wasn’t quite as we remembered it.

I still have a certain fondness for it, if only because it reminds me of how I felt about Apple at the time I watched the TV movie in 1999. Even the unintentionally comedic moments in the scene are still interesting.

For weeks, Apple teased a special event for the morning of September 9th. Instead of a usual invitation, there was a countdown clock. Apple even redirected their main site to the countdown clock. This was going to be so big. Everyone should pay attention to this. Apple would even be running their own liveblog of the event, in addition to streaming video. They were planning on controlling the message on this incredibly important event. They didn’t want this news to filter down through the press, being shaped by the press’ inevitable cynicism of Apple events.

Unfortunately, everything fell apart. The live streaming was in a constant state of skipping through time, freezing, or flat-out denying access. Even when the live stream was working, their audio was all over the place. In the pre-show, they broadcast music over other music. In the event, they broadcast a translator’s feed over the presenter’s talking, at the same volume. This was, unequivocally, a disaster for managing the story they wanted to tell to customers.

I feel terrible for the people trying to manage the event. There’s no, “give me an hour” on a live show. There’s not the chance to come back and do this tomorrow. There’s a whole auditorium full of press. While I do feel bad, this is hardly the first time this has happened. This was, however, the most severe. It’s worse for Apple than it is for me, here on my couch. This failure means they are not getting what they want from their event — control.

Pick an iPhone — Any iPhone

This was not surprising to anyone paying attention to the rumors, and the conjecture. Even though I did not seek any leaked photos, sites still posted them to Twitter and I saw them. We got the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. They are both larger phones than the preceding iPhones. Last year’s iPhone 5s and 5c will stick around — presumably for people that would like cheaper phones, or smaller phones. People that want the latest-and-greatest, in a small package, are at a distinct disadvantage. I do question how big of a deal this will be.

My identity has not been tied to the things I buy for many years. I’ll buy Guava Goddess Kombucha, and fancy wines, or I’ll buy a grouper sandwich in a Florida dive with a Yuengling. It doesn’t say anything about me. iPhones are just things, there’s such an abundance of similar things that it hardly matters. Sure, when I was a kid, and my mom bought off-brand stuff I would be embarrassed, but there are larger concerns than Apple not specifically crafting an iPhone around what I think I want. Big ones, small ones, whatever. I keep an open mind, because I’m a generous soul.

Looking at the lineup, and my antique iPhone 4, I’m leaning towards the iPhone 6. It will be a huge change for me, but I have the cargo shorts to pull it off. (No really, cargo shorts are amazing. Don’t read this, Matt Alexander.)

The Plus is enticing to me because “optical image stabilization” sounds like a great thing to have. Then I thought about that for 5 seconds and remembered that it’s so tiny, it’s probably not the most effective optical image stabilization there is.

The fitness features honestly mean nothing to me. I know there are people that measure runs, and that this (like all bits-o-fitness) is advertised as something to motivate me. Tim underestimates my laziness. They are theoretically neat, but feel like they’d be more at home on a Samsung phone than an Apple one.

Pay Apple

The tech press got themselves in to a lather over NFC payments again. They do this, from time to time, but this event managed to actually pull off their prediction.

They did a bungling, late-night infomercial to lead in to this and it drove me up the wall. Not a single female presented in this event, but they made sure to show overstuffed purses. “Does this happen to you?” BOING! Cards everywhere.

I sincerely question the implementation of this service. From the demonstration, all you have to do is take a photo of a card. This seems… not very secure to me. Perhaps credit card companies are also verifying that the photographed card is being used on a phone that has the phone number of the cardholder on file? I’m not entirely sure. It does make me wary. They also show that it’s linked in to Passbook. I’ve used Passbook, and it’s kind of a mess. Instead of people looking for cards in their overstuffed purses, they’ll be looking for them by swiping around on a glass slab that has no tactile indications of what you’re touching. Then scanning their fingerprints with the Touch ID scanner, which sometimes gets fingerprints wrong. I can’t wait until I’m in line behind someone that’s not ready with the card they want pulled up on screen. It’ll be like being behind someone with a personal check.

The really strange thing is when they made a big deal about how secure this was, and then they showed an Apple Watch being able to make purchases. That doesn’t have a fingerprint scanner. Is it just authorized to work as long as it’s in proximity to your phone? Then someone would just need to take your phone and your watch. Do you have to use Touch ID every so often to confirm the watch and phone are still in your possession? Because then it kind of defeats the purpose of the watch being a payment method.

There are just a lot of questions. I am not coming down against it, but I do want to see how this works for people in real life. When Passbook was introduced, many people wrote that it was Apple’s answer to NFC. That the NFC sensors didn’t exist, so it just made more sense to use scanned codes. Who really uses Passbook? I am at a loss to think of anyone in my life, but perhaps there’s a very large, dedicated community of users I’m unaware of.

Status Symbol

The Apple Watch, a long-rumored device, finally made its big debut today. People loved it, and people hated it. People are the worst. It does things that are, in a purely technical sense, amazing. However, it does a lot of really weird stuff that seems totally outside the mandate of a teeny-tiny device for my wrist.

I am not sure where the Apple Watch is aimed. It includes a dizzying list of features that would entice any Android smart watch owner to consider it. It requires an iPhone, of course. It’s $350, which is more expensive than many entry-level, on-contract iPhones, but it is a watch.

If you’re a bro with a G-Shock, or hipster with a Seiko, it might seem exorbitant to charge this — a king’s ransom — for that kind of a watch. For those that love Automatic Swiss watches, this is a paltry sum. However, the lovers of those Automatic Swiss watches do not want features, they want exclusive, meticulously crafted jewels. The G-Shock owners want those features, and they don’t care about rubber, plastic, or mass-market, quartz timekeeping.

It is very peculiar that Apple chose to walk the line between the two. There are fussy materials, but not the craftsmanship. It’s cheap as dirt compared to Tissot, but it’s too expensive for Timex. It’s G-Shockingly ugly, and bulbous, but it’s glossy and sleek. Who is this for?

I had known before the event that the device would not appeal to me because I don’t wear any watch at all. I am in the camp that feels like cellphones cover all of my timekeeping needs. I’ve never felt like my notifications are too far away, or unreachable (cargo shorts) so it seemed unlikely Apple would have invented something that would sway me towards wearing a watch. That’s just an honest perspective, and not a judgment.

This is actually a huge relief to me. There is no super-special feature here that I would feel locked out of. No exclusive ability that would make me ashamed. Just a “smart watch”. I will be glad to see it find a home with other people, and see those people come up with creative, and useful ways to explore what a wrist device can do, but I’ll catch up to them later if I feel like it.

Cloudy Horizons

Today’s event did nothing to allay concerns about Apple’s cloud infrastructure. They can’t organize and host their own events reliably, like Google can, they still have data plans that don’t seem to really keep pace with their competition. Their headline feature from WWDC, Continuity, was removed from betas weeks ago.

Todays event was about devices, but I was never really concerned about devices. There would be a new iPhone. There would be stuff for people to buy. Where’s the focus on what connects these things?

Apple, don’t be scared of cloud stuff, or it will be a bigger threat than an unannounced watch. Get the services right Apple, everyone else is. Understand it. Key in the sequence, Tim.

Update: Hours after this post went up, and Jeff Atwood renamed his fork of Markdown to “Common Markdown”. All the criticism below is still 100% valid. They’re making a project that suits their own needs, but using a (new) name to suggest some level of primacy over other Markdown dialects, and Markdown itself.

Markdown was made by John Gruber, and it’s a great way to turn easy-to-read text in to unreadable HTML. It’s a limited set of syntax for things, that can be expanded on. It’s become wildly popular, particular for blogging, or for web sites that have comment systems. It’s even influenced Fountain, a similar specification for writing heavily formatted screenplays with just plain text.

Some people have to write code that supports processing Markdown text in to HTML. Many people hewed closely to what the original tool generated, which makes sense. Then people ran in to cases that weren’t precisely explained, or areas where the tool didn’t have what someone wanted. This means that sometimes things will produce different HTML code, but even that doesn’t always look wrong in the browser. More often than not, people wanted to add on features.

People called their Markdown implementations something clever. Like “GitHub Flavored Markdown” or “Python Markdown” or “Kramdown” or whatever. So here you have a ton of little tools that do slightly different things — either intentionally or unintentionally.

This drives some people nuts because they want there to be a proper way. They want the correct way. That’s cute, because the same people that want a correct version to refer to, and test against, are the same people that make their own syntax features.

Here, let this guy lacking self-awareness explain how he oversaw two different Markdown implementations:

We really struggled with this at Discourse, which is also based on Markdown, but an even more complex dialect than the one we built at Stack Overflow. In Discourse, you can mix three forms of markup interchangeably:

• Markdown
• HTML (safe subset)
• BBCode (subset)

If there was a standard, Jeff would still have ignored the standard if it didn’t fit the products he made. The flexibility to make your own dialect trumps adhering to anything. This is the point of every Markdown service.

Jeff highlights John MacFarlane, creator of PanDoc, and a tool John made called Babelmark. The tool lets a person compare the code generated by the default behavior of a variety of Markdown tools. Example. This is neat, and clearly, you can see that the code is different. If you flip over to the preview, you’ll see there’s not much visual difference here.

I know, horror of horrors, it’s not conforming to one, specific thing that can be tested and verified. Pass or fail. That would be neat and tidy, wouldn’t it? It ignores reality though.

In the “Standard Markdown” spec, they include GitHub Flavored Markdown’s “fenced code blocks”. Oh! Well, would you look at that! It’s a feature that serves the needs of one of the “Standard Markdown” contributors. It has nothing to do with the original specification of Markdown. This isn’t solely about removing ambiguity, of course, it’s about making the Markdown someone wants in to the correct Markdown.

Where are the tables? Tables are not a “core feature” like GitHub fenced code blocks. Where’s ids for headers? No one needed it, but Jeff agrees about maybe putting it in. Where’s the metadata storage? Guess no one needed metadata storage. Maybe they’ll come later on, and we’ll have “Standard Markdown 2.0 Compliant” badges we can adorn our blogs with. Maybe we can put a special header in our text files that says what the human-readable text should be processed with? You know, like “!#/usr/bin/StandardMarkdown/Official/2.0.1.a/” Something easy on the eyes.

This blog, which is really simple, and dumb, uses Python Markdown. It offers a series of extensions that can be enabled, disabled, and configured to suit my needs. I use metadata to store things like the title, and publish date. I use a table of contents package to create anchors for the headings. None of this stuff is supported by Markdown or “Standard Markdown”, and Python Markdown doesn’t even do it out-of-the-box.

Byword is my writing app of choice. It includes certain visual cues for Markdown elements based on the popular MultiMarkdown (MMD) syntax. I don’t get visual hinting for all of the elements I write that Python Markdown will convert. That’s fine. It’s great that neither strictly adhere to Gruber’s original Markdown. There’s enough here to make this all work smoothly, and I’m not surprised by the outcome very often. The alternative is that I have a rigidly enforced system that does not do what I want it to do.

Like Stack Exchange, Discourse, or GitHub, we all have needs. This is here to make things easier for us. If we have to have some cockamamy specification laid down that all must yield to, then I don’t find it appealing. Is the “Standard Markdown” team going to allow all these customizations? They fly in the face of what they deem correct. Will every customization need vetting and approval through some Discourse board where I’ll have very little sway?

I Can’t, With That Name

A petty, vainglorious power-grab of a name. What’s in a name? That which we call a Fork, by any other name would be just as forky.

1. Standard - This is like telling everyone you’re cool. “Hi everyone, I’m Cool Joe! Come hang out with me!” Congratulations on jinxing yourself? The iPhone is not called “Standard Phone”. Also, as I’ve established above, this is only standard in name only. A few guys made this in secret to scratch their own itch.
2. Markdown - Lots of things use “Markdown” as part of the name of their implementation of Markdown. The Python library I’m using does this. It’s usually not paired with “Standard”, “Official”, “One and Only”, or “Legal” to imply it holds some special place. This is, after-all, a fork.

This is about legitimizing their fork over all the others. Not just another fork here, this one is named “Standard Markdown”!

For someone that says he loves Markdown, Jeff doesn’t seem to understand anything about why it is popular. Or why attempts to rein in the wild sprawl are bound to fail.

Welcome, once again, to the all-podcasting all-the-time blog! This one is Gorn-free. It is in an outline format, followed by self-deprecating stuff! Isn’t that fun!

(Ragtime music)

1. All y’all know Casey is Southern.
2. All y’all know Casey’s the internet’s favo(u)rite.
3. Followup editing noise.
4. Tagging, and checking-in, are controversial because it can provide access to you in a way that varies from creepy, to overly-familiar based on who has access to that data now, or in the future.
   1. Hypothetical: Casey has a stalker — Definitely not. Who would listen to every episode? And then blog about it? And tweet?
      1. (Looks away)
      2. (Loosens collar)
      3. (Clears throat)
      4. (Continues outlining)
   2. Hypothetical: Someone sees a tweet sent directly to someone else, and decides they should show up anyway.
   3. Hypothetical: Same scenario, but the person is already at the same location you are.
   4. Hypothetical: What if your friend, ‘Joe Smith’ shows up at the bar and even though he’s your friend, he’s not the friend you want there.
5. Identity: What do you like to be known for?
   1. Casey mentions his wife, and she identifies as a teacher, and has since college.
   2. Myke identifies as a podcaster. Then he says other stuff.
      1. Myke is a “marketeer”, and Casey says it sounds like a Disney property. I think it sounds like a different Disney property. Myke does not identify as any of those things.
         1. Friendship sacrifice is here, under identity. I only took AP Psychology, so I’m not qualified to speculate about why that is. Seems like it’s related to friends in meat-space not understanding his identity as a podcaster.
         2. Online friends are a component of Myke’s identity.
            1. Being with those internet friends, in person, cements a relationship.
            2. Myke needs human interaction, still, and would go to a co-working space rather than sit in his room.
   3. Casey has a dual identity.
      1. A J.O.B. job that used to define him more.
         1. It doesn’t satisfy him as much as it used to, but it is still a part of him.
      2. His internet life, twitter, internet friends, podcasting, that he’s getting more from these days.
         1. This is why Casey is so obsessed with Twitter.
            1. Healthy.
               1. Myke and Stephen are good.
            2. Unhealthy.
               1. Ignoring Erin, or real-life friends.
6. Internet followers.
   1. Myke.
      1. Ego: Loves seeing follower count go up, and just looks at it every now and then.
      2. Business: Seeing people from companies, sponsors, that follow.
   2. Casey.
      1. Affliction (no, not that one) — White Whale Syndrome.
         1. You really want to be followed by someone, and then they do follow you, and you feel great. It is an affirmation that you exist, and that they’re at least interested in you.
         2. “Why doesn’t John Smith follow me? We’ve exchange tweets?” — What does Casey have against the Smith family? Jeeze!
         3. Once you get that follow, then you just have someone else you want to follow you.
         4. Like a crush, or not being picked for sports, or really wanted to be friends with the cool kid at school.
         5. Everyone, to some degree, gets some amount of their identity from twitter followers. Even the amount, and wanting more than the amount they currently have, defines part of them (I like how the first number Casey throws out is 1,000.) because they want what they can’t have.
7. Online, or Offline, are you the same person?
   1. Casey.
      1. Hesitates on tweeting every little thing he might otherwise say. He’ll coarsely filter his thoughts.
   2. Myke
      1. Cursing.
         1. Joe Steel, in the chatroom, mentions Myke curses in the livestream on occasion. (This was the minute I tuned in. I probably shouldn’t have opened my mouth. Why did I open my dumb mouth?! Joe’s identity is opening his dumb mouth.)
         2. Myke can filter cursing because of his parents, and he tries to keep his podcasts clean, but swears often in real life.

I totally understand the followers stuff. I would never have said it if they didn’t mention it first, because honestly, I’m worried it makes me sound super self-absorbed — which, uh, I am.

There’s something I’d add to the ‘White Whale Syndrome’ and that’s shame. I’m really good at adding shame! What if you get what you want, and you feel like you didn’t deserve it, or you’re concerned about them seeing something unflattering about you? I guess that’s more ‘Monkey’s Paw’ Syndrome? Jason Snell picked me for the kickball team — I can’t disappoint Jason Snell! I was fine disappointing the rest of you. (Wink.)

In that ‘Launch Anxiety’ post, I mentioned freaking out about Myke’s retweet, and the pressure of having someone following you. Sure enough, Myke retweeted my blog post about how much his retweet freaked me out and Jason Snell followed me. I had thought it would be cool if Jason Snell ever followed me, like Casey mentions in Analog(ue) #3, but it’s actually kind of intimidating. I’ve already managed to disappoint him by not liking a Doctor Who episode. Good job, Joe.

It’s not even really about internet-famous people, there’s an aggregate pressure from all the followers. Myke and Casey talked about the follower count numbers increasing, and that’s an encouragement. That they weren’t concerned about the number decreasing — neither am I. What I am concerned about is that the higher the number gets, the more likely I am to be a jerk to someone. To not reply to a tweet about Defocused in the way they wanted. After all, I want to be funny, so doesn’t everyone contacting me want to be funny too? Don’t they, sometimes, want me to follow them back? God, what if I’m someone else’s ‘White Whale’? Like in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion?!

The part that’s far more embarrassing is that I tuned in to Analog(ue)’s livestream late, at the very tail end. I joked that they could start the episode over again, but I shouldn’t have because it immediately seemed obnoxious to me, and doubly so after listening to the entire podcast. After their recording, Casey and Myke kept the livestream going and complimented Dan Sturm and me. It was extremely flattering and extremely uncomfortable. Just like with the white whale syndrome, of getting that Jason Snell twitter-follow, I got a barrage of compliments from two people I respect, and I immediately felt like I didn’t deserve it, and that they should not have said anything so nice to me. On the one hand, I knew it wasn’t part of the episode, but on the other hand, it still felt like I was getting attention I wanted, but didn’t deserve to have. (Casey was extremely complimentary.)

I used to think that my career defined me, much like Casey, but I want to be liked, and that’s never happening with my career, so it seems to hinge on my commentary. That sounds kind of dull, right? I am not going to start a podcasting empire, and I’m not going to be on the Biggest Podcast Ev4r, but I want to create lots of little things. Most of this identity — this personal brand — is trying to be entertaining with my observations. Not a comedian, but entertaining, hopefully. If I assert a little ego here, I’d say I’ve managed to do that, to a degree. I’m not wildly popular, but I obviously have more people interested in listening to me, and reading me, than I had a year ago. There is a certain measure of success there. But if they’re interested in my observations, than that’s sort of like being interested in a mirror. In holding a mirror up to a podcast episode, a book, or a movie. I am not the true source of what’s interesting, and I don’t think I have that capacity.

The Incomparable started a new initiative to discuss the best, and worst, of Star Trek in a series of episodes. It is required listening for this post. I’ll pretend that I had a turn in the draft roundtable discussion after Brianna Wu, Scott McNulty, Tony Sindelar, and Jason Snell:

Best Episodes of Star Trek (First Pick)

• Brianna: VOY - ‘Course: Oblivion’
• Scott: DS9 - ‘Duet’
• Tony: TNG - ‘Chain of Command (Part 2)’
• David: DS9 - ‘The Visitor’ (Really David, the writer, you picked an episode about a writer? 😉)
• Jason: TNG - ‘Darmok’

My pick is ‘Cause and Effect’ from TNG. This is pure Star Trek all the way through. There’s a mysterious puzzle to solve, with details bleeding over from previous iterations in the loop they’re all stuck in. Also, the Enterprise blows up (a lot), which is always interesting.

Worst Episodes of Star Trek (First Pick)

• Brianna: TOS - ‘Spock’s Brain’
• Scott: VOY - ‘Phage’
• Tony: TOS - ‘The Empath’
• David: TOS - ‘Turnabout Intruder’
• Jason: TNG - ‘Code of Honor’

I’m going to side with the ‘offensive’ critics over the ‘organ stealing’ side. The episode that precedes ‘Cause and Effect’ — ‘The Outcast’ that I didn’t like as a kid. I saw it, and thought the aliens were idiots, and the conflict in the episode made no sense. It wasn’t until years later that I learned this episode was supposed to be their episode on sexual orientation — their gay episode. It’s really a very weak gender identity episode, which is not the same thing. They were scared of how their audience might react to gay characters. The character of Soren is tragic, but the tragedy is undermined throughout the episode by the decisions of the show’s producers. Even making her brainwashing a flawless success is dumb because then it implies that reeducation treatments are good, instead of, you know, horrible.

When David Gerrold (a gay writer on TOS, TAS, and TNG) came forward with his story that was an allegory for AIDS, the producers didn’t want to do it because it featured two guys in a relationship. Eew, gross, icky. It was rewritten by another writer, to remove the gay characters (still wasn’t produced), and Gerrold left.

Questions about sexuality on Star Trek kept getting asked, and five years later, Rick Berman went with ‘The Outcast’ to be the episode that would explore the issues, but it was about male and female gender relationships, not about same-sex relationships. This episode with an androgynous race that condemns gender is pretty much the opposite of what they should have been doing. They also cast the character that Riker kisses with a female actress, playing a character that identifies as female and seeks a male, which really is not all that unusual. Rick Berman was worried the audience would find two men kissing “unpalatable”.

There have been several episodes featuring women with feelings for other women, but not a single one about men. The later series (DS9, Voyager and Enterprise) even ran while Will and Grace was on the air and the best they could do was hedge with Trill gender swaps and a non-same-sex allegory about AIDS with forced mind-melds. JJ-Trek is in the unfortunate position of having their main characters shipped to them from the 60s, so it’s unlikely anything progressive will happen now unless they add characters.

‘The Outcast’ - The least-progressive progressive episode ever.

Best Episodes of Star Trek (Second Pick)

• Brianna: TNG - ‘Best of Both Worlds (Part One)’
• Scott: DS9 - ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’
• Tony: DS9 - ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ (Damn it, Tony!)
• David: ENT - ‘In a Mirror Darkly’
• Jason: TOS - ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’

‘Sacrifice of Angels’ is the second half of a Dominion War episode from DS9. Things had been going very badly for the Federation, for many episodes, and this is where things turn around. This is like Return of the Jedi only the Ferengi are less annoying than the Ewoks. The Dominion is convinced that they have the upper hand, and it’s all lost. All of it. Gul Dukat’s own daughter, the daughter he sacrificed his career for, reveals her treachery and she’s fatally shot by Damar. Gul Dukat collapses. Marc Alaimo is so incredibly fantastic in this episode.

“I forgive you too.” - Broken Dukat handing Sisko the baseball that Sisko left when the station was taken.

Worst Episodes of Star Trek (Second Pick)

• Brianna: VOY - ‘Threshold’
• Scott: TNG - ‘Conspiracy’
• Tony: DS9 - ‘Move Along Home’
• David: TNG - ‘The Outrageous Okona’
• Jason: ENT - ‘These are the Voyages’

Jason stole my pick, drat. My backup is ‘Profit and Lace’ from DS9. In DS9’s defense, they can’t all be winners, but WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! The episode was meant to be a farce, but it’s so, so, so ill conceived. I love wacky, comedic episodes of Star Trek — like Voyager’s ‘Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy’, or ‘Message in a Bottle’ — but this is just atrocious.

Best Characters of Star Trek

• Brianna: Seven of Nine
• Scott: Reginald Broccoli Barclay
• Tony: Elim Garak
• David: Jean-Luc Picard
• Jason: James Tiberius Kirk

It’s a toss up between Spock and Data, but I’m going with Data. He has a very unique struggle, wanting to experience emotion, and wanting to be loved and respected. When I was a kid, I really identified with the episode ‘Hero Worship’ because I really looked up to a character like Data and see myself in the role of Timothy Vico. (Spoiler Alert! This episode is not as a good as I remember it being! UGH!)

He’s been on trial for his rights as person or appliance (conflicts that The Doctor of Voyager experienced), and his right to procreate.

Worst Characters of Star Trek

• Brianna: Neelix
• Scott: Harry Kim
• Tony: Nog
• David: Ezri Dax
• Jason: Q

Travis Mayweather makes me sad. Tell me something about Travis. He’s a really good pilot, right? OK, well that’s good, because he is a pilot. Kind of important to be good at piloting ships when you pilot ships for a living. He’s a main character on Star Trek: Enterprise and he does… uh… and his arc over the series is… uh… Wasn’t there something about parents and freighters? Or something? Or that xenophobic reporter girlfriend that tricked him?

Hoshi and Malcolm are both primarily defined by their job on the ship, to the exclusion of almost everything else. They’re still more fleshed out than Travis.

What a total disappointment. Like all of the Enterprise characters, the Mirror Universe version of Travis was far more interesting and we barely saw that one. He’s by far the least developed member of the main cast of the show. Enterprise really focused a lot on Archer, T’Pol, and Trip, to the unfortunate exclusion of all of the other characters.

Welcome, once again, to my Casey Liss and Myke Hurley fan club. While Casey and I were scheduled to be on John Chidgey’s podcast, we made arrangements for him to appear on Defocused. Since we try to anchor the podcast with a movie to discuss, we asked Casey to pick one. He selected Collateral, which I had never seen before (I typically avoid Tom Cruise movies). It’s a great movie, and everyone should go check it out if they haven’t already. I really appreciate Casey’s selection for the show, and I hope others do as well.

You’re not going to miss anything if you’re not completely caught up on Defocused. Dan and I are terrible people. I tease Casey about Firefly on Twitter, and then I watched all the episodes. There, all caught up.

After listening back, there were a few nits I neglected to pick on the show:

• The helicopter shots. So many aerial helicopter shots. They don’t really serve as good establishing shots, because they don’t have much to do with where characters are, or are going. They’re kind of night-shot filler.
• If you’re watching the very end of the movie, there is some distracting greenscreen work that detracts from the acting. It’s a real shame.
• The way the police are dressed, and their hair, is … uh … something.

Everyone, look under your seats, you all have favorites! I have talked about my opinion on favoriting things in the past, but to quickly summarize: I favorite for a variety of reasons, but I favorite things often. Their use can impart something to the conversation you’re having in a way text would not, and they can also be simple bookmarks.

Since a favorite alone can be used as a form of communication, it is important to know when one has received a favorite. Which means notifications need to be enabled for them. However, if you use Tweetbot, those notifications are not sticky, they go away as soon as they pop up in the app. If you want to know what happened, you need to open the official Twitter app, or the Twitter website, and look at the “Notifications” section. This is why I juggle two apps, back and forth. I hate the regular Twitter app’s timeline, but I need the context of what was favorited to steer a conversation, or to know that a conversation ended amicably. People often favorite the last tweet in a conversation as a form of punctuation, that they enjoyed the conversation, but it’s over for right now.

None of this mattered at all until this week when Twitter changed how they displayed the timeline in the official apps. Now, my promiscuous picks, pokes, and polite nods are going to appear, at random, in the timelines of random people that follow me on Twitter. These out-of-context artifacts will just hang there, taking up about 1/4 of someone’s visible timeline on a mobile device and leave them scratching their heads. Attempt to follow the conversation from one of those tweets and you’ll be totally lost. Some sarcastic interchange might appear to be closely-held beliefs without proper context. Will people just see self-contained gems of 140 character insight? Only tweets with links to news, or products?

Also troubling, are two other injected types: ‘[One of your followers] follows’ and ‘From Twitter’. The ‘follows’ one might be familiar to anyone that’s accidentally looked at Twitter’s ‘Discover’ feed, only now they’ve seen fit to migrate it to the main feed. You get a popular, recent tweet from that ‘follow’ presented to you. These have so far included things like Buzzfeed: “John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s #IceBucketChallenge is why they are the best couple ever [buzzfeed pageview metric link]” and Cory Doctrow “Child arrested after writing story about shooting a dinosaur [boingboing]”. It offends me, not because I find Buzzfeed’s desire to share cynical, or BoingBoing’s news old, but because some algorithm has decided that these things suit me. That these are the things that I will click on, the content I will consume. It makes me want to shout, “YOU DON’T KNOW ME!” But, in a way, they do know some of me. They see my actions and try to infer meaning from them, which is not the same as understanding me — yet. I’m sure they will get better at it, which also disturbs me.

The same goes for ‘From Twitter’ only it’s using some mechanism that makes no sense to me. I’ve only ever seen one of these, and it was for someone I do not follow, and I don’t think anyone I follow, follows them. There is one connection, Buzzfeed, so maybe it’s topical? “Meet AdDetector – the browser plug-in that labels native advertising with a huge red [sic] banner [Wall Street Journal pageview metric link]” The algorithm is so cynical, and inept, that it selected a story about the offensive injection of reading material people do not want to inject in to my timeline.

The ‘Discover’ tab is crap for this very reason. It is a company highlighting things that align with how they would like me to use their product. Twitter’s appeal, for me, has been in my ability to select who, and what, I see. It was clear before, you followed someone, you saw their tweets. You followed two people that talked to each other, you saw their conversations. You’d only see tweets from people you did not follow when they were retweeted.

Twitter Hates Completionists

Twitter wants to control what I see. When I’m out of tweets to read, it wants to pick one for me. When I’m scrolling through, it wants to put something that is closely aligned with its interests in the list. They want me to amplify the voices of the popular so they stay popular and engaged with the service — especially publications, and large blogs, that tweet frequently.

A real peril is that when I start from where I last read twitter, I will read everything, as it unfolded. I will see the first news post instead of a promoted one. I will see the first time something funny was said, instead of the one that has been selected for popular reinforcement. Most importantly, I will read everything, and stop using the service until later, because I know Tweetbot won’t lose my place.

Tweetbot isn’t going to exist forever, neither will any of the other clients. Their functionality is hamstrung, and their profitability is constrained. Where’s the update to Tweetbot for iPad? Why am I still using an iOS 6 app on the eve of iOS 8’s launch if for no other reason than it’s not in the developer’s interests to release it? Twitter would like it very much if Tweetbot went away.

The worst thing in the world, from Twitter’s perspective, is for me to read only what I want to read. To see only what I want to see. What I want does not make them any money. What I want is at their expense.

Twitter, as it existed for its first few years, was not profitable. It needs to be profitable. Services can’t run on adoration and appreciation, they do need money. Investors want a return on their investment greater than just breaking even.

Marco Arment, John Siracusa, and Casey Liss talk about this, and all things related to the Twitter experience, in Accidental Tech Podcast episode 79.

“Web 2.0” was a great lie. The power of social, connected data on dynamic webpages — for free. We participate in the lie every day. Look at Tumblr, acquired by Yahoo, and making its own moves to lock itself down. Their “Sponsored Posts” have animated gifs, so they’re still cool, right? Axe body spray is cool, right? They even insert suggested blog posts now. It doesn’t hurt that the suggestions are from popular blogs that are selling products. I’m sure that’s a coincidence!

Let’s Make Our Own Twitter! What Could Go Wrong?

Diaspora Still Works!

Diaspora, a federated network of nodes that presented people with a Facebook-like interface received funding from Kickstarter in June of 2011, but didn’t launch fast enough, it took years. Nodes are still up and running, but don’t pretend it achieved its goals of providing a social space, they just built a mostly empty city that will live forever. You can go use it right now, if you want, but almost no one is.

Generic Dot Cereal

App Dot Net is the most infamous flop because its slow-motion death is ongoing. App Dot Net was the name for a social application platform, but what everyone associated the name with was “Alpha” the Twitter clone that the App Dot Net employees made to showcase their social application platform. This was the biggest danger. Mentally, all App Dot Net was, was a Twitter clone. The technical underpinnings did not matter to the vast majority of users. The other “cloned” services like Backer weren’t even a blip on most people’s radar. People could build whatever they wanted to build, but it didn’t seem to matter because it was all about the Twitter clone component.

How often to clones of things outpace the original? Usually, only when the clone is cheaper than the original, and even then that’s not guaranteed. You might buy generic, bulk toilet paper, or generic breakfast cereal, but there will be things you choose not to compromise on. App Dot Net was never going to be cheaper than Twitter. That means you need your clone to do something novel. App Dot Net had a slightly longer word length. I would not call that a distinguishing feature for your Twitter clone.

App Dot Net was also going to be different from Twitter, or Facebook, because users would pay to use the service. Here, look at their funding page, that they no longer have online. It’s hard enough to convince people to use a service that, on the surface, is ‘just’ a Twitter clone, but now you’re asking people to pay money for it. This limited the number of people using the service, which limited the conversations, and made for a really uninteresting social experience. All the while, people were still posting on Twitter, because that’s where conversations could really happen. The developer-friendliness of it was immaterial to people posting about their food, or what was on TV.

App Dot Net eventually made a free tier, and turned the platform in to a “freemium” service, but by that point, all the new users could see was a Twitter clone full of straight, white, male programmers and technology enthusiasts. It was about as fun as a party organized exclusively by engineers. I joined around this time, telling myself I would pay for the service if I liked it. I was certain I would reach the limit for the number of people I would follow because it was so low compared to my Twitter account. Turns out, that there wasn’t a reason to follow most people because they were cross posting with Twitter, and many accounts from people active at its founding were unused, or only occasionally updated. Engagement is a word I love to make fun of, but seriously, there was no engagement.

The Tent is in the Jargon Cupcake

Tent/Cupcake is a total mess. It is a service like App Dot Net (the platform, not the “Twitter Clone” part). Tent is more like Diaspora in that it’s decentralized. Anyone can create a Tent server.

Tent is decentralized like email and the web. That means that users interact with each other in the same way whether they’re on the same service provider or across the world. That means no one company can control the ecosystem. If a service provider starts behaving badly, users can move to another provider or set up their own servers, taking their data and relationships with them. Unlike email, address books are updated automatically so migration is seamless.

That sounds really neat for a second until you realize that the positive part of their metaphor is email. Almost everyone uses free, ad-supported email, and even services that mine email for ways to sell ads to you. You can migrate wherever you want, but will you? Won’t you just stick to the free ones that will probably suck in some way? Being really excited about Tent, is like being really excited about IMAP. IMAP is not your email, it’s what allows your email to happen.

Cupcake.io is run by the guys that make the Tent protocol, and they provide a “freemium” experience — like what App Dot Net added. What’s the freemium experience like? I don’t know! What are the apps like? Couldn’t tell you! It’s a total mess. This website is not how you get someone to try your service, it’s how you make someone close their browser tab and go back to Twitter.

Great apps

We have apps for everything from microblogging to file sharing. All our apps are free to all users. And of course you can use any Tent app in the world with your Cupcake account without limitation.

Where are the apps? I don’t sign up for things just because you’ve prompted me with the field to sign up, show me what’s at the end of this process. No matter how much I don’t like Twitter, it’s still socially viable and your service is only jargon to me.

When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth

In the beginning, there was darkness, then we had an explosion of social, web-centric applications. Services would rise and fall. People would have accounts on multiple services. Services having APIs to make clients was a cool idea. This bubbling primordial ooze produced lots of things that have died off. Even services that promised to aggregate all your other social feeds, like Friendfeed (bought by Facebook), and SocialThing (bought, and destroyed by AOL. Fortunately, we got the last laugh because the SocialThing guys ruined AIM.) Typically one led to the next though. Friendster was followed by Myspace, which was followed by Facebook. Then Facebook stayed. The reason this rise-and-fall was broken was because Facebook refused to be acquired, and as such, it had to have a business plan. They turned their creepy, awful, social pressure in to a tool to lure in more investors and IPO. They had money to do their own acquisitions. This caused an imbalance, because before, things would just shutter, or get acquired and shutter. Google, Yahoo, and AOL were, and continue to be, really bad at social platforms. They don’t even know what to do with their instant messaging platforms most of the time.

Twitter rose up around the same time as Facebook, but much smaller, and it’s been its success on handheld devices that’s enabled it to run in parallel with Facebook, which continues to fumble mobile. Facebook’s biggest success in mobile is from an acquisition of a company that lets you take photos, something they were incapable of doing internally.

Twitter is Facebookifying themselves because they want the financial success of Facebook. The controlled timeline, even superficial things like banners and avatars. And Facebook is Twitterifying themselves with the digestible tweets. And they’re Snapchatifying themselves with their messaging stuff. They’re Flipboardifying themselves with Paper. Tumblr is changing from a blogging service in to a feed-focused service, like Twitter and Facebook. Where else can you put the ads?

Where once there were tons of silly, ridiculous, obnoxious, fun social services, now there are only a few and they’re interested in maintaining themselves by eating the small services, and morphing parts of themselves in to one another.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what happened with all the original web companies. AOL, Google, and Yahoo all needed webmail, they all needed news services, they all needed blogging platforms, photo services — Hell, Yahoo bought Tumblr.

Seeing the craptacular nature of things doesn’t matter. We get riled up every six months on the internet about how social networking giants work. So what? Our collective outrage as resulted in a few abject failures we can pat ourselves on the back for. The next big thing probably isn’t going to come from any of these nerdy, nice people making things, it’s probably just going to be another Twitter or Facebook that seems more attractive to us because Twitter and Facebook will continue to be less attractive to us.

As the social survivors of “Web 2.0” gorge themselves on gifted youth they start to move further away from being things people enjoy. They become business-degree-managed sameness.

If this evolution in to generic commodities continues, then when will we see the next fish crawl out of the mud? What will that fish be? I hope it’s an awesome fish that I won’t hate for a few years.

Yesterday morning I listened to Myke Hurley and Casey Liss on their brand new show Bionic Bonanza The Casey and Myke Variety Power Hour Analog(ue). The show is ostensibly about the human side of tech podcasts, and therefore, it is kind of experimental. Myke had Casey on as a guest on a similarly themed episode of CMD+Space many months ago. Strangely, I have elements that I find I can now identify with more directly — it’s like their launch experiences are analogous to my own. Huh.

Casey discusses the fear, and uncertainty he had about the launch of Neutral, the show that propelled him from a relatively unknown, to a slightly more well-known unknown. Casey talked about fears that surrounded that launch. When he kept checking his phone while he was with his wife, Erin. He couldn’t believe it.

Myke, similarly analogously, relayed the story behind his announcement that he was leaving the 5by5 Podcast Network. He was filled with abject terror. What would people think of the move he was making? Would people be upset with him? Would people be happy for him? Each second, each minute that passed built more tension for him because he received no immediate feedback.

This is Where I Make it All About Me

Dan and I had recorded a bunch of Skype calls podcasts that we never released. Some of them, Dan and I just outright trashed. We had no real concept originally, a different configuration of hosts until timing became uncertain, and we had tried to start the show in different ways. At the conclusion of a short freelance project, I was feeling tapped out, creatively unfulfilled, and I wanted to actually do it for real this time. We had something that was mostly useable. We managed to speak to one another in a fashion that we could stomach listening back to. Dan still edited out some stray conversation threads, and trimmed some of the start and end. The result sounds pretty natural, and I do understand the desire to just put up raw audio, that it is more pure, and truthful, but a little primping never hurt anyone.

The problem was that while Dan was editing, I was terrified about two things. Firstly, I was scared that he was putting in effort in to editing something that we wouldn’t like when we listened back, a total waste. Secondly, I was petrified about what to do if it was good. I never had a scenario in which it was mind-blowing, but I thought good-enough was a possibility.

When Dan sent me the file, I knew it was good enough. Not like in a settling for it kind of way, but in a “I would put my name on this” kind of way. I can’t call it pride exactly, but I had a firm enough opinion that Dan and I were worth listening to this one time. If we didn’t release it, then we’d never know if we were worth listening to a second time.

Dan and I fussed over a few tiny things, then Dan made the website with Squarespace. We had no idea what to call it though. We never got far enough to give what we were doing a name because we never had confidence. We bounced ideas around for a few hours. Obviously, we had a VFX nerd bent to it, but we also talked about movies and Dan’s opinions on iOS note-taking apps (LOL). In the end, the VFX-ness won out and we called it “Defocused”.

Dan and I bounced ideas off one another for the album art, the logo. Dan wanted to use a colorful test pattern, and I wanted to use a 3D rendering of 3D text with a very tight depth-of-field effect from the “O”. Dan put the two together and hazed out the background, and that was the show art. Simple, and pretty literal.

It was all set. There were no more excuses.

Where’s the Trigger? Where is it?

Dan and I were faced with the interesting problem of not knowing when to launch it. Time mattered. Ideally, we’d try to stick to whatever day and time we started off with. It has been said that consistency is hugely important for blogs, podcasts, web comics, etc. People want to know when their episode will be there.

However, I was also terrified of launching in broad daylight. I was worried we’d either get totally crushed in the Eastern Time Zone Daily Tweet Deluge, or we’d be totally unnoticed. Naturally, we launched in the middle of the night. I had been releasing a few, blog posts around that time, and it felt kind of safe. Dan and I thought the late hour would give us a chance to get some slow feedback, and to tweet about it some more during the day if things seemed positive.

I couldn’t sleep. I was in bed, my iPhone in my hand, refreshing and refreshing Twitter, and my earbuds in, listening to the episode for the second or third time to make sure there wasn’t a reason to pull it. I’d go to Tweetbot, then back to Twitter, and then I’d go find the show’s account and see if it had mentions. Now that I had launched it, I found that I was in the same situation as Myke and Casey — That moment of paralysis that seems to last forever when you don’t know if you did something you will regret.

I was mulling over this terror when Myke tweeted that he listened to it and retweeted the show to the gajillion people that follow him.

Fuck.

Here I was, lying in bed, eyes wide, heart racing. Was Myke just being nice? He really liked it? What if he did like it, but only because he talks to us on Twitter? What if all those people that would see his retweet would go in to our episode expecting a Myke Hurley podcast? Neither Dan, nor I, are Myke-esque in any way.

Most importantly, what did this mean for the second episode? God, now we were really in the shit; we had to make more than one for sure.

Dan and I pelted each other with “OMG” messages of disbelief until I started to notice tweets trailing off. I fell asleep at some point then. I woke up a few hours later, and checked twitter in a panic. Then again. I basically have not had a solid night’s worth of sleep on any of the night’s we have launched an episode. This terror and uncertainty keeps waking me up. What if my server I host the file on goes down? No one can fix it but me. What if I lose people because of that?

This is a lot of stress for something that provides no commercial value to Dan, nor myself. We continue to do this because it is fun. The adrenaline hit of panic is fun in a demented way. After it all dies down, and you see those few tweets that someone liked a thing you did, you’re on a high. It’s like skydiving, or bungie jumping (I refuse to do either of those, they seem dangerous). Every time some hugely important podcast person says something to me, I am arrested with uncertainty, and gratitude.

Launch Feedback

There are different forms of feedback you can get over Twitter. Someone will favorite a thing, they will retweet a thing, they will reply back to you, and they can also follow you. I don’t formulate tweets specifically with any of those outcomes in mind. If I merely get a chuckle that I never know about, that’s fine. However, I live in abject terror of being followed by someone I respect. Someone that has my genuine respect will see everything I say. I see the follow notification, I get excited that they like me, and then I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach that they will utterly regret their decision to follow me once they see my nonsense. That the quantum waveform will collapse, and the cat in the box will be dead. I guess I’m just a positive-thinkin’ kind of guy.

Podcasts don’t even give you that level of interaction. Sure, people will interact with the show account Dan runs, or they will message Dan and me directly, but that’s not really a guaranteed outcome. When I look at feeds, or file access rates, or any of that, I see that most listeners are made of dark matter. I can observe their effects, but I have no idea who they are, or what they like about the show. Where are you, silent listeners?

This is very similar to the gap Myke describes where there’s no feedback, the feeling that maybe no one cares, only in a certain way, I can see that they care enough to have subscribed and have not unsubscribed yet. It is strange to think of the enormous chasm between observation and interaction. Surely, I admit that I am vain enough to care what people I’ve never met think, and I’m sure I care enough about what a random, important listener might think.

An interesting dynamic came a few weeks ago with the launch of Overcast. The recommendation system linked to Twitter was a new and innovative approach to looking for podcasts to listen to. It’s also a great way to spy on the people you follow to see if anyone of them are recommending your show. (Sorry guys, I’m spying out of love.) That recommendation isn’t sent to the podcaster, it isn’t available on a leaderboard, it isn’t a graph widget, it isn’t an analytics package for purchase, it is just a small way to see if someone you follow likes you enough to think other people should check you out.

Frodo & Gollum

Hopefully, Dan and I will continue to improve at this, and it will start to feel very natural. Maybe I’ll get some more sleep when these go up Wednesdays. I’d like to keep receiving slow, steady, positive feedback. There’s no anxiety if everything’s easy-peasy.

There’s another part of me that wants to keep experiencing this adrenaline hit. To see a rapid expansion of listeners. To do new, unexpected things with the show. To have some cray-cray success that overfills my inbox with compliments.

That’s not a healthy, sustainable impulse, and maybe it’s a sin to secretly want that? Damn it, why couldn’t Casey and Myke have talked about that part?! Way to leave me high and dry here, fellas! I guess I’ll just have to tune in next week.