Ev Williams has it right; I know, because I did the same 10 years ago
Medium, the publishing platform, has recently launched an overhaul of its application. Its founder, Ev Williams, has written a post on the company’s blog, where he gives the rationale behind the change.
It is titled “Toward a more relational Medium”. He writes:
“Among other ways, the internet has changed media consumption along a spectrum that you might call relational to transactional. Think of (or imagine, if you’re not old enough) when you got your morning newspaper or your favorite magazine and read articles because they were in that newspaper or magazine. Sure, you didn’t read all of them, but what you read was very heavily influenced by where it came from. You picked the source first and then you picked the articles. You built affinity and trust for the sources (publications) you liked best, which read to repeat reading and/or subscription. In other words, you had a relationship of sorts with them — and, perhaps, with many of the writers in them, as well.”
Ev goes on and discusses how meaningful content emerges through relationship that are formed between people, and how Medium plans to optimize its user experience to bring into the spotlight the writers. When I read Ev’s post, it strike a chord with me as it touches upon a growing feeling I have with respect to what we might be losing in the world of transactional media. It immediately made me consider how Medium might be a place I could feel at home.
It also threw me back some 10 years ago, where I stared a company called Serendip, along with my friend, Sagee Ben-Zedeff .
What really matters is what you like, not what you are like
Sagee and I started Serendip in 2010 out of a shared nostalgia to an experience we fondly recalled from our childhood. Both avid music lovers, growing together in a small town in Israel in the 80s, one of our most vivid memories was around the discovery of a friend’s music taste. It would typically go like that — we would visit a friends’ home for the first time, and soon enough we would find ourselves scrolling through his CDs (or cassettes) collection, hunting for shared favorite artists and albums. Once a certain “click” clicked (given a good level of overlap, which wasn’t always the case), relationship would form. In other words, we have implicitly “collected” our friend to our list of sources; we would listen to a new album he discovered, we would exchange mixtapes with him; most importantly, we would constantly converse with him about our shared taste.
Serendip.me, the music service we have built, followed a similar experience. After a quick profiling of the user’s taste, the service would suggest her with DJ’s to follow. These followed DJs would comprised the network of music soulmates, the trusted sources, through which the music experience of the service was created. Music that was shared by those DJs (through social media, or directly on the app) fed into the playlist, and you could further drill down into a DJ’s profile page, follow, share and converse around it.
Some have called this “The Twitter of Music”.
Serendip was a glorious commercial failure. I know today that you need many things to get right (and some luck too) to make a startup successful. But we did get one thing right. Our core intuitive understanding of the importance of people, as a way to establish trust and meaning.
In the great movie (and book) “High Fidelity” by Nick Hornby, there’s this memorable sentence by Rob Gordon “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like”. I don’t think that personality and character are not important, but the things we cherish around music, books, movies etc. are evidence and proofs to our value system and core beliefs and very often , they are the basis for deep relationship where media really provides a rich and delighting facilitation to those ties.
In our investors’ pitch, we often used this quote by Prof. George Howard:
What people in the music startup world keep missing is that the vast majority of people don’t want every piece of recorded music.
Rather, they want what they like, and then they want to be led to other things that they might like by people they trust.
(Prof. George Howard, Music Educator, Consultant)
Trust is really the basis of deep relationship, in media or otherwise. Just think of some of your best friends, and how much of your shared experience revolves around books, music and films you both cherish. Think of the authors, publishers, radio DJs and other curators and sources, you trust. Think of the podcasts you follow. People precede content. This was true for serendip 10 years ago, and it’s true for Medium today.
Submit to algorithms or have them serve us
Ev talks about the transactional vs relational . His words should act as a wake-up call to us. When we vote for transactional media, whether it is through TikTok, YouTube, Spotify or Facebook, we submit ourself to an algorithm that decides for us what we consume, which inherently submits us to superfluousness. Transactional media is the equivalent of those “13 channels of shit on the TV to choose from” as Pink Floyd once sang (only that 13, is more like 130,000 now).
Transactional media is out there because it serves the Big Tech companies and their likes. We’re made to believe that the algorithm knows us best and is programmed to provide us the best experience possible, where in fact, there’s every reason to believe that the optimization is there to serve the advertiser, or the data buyer, those that actually pay. (yeah..yeah.. “if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” … cliché but true). There’s a reason why those algorithms are so secretive and non-transparent.
Take Spotify for example. They have just announced a new “Discovery Mode” claiming to give a better distribution option for opted-in artists, but at the same time, cutting their royalties payments by half. Spotify offers the artists a trade-off between distribution and payments. Will this end-up benefiting or hurting the artists is unknown and can’t be measured. You have to trust the algorithm. What is already known however, is that it did piss-off an already ‘down and out” industry with some already calling it the return of the Payola.
But there’s another way. We have the power and we can feet-vote those services that put people before algorithms. We know which services these are because we can feel their love to the subject matter. We can feel the love of goodreads to books; we can feel the love of bandcamp to music,; we can feel the love of Medium to words. And we give back love to them, to make sure algorithms exist to serve us rather than the other way around.
