Karma Police: the resurgence of attention

Email

I’m going to start with email since it has capabilities to create a community (with mailing lists). Email between person to person isn’t that different from sending a letter, but creating carbon copies allow it to create a community: you can send the same mail to many people and they can respond in a thread.

Needless to say, email became very popular, but people don’t use it as a social community much: some OSS software uses it for development (Linux, Postgres) and some folks use it to arrange meetings or discussions. Although using email is very convenient, many people hate it:

Donald Knuth famously said this about email in 1990:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode — like, one day every six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol’ snail mail…

Many people dream of “inbox zero”, where they have no more emails to read or respond to. Email suffers the same problem almost everything that reduces friction does: it causes problems of abundance.

In the 60s and 70s in America, as telephones became more popular, some people racked up huge phone bills to talk to their friends and keep up with the gossip in their friend group. The telephone, a tool for increased communication, did the opposite: it isolated people from their community.

Email is a rudimentary social network: it wasn’t very popular until the 90s and people didn’t use its social capabilities much. Onto the next era.

Forums

With the World Wide Web becoming popular in the late 90s, people wanted to find similarly minded people to discuss things with: so they created specialized websites, called forums for this purpose. Someone (or a team of people) manage the site, and everyone discusses on or off-topic things. Moderation was loose and things were hectic, but they worked. Sometimes your favorite forum would disappear, or the mods would make it invite-only, but anybody was free to spin up their own new forum.

Forums had threads as a first-class feature: you could make a thread and users could comment on it to discuss. Some forums had upvotes and downvotes natively, expressing approval or disapproval of posts on the forum.

Reddit saw the use of forums and decided to create a meta-forum: a website where users could create a forum about any topic, moderate it however they wished, and so users wouldn’t have to remember all the forums they used in the past. Reddit would handle the discovery: they would aggregate every subreddit like google did for the web, and they had an interesting way of arranging content: highly upvoted posts would float to the top, so users could read “interesting” content quickly, keeping them engaged.

It was a smash hit. By the early 2010s, many communities moved to Reddit, and over 10 years later, Reddit is now looking to IPO.

But can you really turn a forum run by users into a profitable business?

Reddit’s business model is to own the website reddit.com, and own searching, but there’s no reason that anybody has to keep using the site. Reddit is the overlord of the fiefdom, but the vassals don’t get paid taxes.

As well, there’s been a turn against “engaging” content. Our attention spans are finite, and engaging content in surplus becomes trite.

The upvote has lost, and the karma police will collect their dues. I predict a messy IPO.

The resurgence of scarcity

For most normal economic goods, suppliers prefer scarcity to increase profit margins, but they prefer surplus to maximize profits. If one supplier can corner the market, there’s a monopoly price that introduces scarcity to strictly maximize profits. If there are enough suppliers, all suppliers tend towards surplus to maximize their payoffs (which is zero).

On the other side, users tend to prefer goods in surplus since it lowers the cost of their goods and increases quality and choice.

But the economics of surplus don’t make sense for everything.

When people left the communist bloc to see the western world, surplus was all they saw. Grocery stores were stocked to the brim where they stores would waste perfectly good food to entice customers with only the freshest food. There weren’t lines to order food or shortages.

But while we don’t starve, we have another problem: in America, the obesity rate is nearly 45%. In 1960, it was 13%. Our life expectancy hasn’t gotten much better either, from about 70 years to 76 years, with most of the gains coming from earlier on in life.

With attention too, people are rethinking their relationship with technology. Communities without internet have popped up, with eager urbanites moving into those rural areas. Others have decided to restrict the time that they use technology to unwind. Basically, self-imposed scarcity, with promising results, like improving mental health and increasing the meaning in their life.

Most of all, with the ever increasing tide of technology and capitalism, people are re-learned that the incentives of suppliers and consumers aren’t always aligned. Capitalized social media platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter need your attention to keep generating profits.

Why attention matters

As a disgruntled 20-something, I used social media as a crutch to stop myself from thinking the woes in my life. I wasn’t going anywhere, I was working increasingly long hours doing hard labor jobs that I knew I couldn’t maintain, being paid next to nothing to maintain my pitiful existence. Where I worked, I knew of people who died by alcoholism, suicide, and were maimed in the workplace. Every extra day I worked in these conditions, I increased my chances of being one of those people, long forgotten.

I talked to a coworker who had been working similar jobs for 20 years, being paid minimum wage just like myself. He couldn’t afford to raise his family and was in heavy debt. His health was terrible from the alcohol and drug consumption needed to keep up with the 80 hour work weeks. He had professed a love of social media as a tool to stop himself from thinking about his miserable experience. He told me all this to say that time and focus was the resource he misused the most in his life. He was a 40 something guy, but I was in my 20s. I had time. I took his lesson to heart and began to take care of myself and preserve my attention. I learned a desirable skill to leave the never-ending cycle of low skill, low paid work and started to turn my life around.

As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. I wish I learned that sooner.