Hello fellow Convivants. And hello to new potential friends in the audience who’ve been forwarded this posting, thanks in advance for sampling a Convivs experience.
Today’s Convivially Yours post, this writing, was inspired after just now reading Kate Lindsay’s piece titled Instagram is Over in The Atlantic, and Eric Newcomer’s (he was at Bloomberg, and now going it indie on Substack) recent podcast with guest Jason Calacanis, an OG from Internet media, angel investing and heaven knows what next. Further impetus for this post was derived from two events: crypto-related narratives coming undone, and the evolving landscape at the bird site.
There’s a theme that deserves some unfurling that’s got nothing to do with Insta, big and social media, crypto, and Elon Musk, that yet’s got everything to do with our individual lives and happiness.
Chris Dixon (early builder and investor, who for a while now at a16z) has written about the S-Curve, which pretty much sums up the lifecycle of what most call a bargain. Essentially a bargain is an agreement, a sort of promise, that goes like this: I will do this and you will do that. The “S” tops out when the first part, the promisor, changes the terms of the agreement after the transaction’s in progress.
Some call it bait-and-switch, others call them rug-pulls, while others call it fraud. The bottom line is trust is violated. The question is always one of intent, did the rug-puller intend from the beginning, baiting a transaction, to pull the rug, or did is just sort of happen because later on things changed and it became the only viable alternative. Or was is accidental, the first party never intended to rug-pull however she stepped on to a slippery slope knowing full well it was slippery and sloped and messed up.
Regardless of whether there was mindful intent to benefit, when it happens bad feelings soon follow. In friendships we avoid this sort of messing up however in business it’s often expected and accepted. Hey, we just figured out we have to charge you in order for us to keep the lights on is the typical business message.
If a friend invited you to dinner and presented you with a bill after dessert you’d likely be taken off guard. When a social media company does it, or dumps advertising into your feed or withholds for ransom your posts intended for your friends, it’s just another day online.
It all boils down to trust. None of us likes to get rug-pulled. Many businesses have histories of rug pulls, from altering feed algorithms to withdrawing Application Programming Interfaces and screwing over the very developer networks responsible for business growth, to charging you to get your posts that they secretly held back (so is said) distributed to your friends and followers, to outright gambling with monies of yours that were supposed to be held in safekeeping, to however it is that the next sudden rent-extraction move or fraud presents it face.
Trust. When it’s breached there’s no going back. Sometimes the courts have means that may lead to providing recovery, or at least solace, however all too often the only choice after trust has been obliterated is to move on. Simply walking away and letting go is always an exit.
Insta appears to have leavers, as does Twitter. Some of big media’s clickbait farms and crypto’s pump-and-dump scammers are feeling the effects of leavers too. Being a leaver is healthy, it demonstrates growth and development.
It’s this cycle of disillusionment that leads to new building. New teams form. Ideas go from being proposals to products and services that benefit the leavers and those following them out the door. Goodbye to the bait-and-switch business models, the “we’re adding this convenience fee to keep-the-lights-on for you” types of desperate pleas, the feed manipulation shenanigans, the taunting aggro-provoking threads, and further “messing up”.
It’s time to put trust back into the business model, and to get back to having fun with friends both new and old. Life is too short to waste any of it being hustled for the enrichment of corporations looking to take advantage of or otherwise arbitrage you. It’s time to exit the old and try something fresh and convivial, which is really what most of us prefer over the BS that’s being slung around. We all would be grateful for heaping servings of trust and fairness, and probably not yet another pay-to-peep rent extraction scheme sugar frosting on top of a mystery cake. BTW, think most of us feel bringing our beds to the office instead of working from home is just another instance of shite engineering; our beds in our homes simply felt more natural. Amirite?
Convivially yours,
Convivs