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Comments Posted By Dan Knauss

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WordPress News Sites And The Bermuda Triangle

…which is hucksters, hobbyists, gee-whiz-this-is-cool-bloggers, hired mercenaries, lackeys, and enthusiastic lapdogs who write mainly to curry favor with people they admire + a few genuine talents with independent minds. The latter have day jobs and eventually realize the deep end of the pool is for tough bastards with Michael Arrington style personalities, but the years of development it takes to get that hard shell and calloused fists just isn’t that attractive. Neither is the current regime of fanboys herded and managed by brand apparatchiks, but I can hardly blame people who don’t want to make draining that swamp their main mission in life.

» Posted By Dan Knauss On March 18, 2013 @ 1:33 AM

Everything I have read or witnessed for the last ten years on this subject says “web businesses,” small and large, have been doing very well. Where I think they and their customers are often frustrated is in facing an impossibly large and fast growing quantity of unorganized information and choices about what products and services to buy or adopt.

This is largely because — as you restated my original point — there is not much money to be made in information, at least not public-access information.

Nobody is talking about “saving” the New York Times here (it was mentioned once as a general example), or lamenting the declining cost of printed words. I simply observed what seems to be a troubling contradiction: markets need information to function, yet they’ve devalued it to the point that it’s in short supply, or only offered for (unsustainable) altruistic reasons or through patronage and subsidies.

Relatively public-access information (as opposed to private intelligence) doesn’t work as a product or service itself — and yes it hasn’t for a very long time. Now it doesn’t even work well as an ad vehicle. For a small software ecosystem that’s not necessarily a problem, as things tend to be centralized, choices sharply delimited, and information can be good in coverage and signal quality. Some projects seem to deliberately maintain that condition while others started there and then grew enormously, creating the odd situation under discussion here.

When you add hundreds of millions of users and businesses adding ancillary or subsidiary (or junk) support to the core product, good information, you have an anarchic scene full of hucksters. There’s plenty of fun and opportunity to be had in that, but you’d think one of the opportunities is providing reliable sources that tell people what’s the right way, the wrong way, and the WP way; what’s worth your attention, time and money, and so on. This has great value, yet it doesn’t seem to be readily monetizable value.

Maybe it’s just a matter of time. I bet it can be done but maybe not at high enough profit to be worth it. The skills, knowledge, experience, and access it takes to be a knowledgeable authority in a technical field has many appealing (and more lucrative) opportunities than writing, so tech writing/reporting/reviewing may always tend to be someone’s side project. That’s fine, but it probably results in less information, less quality information, less independent information with a minimum of entanglements in business interests.

» Posted By Dan Knauss On March 17, 2013 @ 10:22 PM

I’ve never seen someone so openly romantic about someone else’s poverty, or so committed to using it in irrelevant ways to make a bad point badly.

There’s a reason why accessible, working PHP/MySQL apps became wildly popular at the time they did, no matter how bad they were (and still are) architecturally. That time has passed and they’re maturing with big-little economies around them. They may or may not remain scenes of technical innovation by the one-in-a-million whiz kids who can do anything. So what?

The subject at hand is whether these open source project-based industries can grow and sustain themselves. It is very hard to have a good market without good information so people know shit from shinola. Good information is expensive to create but hard to monetize, in part because the obvious sources of funding are interested in biasing/limiting/controlling the information.

This is a real and interesting problem worth taking seriously. If you just want to say there’s no problem because geniuses will come out of nowhere and fix everything miraculously, and this is the best of all possible worlds, then you must be some kind of rare, optimistic, idealistic troll.

» Posted By Dan Knauss On March 17, 2013 @ 2:33 PM

@Ted – If underemployed first world kids subsidized by their parents for a few years is a likely source of quality tech journalism for open source projects, then why don’t we see a lot of it?

» Posted By Dan Knauss On March 16, 2013 @ 11:21 PM

@Ted — I think it’s a different story. Even the biggest/most commercialized open source communities do not produce a strong public sphere where critics, analysts and reporters cull out the value information from the noise, disinformation and spin for the same reason journalism has largely collapsed in our larger society. It is simply not an activity that can be supported financially without being captured by a big commercial interest.

To draw from a similar example, consider a small or mid-sized American city where the best political talent lies untapped in lawyers who would rather stay in private legal firms or get a judge’s seat where they are guaranteed six figures and a much easier life than if they ran for office. As a result you end up with a public sector led by under-competent politicians who know how to stoke up a crowd and win a popularity contest — but not much more. There is just not enough incentive among the real talent pool to serve the larger public because it results in a lot of work, taking a lot of crap, and making a lot less money. I think the few idealists who try to break this mold usually end up realizing it’s not worth it.

» Posted By Dan Knauss On March 14, 2013 @ 10:27 PM