Mediaboss Marketing

Social networks dont feel so social anymore. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and the rest seem to be leaning ever further into entertainment and away from helping people find and chat with others like them. But Glass is hoping to be different. The new photo-sharing social network is determined to find a better, less problematic, more social way to network.

Glass co-founders Tom Watson and Stefan Borsje have both worked in tech for years and have seen the pitfalls that come to social apps. So theyve set out to build Glass very differently. Theyre not taking VC money, theyre not prioritizing growth and engagement above all else and they wont even show you how many times people liked your photo. In the process, they hope theyre building something photographers might actually want to use.

Watson and Borsje joined the Source Code podcast to discuss Glass, the state and future of social networking and what it takes to build something different.

You can hear our full conversation on the latest episode of the Source Code podcast, or by clicking on the player above. Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Subscribe to the show: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Pocket Casts

A theory I've always had is that you can tell the story of the internet through photo-sharing apps. You have Flickr, you have Instagram, you have all these different photo communities over time. Why do you think it is that photos have been such a core part of how the internet has evolved?

Tom Watson: I think it's that it's such an easy thing to share. You can take a photograph and immediately put it online, and it tells a visual story.

These days, it's just such a quick way to do it. Video is incredible, and you see it becoming more and more important with things like TikTok and YouTube. But the photo can be a very quick consumption experience as well; it just takes a second to look at it.

One thing I've noticed about Glass is you seem to have a very clear idea about what you don't want to be. And I think we're now more and more clear about what the traps are that companies and products fall into, that take them away from being the things that they originally were. So I'm curious: Was there a moment where you had to sit down at the beginning and, like, write on a whiteboard or a Google Doc, Here's what would turn us into Instagram? A what not to do list?

Watson: We wrote down a list not of what not to do, but more of a list of what we wanted to be. We want to be this community, we want to be a photo-sharing service. We want to build upon those things and focus on the market of photographers, and less on the things we knew we didn't want to be. But we did know that there were certain, like you said, traps.

So its more like, OK, so we're not going to take on outside funding. And that was a real thing. Weve been offered that through the process, and it's really tempting when you're struggling and you're trying to build something like this. But the expectation that that funding would bring into what we're trying to build just wasn't in alignment with it. If there was an investor that had a particular mindset, sure, maybe, but even then we have really held true to that view that we know we're going for a smaller market. We know we want to have independence. And in order to do that, we need to not take on additional investors.

We want growth and engagement, but exponential growth and engagement is something we're very much not into. But that's the expectation that venture capital money ties you to. And so you need to build a product that needs to do that; you need to chase that growth in any way possible. I worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2013, and then Pinterest from 2013 to 2018, so I've seen what the expectations there are for those types of companies. We just wanted to intentionally build something different, and, in order to do that, required a different business model.

Community has been an internet buzzword for forever. And community's a challenge. It's a hard thing to do from a straightforward content-moderation standpoint, it's a hard thing to create a culture inside of an app. And figuring out even what you want that community to look like, and how to incentivize it the right way, seems like the kind of thing you really have to do from Day One, or else it's just going to be a losing battle forever. So what was the stuff at the very beginning where you were like, Here's what we want this community to look like?

Watson: The focus specifically was, all right, we want it to be a safe and trusting environment. So we invested upfront in reporting and blocking from Day One, which are traditionally not startup features that we would do. We just needed that base level; trust and safety needs to be a huge part of our community. We also were upfront with our community guidelines and rules. And then we obviously hoped that by bringing in alpha and beta testers into the service, we could really set the tone of what the community would be like before we opened it up to a broader audience. And I think that was really important.

And then its just modeling the behavior. You can set up all these rules, you can set all this content moderation and stuff, but what you see when you walk into the space is really important. It like sets the tone for you, unless you have great photographers, big photographers, people who are active in the community commenting, really being engaged those were key decisions for us before we just opened the doors like, Here's an empty space, let's hope it all works out.

I think I spent at least eight months talking to photographers while we were building it. And we would just get on a Zoom call during the pandemic, people had some time and wed just chat with them about what's going on, run them through the product, talk about the choices. We didnt always have a product yet, so it was just what their needs were and what they would hope from a community like this.

What were the photographers telling you in those early days? I asked a bunch of people what I should ask you, and my photographer friends overwhelmingly said: Why do all my photos look so bad on every web service? And can Glass fix this awful image compression that exists all over the internet?

Borsje: I think it's mostly just an economics question, to be honest, because bandwidth is not free. And especially if you have a large audience of viewers, you end up consuming a lot of bandwidth on the viewing side, obviously, especially if you have high-quality pictures. And I think for most platforms, it's probably a trade-off between what is good enough and what keeps our costs under control. And I think in our case, because our community's a little bit different our community consists of a higher percentage of creators and I think a lower percentage of consumers I think you can get away with spending a little bit more time and effort.

So we can afford to show high-resolution photos. Especially on the web version of your profile, we go through a little bit of extra effort: We load one lower-resolution photo first and then try to switch it to a high-resolution one as soon as the browser has it. So I think those kinds of tweaks are things that we can afford to do, because we're not as much of a mass-market channel as some of the others.

Would that calculation have to totally change if you get to 100 million users? Or is that one of those things that is so important to your users that you just have to deal with it?

Borsje: I think in our case, I would like to say that it wouldn't change because I think it's too important for our community to keep that around. So I would rather have a smaller group of viewers and optimize for the viewing experience than the other way around.

One big gate there just seems to be, It costs money. [Editor's note: Glass is $5 a month or $30 a year.] As soon as you charge something, you're going to immediately lose lots of people. And it seems like you, very smartly, are very happy to lose most of those people. If this is not a community you want to be part of, no hard feelings, it's just not worth it for you or for us. But I do wonder how that scales up and down.

Watson: One thing to note about when we talk about community building: One of the things that was a big factor in this is, when it's a paid-for service, you immediately have a different tone and interaction with the community versus something that's just free for anybody to just stop in on the internet. That has a very big impact on the way everyone interacts with us.

We haven't had to face massive content-moderation issues like I've seen in other social networks because we're a paid-for service. It currently requires an Apple ID to sign up, and that requires a credit card. And so you cant even be on a trial without a little level of commitment. And I think that helps us. I mean, its still a free trial, but you can't just create a random account with some random username and just give it a shot. I think that really has helped us with our community building.

How has that played out? People being nice to each other makes sense. But from a standpoint of, like, I've paid for this, I might as well try to make it good here, do you see that feeling play out in other ways across the app, too?

Watson: I think people treat each other a little better. Theyre more invested, literally, in the project. They want the space to be good. And I think that a lot of our members are getting really thoughtful comments, and they've been really responsive to our Appreciations thing, which is our version of liking.

Let's dig into that one a little bit. I think it has felt intellectually obvious to a lot of platforms and companies that, like, Oh, we should let people say that they enjoy something, and then all the decisions you make after that are a mess. So what was the goal of Appreciations?

Watson: I think the big goal was to remove, That's cool, It's great, Cool, and to create the comment space as a real area for discussion and community. So that was the impetus for it. Also, to improve engagement! We wanted people to be engaged in the platform.

We actually were kind of glad we launched without any; it was just comments. And we would get a lot of feedback saying, Oh, this feels really old-school. This feels slower, and I love it. And we would see some of that. We also saw a big increase in engagement when we did release Appreciations.

But we wanted to strip out some of the things that we felt were problematic with liking, or the quick positive feedback. And a lot of those have to do with tracking. We wanted Appreciations to feel like this moment between you and the other person. It's a private appreciation. We don't show counts on any part of the product, so it's just sending positive vibes or sparkles or whatever the icon implies to the other person. There's no FOMO when you go see someone else's post and see all their like counts, or their heart counts, or whatever.

If you appreciate even a comment someone's left for you, you see what's been appreciated, but nobody else sees that you've appreciated that comment. Those subtle changes make a huge impact on the way you feel on the products. A lot went into each one of those little choices and how we deliver it. But the big, overarching theme is that we didn't want it to be tracked or feel uncomfortable by using the product. It's almost like a private thing between you and the person.

As the photographer, can I see how many people have appreciated my photos? That seems like a tricky balance, too.

Watson: We worked through that, too. So if you go to your photo, there's a section that appears when someone appreciated your photograph. And it just says Appreciations. And then if you tap through, you can see all the people that have appreciated you. But it explicitly doesn't have a number associated with it. So there's not like, 15 people have appreciated your photo. And that's really different from the world in which everything's got all these counts. And so you could count them up, I guess, if you want to, but there's just a difference: It's a nice big picture of the person and their name, people that appreciated your stuff. And it works in a small community. It doesnt always scale. But it will scale to a very large number, right? Its not hundreds of millions, but we're happy with hundreds of thousands of people using our product, and that's the goal.

I want to talk about the balance between not tracking and not optimizing for engagement, versus discoverability, which seems like a key thing that a lot of services get wrong. My sense is you have under-optimized on tripping through Glass, finding new funky things and people that I might enjoy. There seems to be a lot of stuff you could do there if you wanted to, but when I go to my homepage, it's just like reverse-chron photos of people that I follow.

Watson: We have a lot of plans to improve discovery. Optimizing for clarity of what you're getting to see, I think, is really important to us. When we talk to people about other social networks, they get so frustrated, they don't feel like they have control over what they're experiencing on the platform. So we really want to optimize for your home space to be what you expect to see I follow these people, I get to see their content.

I think that's really important to us in the home space. But when you go to our Community tab, we want to work toward better ways in which we can surface you great photographers. Were exploring editorial ways of surfacing that stuff, as opposed to an algorithmically generated list or something. We'd love for photographers to explicitly express what type of photographer they are so that you could explore and find content that way. So we're looking into improving that space, because we launched with a very bare bones list of photographers. And we've since added categories, and you can discover things for categories, which is a good first step, but we have a lot more to work on there.

Borsje: One thing that, for me, personally, is always frustrating about recommendation algorithms is that they take away some of the discovery of new stuff that I'm not familiar with yet. I think you see it on YouTube, you see it on Instagram as well in the Explore feed. Once you've looked at a certain category of photos, you're just going to get bombarded with that. And that's it. And it's really difficult to step out of that bubble and see something else. And that would, for me, be a reason to be very hesitant about introducing, Oh, we're just going to show you what we think you like, because we might not even really be able to figure out what you like. You might not even know yet what you would like.

I don't think you open the Glass app to get hooked and just doomscroll for like two hours. I think you come to Glass to get inspired, to see something that you haven't seen before, to get new ideas of how I can approach my photography with new techniques or new styles or something that I just haven't tried or tested before. And that sense of discovery, I think that's something that's very important to us.

Read the rest here:
Glass hopes to be the photo-sharing app Instagram never was - Protocol

If there was one thing that still united citizens of the Communist block in the early 1990s, it was the widespread hope to escape the Soviet drab, says Johannes Mueller, Head Of Research Macro Research, DWS Group.

No matter their disparate nationalities or their age, citizens hoped for a "normal" life of the sort most citizens of the democratic societies in the "West" take for granted.

Getting richer, but also being able to read and think what you want, and say or write what you think, without the fear of government oppression or foreign invasion.

In purely economic terms, some countries have succeeded better than others, 30 years on, as our "Chart of the Week" illustrates. Measured at current prices and purchasing power parity, it shows that at the end of Communism, Ukraine had roughly the same gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as Poland. Today, it is only a fraction. Poland has even surpassed commodity rich Russia by a decent margin. The same is true of Latvia; the other two Baltic states have done better still.

This probably understates Russia's economic performance from the point of view of its average citizens, not only because of higher income levels than most to begin with, as the imperial and industrial center of the old Soviet bloc. Since 1990 the distribution of income and wealth appears to have become extremely unequal; some estimates suggest that the amount of private wealth siphoned offshore over the years by the very richest Russians stood at about three times the official net foreign reserves by 2015.

For critical Russian journalists deemed incorrigible enemies, the reprisals, intimidation and, ultimately, murders of, began almost immediately upon Putin's initial ascent to power.

For most other Eastern Europeans, notably in Poland and the Baltic states, membership of the European Union (EU) offered an alternative model of how to combine economic with political freedom.

Russia's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was sparked by a trade treaty with the EU, not by any realistic prospect of joining NATO. Similarly, the main demands among democracy activists in neighboring Belorussia that prompted the Moscow backed crackdown were better relations with the EU.

Contrary to what Putin seems to think, Ukrainians have long seen themselves as a clearly separate, European nation still in the process of defining where it stands vis a vis its neighbours.

And if that wasn't provocation enough, they want to determine their own future through free and fair elections - as it is normal in most of Europe. That Putin sees it a mortal threat says as much about his regime as the terrible scenes of cities getting bombed the world is currently witnessing.

30 years after the end of Soviet Communism, EU membership has proven a key factor in determining economic performance.

Sources: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, DWS Investment GmbH as of 10/31/21*Gross domestic product per capita in current price

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What Putin's war is really about - International Investment

Recently, as I sat waiting to be called for my IELTS Speaking Test, I felt a strong urge to ask one of the people in charge of maintaining the exam conditions to ask for my phone back. This was strange, for the situation was not new to me. I had taken many exams before, and had to wait much longer than I did that day, that too without any devices to distract myself.

However, this test was a familiar one, and my wanting to just get it over with, made me unnaturally restless during the 30 minutes before which I was called. While the feeling surprised me, this need to turn to our gadgets at the slightest hint of boredom is one that has become more than common in the past decade.

Boredom, by itself, is universally considered an undesirable state to be in. It also seems to be ancient. A New Yorker article titled "What Does Boredom Do to Us and for Us?" mentions not just industrial age philosophers but Seneca from the first century who used "taedium vitae" to describe nauseousness at the repeated nature of life. It can be distressing and even excruciating, and this is a problem that plagues not just adolescents and adults beginning their work-life but older segments of the population as well.

We can get a sharp understanding of just how dire this state can be if we look at a 2016 BBC article mentioning the case of Frederic Desnard who sued his previous employer for "boreout", a term derived from burnout.

Furthermore, links have been found between boredom and adverse mental health conditions. A Washington Post article titled "Boredom's link to mental illnesses, brain injuries and dysfunctional behaviors" details how agitated people can be when bored, even for 10 minutes. This was indicated by an experiment where one participant shocked himself 190 times when placed in a situation with zero distractions.

It might seem like a paradox, but the whole issue seems to have been significantly exacerbated with the advent of the digital age where unimaginable amounts of content is produced every second.

A line that perfectly encapsulates the differences in reactions to boredom between past generations and this one comes from a Vox article called, "Bored and lonely? Blame your phone", where it says, "Because of the promises of the digital age, when we experience those feelings, we're more surprised and alarmed than our ancestors were."

The words come from one of the authors of a book called Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter where comparisons are made between people of the 19th and 20th centuries and people today, in terms of how both groups felt about boredom. The author states that while former generations viewed monotony as an ordinary feature of life that couldn't be avoided, the potential of instant and constant entertainment and companionship provided by our devices today, make us feel worse when we feel bored and alone.

In addition, the lack of effort with which we are able to use social media is also to blame as it offers no challenges for us to overcome. A study at Kent State University found that the usage of social media increased boredom while self-selected schoolwork decreased it. The results might be shocking, but as members of this generation, we know all too well that this has a grain of truth.

References

1. BBC (July 26, 2016). Is there such a thing as 'boreout'?

2. The Washington Post (July 17, 2021). Boredom's link to mental illnesses, brain injuries and dysfunctional behaviors

3. Vox (May 5, 2019). Bored and lonely? Blame your phone.

4. Kent State University. Social Media Use Increases Boredom and Homework Decreases Boredom, Kent State Research Shows

Matilda sincerely believes it is always other people's fault. Tell her she's right at matilda.tilda1234@gmail.com

Read more here:
Boredom, and How Social Media Makes It Worse - The Daily Star

The world has changed, and the strongest tech founders dont need todays accelerators. They face new challenges and need new solutions. At Neo, were taking on the task of making the accelerator relevant to them again.

In 2008, Airbnb applied to Y Combinator as a lifeline: they needed the cash. If the Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nate Blecharczyk were starting today, they could get funding within days just by changing their Twitter bios to working on something new. They wouldnt need a three-month program with a demo day to raise money. Capital is more abundant than ever, and Zoom has made it easier to raise. Meanwhile, tech talent is scarcer than ever. Start-ups desperately need help recruiting engineers, which is what Neo does. Since 2017, weve built an awesome talent pipeline and convinced hundreds of star engineers to join start-ups.

Building on this track record, weve reimagined Neo Accelerators demo day to be more like a career fair. Instead of pitching investors, imagine pitching an audience of exceptional engineers and scoring meetings with candidates interested in joining you. Thats something every tech founder would want. Starting a company is a lonely experience, especially for people early in their careers, and Covid lockdowns have left us all craving human contact. Unlike any other accelerator, Neo kicks off with a monthlong all-inclusive retreat in Oregon, which were calling Neo Campus. Imagine living under the same roof and bonding with mentors and other founders over meals, hikes, and other activities.

What do you consider innovative now? Talk about specific areas that are under-hyped and overhyped.

Whenever I make predictions, Im usually wrong. I prefer to bet on people smarter than myself and trust them to figure out what to build. With that caveat, there are two areas Im very bullish on in the post-Covid world.

The first is any technology that supports the redistribution of work and wealth from a few concentrated cities to the rest of the world. For the first time in history, prosperity has been decoupled from physical location knowledge workers can be productive from anywhere. This means workers can relocate and work from wherever they want; and employers can hire new workers from all over the world. This is a seismic shift; it may take decades to realize its full scale.

Second, Im bullish on anybody building a new social network. During the pandemic, we saw amazing tech solutions rise to meet our needs. Physical meetings became impossible, so Zoom filled the void. Office conversations became impossible, so Slack filled the void. Making new friends and socializing at parties became impossible yet nothing filled the void. While Zoom and Slacks traffic skyrocketed, Facebook and Instagrams did not. Facebook is the new Myspace. Meanwhile theres an enormous human need that isnt being met, and a trillion-dollar opportunity for whoever reimagines social networking.

At Neo Accelerator, you are stressing diversity and also youth? Are you essentially going back to the old way and with hindsight 2022?

View post:
Opinion | Tech Offers a Silver Lining in Ukraine - The New York Times

The communists won

Wow. It seems the GOP is showing its true colors; it's really a shill for the Communist Party. Fox News is its propaganda arm.

Look at the recent evidence. Glowing praise for Putin; lockstep followers of a wannabe-Putin; downplaying an insurrection against American democracy; suppressing voter rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights; cozying up to the NRA to ensure they can be armed and ready for the next insurrection attempt; ignoring the needs of the American people.

Putin didn't get his way through Trump's inability to overthrow the American government, so apparently he waited until Trump could sell him all the national secrets Trump has reportedly been hiding in Florida. Notice North Korea is emboldened now that Trump is out of office. Trump carried on a very public bromance with these two dictators, and for the right price, I have no doubt he would sell out America.

I'm disgusted thinking of my family and friends drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight communism just so the GOP could hand it over. Shall we start calling each other "comrade" now?

KAREN WOODS

Flippin

Cannot chew on that

I'm thinking that Ukraine may well be Vladimir Putin's Mogadishu. Russia took a beating by a bunch of tribal Afghans with no national unity, basically fighting with rocks and sticks, and he thinks he can beat an educated, armed, resolute people with a fierce sense of national pride?

After thinking about it I'm guessing Putin has bitten off a lot more than he can chew. Ukraine will hand him a licking.

JEFF COOK

Springdale

Ukraine is suffering

The people of Ukraine are suffering an indefensible attack on their country, and I cannot sleep peacefully while there are pictures in the news of frightened people sheltering in subways with their children and pets.

I condemn Vladimir Putin as a criminal. I will not commit treason and congratulate his villainy on broadcast news.

MELODEE PLACIAL

Bella Vista

Turn away invaders

When I was a child in Europe, I used to play in bombed-out buildings left over from World War II. The lesson was clear. If you don't want the whole world to look like that, you must turn out the invaders right away.

CARI KING

Pocahontas

Other world leaders

Vladimir Putin is without a doubt a master of strategy. Europe, America and other nations finance him. He furnishes the humans, of whom he has many. He makes the other world leaders look like amateurs. Is that what they are? Amateurs? Or idiots? Or both?

JOHN HAIN

Little Rock

Stories about people

An offhand remark by Thomas Friedman in his book "Thank You for Being Late" caught my attention: "... the best-selling book of all time is a collection of stories about people. It's called the Bible." One might say, Oh, I thought it was about rules and regulations, about morality, or about God and Jesus. True enough, but it's mostly about how people, ordinary people for the most part, reacted to the concept of God and Jesus. Three of the most well-known are:

1. David: Usually thought of as an underdog going up against an impregnable force. There are hints, though, that it might have been the other way around. Goliath may have suffered from double vision; accusing David of coming at him with staffs rather than one staff. Other factors in David's favor were Goliath's arrogance, over-confidence, and probable unfamiliarity with the damage a simple sling and a rock could inflict.

2. Moses: The meek, reluctant hero. Think of a Jimmy Stewart western where the hero (Jimmy) is bullied, beaten up, and humbled before he finally stands up to the villain and prevails. Pharaoh, the bully. Moses the reluctant challenger prevails only after 10 encounters, demonstrating persistence pays off.

3. Samson: Punisher of the Philistines. Strong of body, weak of mind. A killing machine susceptible to the wiles of a pretty face. His only connection to God seems to be his willingness to wear his hair long to be identified as a Nazarene until he was brought low by being blinded by his enemies and in a state of weakness turned to God as his source of strength to inflict one final devastating blow to the Philistines.

Hopefully, Ukraine will turn out to be a David and Vladimir Putin a myopic Goliath.

JOHN McPHERSON

Searcy

See more here:
OPINION | LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: The communists won | Cannot chew on that | Ukraine is suffering - Arkansas Online