9 ms·

The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)

87 points by KingOfCoders 3y ago

larata_media 3y ago
[flagged]
jmacd 3y ago
The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined were major influences on my young brain. I'm glad I, for some reason, decided to read them. Over the years I had several chances to meet Doc Searls and David Weinberger and it was a case of it being a good idea to meet your heroes. They were just very nice to an eager young kid.
- Mizza 3y ago
  Personally, I can't believe I ever fell for this bullshit, but it is nice to remember the optimistic feelings I had during that era. Now, I am a cynic, and that I ever thought "markets are conversations" was a profound idea and not the Ritalin ramblings of the most annoying guy in the world fills me with self-cringe.
  - itomato 3y ago
    But now they seem to be. That’s about all they are. It’s so transactional that the transaction mode has become the relationship, platform and product all-in-one. Right down to Credit Cards and Car Insurance.
    - Mizza 3y ago
      I guess my objection - besides the tedious style - isn't that it's incorrect, but that it's _bad_. I find it deeply unnerving when corporations act like people. I don't want to have a "conversation" with a company if it means they've used surveillance to stalk and harass me across the internet so they can build a data profile of me and my habits. I don't want my life controlled by ruthless monopolies with happy human faces. The result is not corporations that are more human, it's people that are less human. There is a straight line from Cluetrain to OnlyFans fleshmarkets. It worked, and it sucks.
      - parasubvert 3y ago
        So, don't give the corporations you don't like your data? Many people DO want to have these conversations and are okay with surveillance of a sort if they get something of perceived value in return. OTOH, there are plenty of ways to avoid surveillance via ad blocking and onion routers (which is now shipping on all Apple devices). I'm also not sure why you think people are less human in all of this is, or why OnlyFans is "bad". Commercial porn has existed for 50 years, and like the music industry, has had its economics upended because of Mindgeek (or Reddit, or ...) giving most porn away in exchange for surveillance rather than money. OnlyFans brings the 70's NYC Times Square peepshow back to the mainstream. The cluetrain manifesto and that crowd all saw this coming over a decade before the mobile smart phone put this into hyperdrive; to me it's not "bad" it's just "different from the 90s".
      - prepend 3y ago
        > I don't want to have a "conversation" with a company if it means they've used surveillance to stalk and harass me across the internet so they can build a data profile of me and my habits. I feel similarly. I don’t want my grocery store or restaurant to understand me. I just want to buy a gallon of milk and don’t want to discuss my day with them. And I don’t want my order called out to my name. Just give me a number and I’ll listen for it. I think the idea is that relationships make me spend more money. But I don’t want to spend more money on groceries. I want to spend as little as possible. Also in this category is companies that want to wish me happy birthday or happy pride month or anything else related to what I want from them. I don’t need my water company to wish me happy new year, just provide water efficiently.
        dreamcompiler 3y ago
        A major credit card company (whose cards are usually green) used to bug me with surveys asking what else they could do to make me happier. My answer: Get more merchants to accept your card. How about cash back? No, cash back means I paid too much in the first place. How about free movie tickets once a year? Won't make me use my card more. How about free access to airport lounges (as long as you pay an extra $500 a year)? No. Then what can we do? Improve. Your card's. Acceptance. Hmmm. How about a free credit checkup? Aaaand this is why I no longer respond to surveys: There's often one blindingly obvious thing a company can do to improve customer satisfaction, and coincidentally it's usually the thing the company least wants to do. So survey responses that tell them "Do the obvious thing" just get ignored.
mojomark 3y ago
[flagged]
wffurr 3y ago
[flagged]
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  Dr Bronner's did it better. http://all-one-typography.com/Dr_Bronners-label-Peppermint-32oz.jpg http://all-one-typography.com/Dr_Bronners-label-Peppermint-3...
  - wffurr 3y ago
    Huh, my comment got flagged off. I guess I missed the clue train!
gbxyz 3y ago
mods, I suggest adding (1999) to the post title.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
netbioserror 3y ago
There are some really good points here that are soured by an almost high-school-socialist level of rhetoric. Probably would've been better written as a continuous essay or treatise instead of a list. I'm sure, 24 years later, the authors would acknowledge that. But they can probably say the same in not so many words: The Internet has enabled customers and employees to be far more informed and aware than ever before; companies trying to depersonalize and reduce will die, while those trying to personalize and communicate can win the loyalty of both. I doubt publicly traded companies are even capable of this, and with the money printer constantly spinning, I'm sadly unsure they need to be.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  on the one hand, denounce meme-level political analysis ("Socialism"); then in the next breath, declare that the money-printer is on, favoring Big Corp, and helplessly observe that they will not and maybe cannot, do 6th grade level social citizenship. OK!
  - netbioserror 3y ago
    >social citizenship Good god man, grow some self-awareness.
  - superq 3y ago
    This is a great comment for its unintentional humor.
ryandrake 3y ago
The "power of conversations among people" espoused by the Cluetrain Manifesto never really panned out, thanks to companies poisoning the well by absolutely cramming it full with spam, SEO, Social Media Marketing, astroturf, fake reviews, soon ChatGPT, and by Social Media companies filling it with outrage and battles. Genuine conversations now pretty much happen within small filter bubbles. Most of what you see on the broad, open Internet is either Marketing, "Influencing," or outrage. We've left the Cluetrain and ended up in the Dark Forest Internet[1]. 1: https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  This is why we can't have nice things.
- bilsbie 3y ago
  An elegant sentiment from a more civilized age.
- bilsbie 3y ago
  This could be an amazing opportunity though. It’s what everyone wants.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Totally agree (well, most people), but as I recall there was some language in the TikTok bill subjecting any onlinecommunity over X people being subject to "monitoring" by the government. This advice should maybe be heeded: https://youtu.be/WP-lrftLQaQ https://youtu.be/WP-lrftLQaQ
    - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
      [dead]
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Is that just a factor of time plus the tendency for gamification of <identified positive thing>? KPIs become meaningless over an amount of time depending on how well thought out they are. All things need to evolve to outrun the corruption of what they used to be. Feels like this is a universal truth.
heisenbit 3y ago
Corporation have capital and can shoulder risk. To the degree that medium to long term insights have value their access to capital ads value.
- superq 3y ago
  "capital ads value"
shove 3y ago
Oldie but goodie
santoshalper 3y ago
Two things stand out: 1. I really miss the days when I was optimistic about the internet. Though to be clear, 1999 was not peak internet optimism and this was more of a reaction to us already seeing signs of corporate takeover. 2. If we're being real, a lot of this is seriously pretentious bullshit.
- jrm4 3y ago
  But you NEED the stuff we call "pretentious bullshit" to be a useful "Overton Window" endpoint. This is precisely why I'm so pro e.g. Richard Stallman/GPL et al. Not because I actually do all that shit, but because I recognize how useful an absolute weirdo at that endpoint is.
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    Without those at each far end, the centre would be shifted closer to the other. An incomplete theory of mine is around problems of using behavioural patterns to identify potential criminals. Not all deviant behaviour is criminal, but identifying deviance and somehow cutting it off or minimising it, just means that the next inner level of the bell curve of that deviancy becomes the next target. Eg. Everyone who's killed an animal larger than a mouse put on a watch list for sociopathy. Ok, so once that's done, we need yet another level to score some cheap political points. Ok, how about kids who have amputated their siblings dolls, yeah, they're fucking nutters... It's an incomplete theory because it fails the slippery slope logical fallacy, potentially fatally. But behaviour patterns are already used to predict where crime will occur based on where it has previously occurred. This feels like an ever tightening loop that acts to increasingly justify itself whilst trapped in an echo chamber of our very own unintentional design.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      I have no idea what you are even trying to say here because the underlying idea is so far from mine. Also -- uh, black enslaver? hope I'm reading that wrong
      - 3y ago
nologic01 3y ago
What a complete fail... Subtitle: The end of business as usual. At least they got that right: Today Apple hit the 3 trillion valuation mark. The very concept that the economy is a decentralized something is up for discussion.
- parasubvert 3y ago
  Not a fail - a raging success of a manifesto that was largely ignored by the old guard and the results were, predictably, winner take all for those that saw it coming. And by now the conversations have been corrupted because the old guard did eventually catch on and flooded the channels with shit. That said, what does the valuation of a company have to do with its participation in an economy? The only implication to me is that some corporations are so valuable that there's no way they can be taken over by a hostile entity. Revenue is a more important indicator. Apple is big at $400 billion, but there are lots of other big companies.
polynomial 3y ago
Wait, so the fundamental principle of the Cluetrain Manifesto is that "Markets are conversations" and we've just invented the greatest (in some sense of the word) conversational (literally: chat) technology or all time? (or at least in in our relatively short history) Can't even imagine what Rageboy would have had to say about all this.
- superq 3y ago
  read that way, pretty soon Alexa will order things you don't need. (so, no change except for who's placing the order)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mpweiher 3y ago
Related: The Gluetrain Manifesto: https://web.archive.org/web/20041022054701/http://gluetrain.com/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041022054701/http://gluetrain....
api 3y ago
(7) is completely wrong. Hyperlinks do not subvert hierarchy due to network effects combined with the fact that the lookup system, DNS, is hierarchical. Nobody uses hyperlinks anymore except to link into social media silos or “up” to media sources. The web as an actual web died and nobody noticed. It’s pretty thoroughly dead now. Creating your own home page or even a hosted blog is now a weird niche activity.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  I'd argue that creating your own homepage or a hosted blog were always a niche activity. Though at one time, so was posting any online content whatsoever, and the first small niche was a much larger share of the second small niche.
- jrm4 3y ago
  I'd hold the phone on that one, literally today? I think there's not a bad chance right now that social media somewhat collapses and people significantly return to more things like that; a possible happy medium with -- ideally federated services, but if not, even just like 20 or so twitters and reddits instead of two?
  - api 3y ago
    If the fediverse ever gets big enough to be a juicy marketing target or able to sway elections then the same bad actors that destroyed e-mail, Usenet, the open web, and social media will come for it.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      I don't disagree that it will try, but I'm generally pretty hopeful that it won't be all bad.
- parasubvert 3y ago
  This is far too cynical. Firstly, DNS is mostly irrelevant to hyperlinks, it's been a long time since everyone fought over getting "the right .com name". With a proliferation of TLDs, is this is really even a big deal? The web is still there as the foundation and glue. It's not dead, it's used all the time for eCommerce, support, documentation, research, forums, and most importantly for universal interoperability across whatever "silos" are out there. URI, HTTP, MIME, HTML, and JavaScript are literally the glue that holds even the silos together, or allows our myriad devices to interoperate with them. How else did TikTok take off? Hyperlinks! There's no central hierarchy , the network effects of the web won out. I think the issue people have is they confuse network effects with even distribution. But that's never been the case: think of the countryside Vs cities. Network effects often lead to huge clusters. Even peek web circa 2012 had Google Reader as the ultimate blog aggregation experience. All the architecture and tech of the web is sitting there ready to be used. It's up to software creators to make decentralized software people actually want to use.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Two significant past discussions: The Cluetrain Manifesto (2022)| 42 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395587> The Cluetrain Manifesto (2016) | 31 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220242>
thom 3y ago
A spiritual successor to the Cluetrain was Hugh McLeod's Hughtrain: https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-hughtrain-mkii/ https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-hughtrain-mki... If you read it in the most cynical possible way, it actually came to fruition in a way the Cluetrain didn't.
parasubvert 3y ago
I find it fascinating that some comments think this was wrong. Yes it was pretentious and arrogant. But it wasn't wrong. It was right: too right, and was winner take all for those who figured it out (Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, many others), before spam invaded and made the conversations much harder. The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still the decentralized underpinning of the internet, but people have forgotten why they're there. It's almost an archeological dig for the new generation. It's a foundation ready for decentralization but tech folks were frustrated when people CHOOSE to live in large cluster silos, socially (eg. meta, tiktok, Twitter etc) . But in most other domains with network effects, this clustering isn't entirely surprising. Network effects is often a euphemism for "winner take all". Same confusion as to why AOL was so popular for so long. But the web moves on. Ask yourself: how did TikTok take off? Or how do new sites come about and grow (as is happening with Bluesky, Mastodon and others? How many businesses do I transact eCommerce with directly? If we truly had a big bad hierarchical dystopia , it wouldn't happen. It requires hard work to get noticed, but the hyperlink (and HTTP/MIME/HTML/JS) is still the foundation of all of our interop. which is why Elon shutting off Twitter unauthenticated hyperlinking this weekend is the biggest signal he wants to tank the site: no more network effects for you! What's interesting to me is that technical folks never quite "got" the web, the way the mailing list archives from the 90s understood the web. It was built, deliberately. People now assume it's a utility that was always there. They've not experienced true silos (CompuServe Vs AOL Vs GEnie, anyone?). But still, the evolution stalled. RSS Feeds were the closest we got to an evolution , though ActivityPub is finally showing promise 15 years after AtomPub belly flopped. People have to build compelling software to make users want a more decentralized experience, and that's hard to fund when your investors usually want winner take all network effects.
- nologic01 3y ago
  Well, if you narrow enough the scope of the analysis a lot of things can be "right". My brilliant manifesto talks about cars, with round wheels, on paved streets, taking people places - it will be a wonderful democratization of travel. Come buy a car. I forgot to manifest that the road is severely inclined and the cars lack breaks. > The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still the decentralized underpinning of the internet The web is whatever Chrome and Safari say it is [1]. Its not winner-takes-all on some level playing field. Its a winner-takes ALL, including the playing field. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
skyechurch 3y ago
>Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. At the present moment the human voice online is none of these things, as the market pressures which led to the hated 80s corporate speak are now felt by everyone - the risk one might "lose subscriber" or that one could be "cancelled". If you want a real human conversation now you have to use the abandonware IRL protocol.
dredmorbius 3y ago
"Cluetrain", J.P. Barlow's Manifesto, and ESR's Cathedral & Bazaar were all influential and widely-lauded at the time, but strike me now as various degrees of misguided and/or naive. All three documents were highly aspirational, in that they pointed to a vision of the world the authors wanted to see, though the specific mechanisms and implications were less than clear, and over time, many dark and/or futile implications have emerged. "Cluetrain" specifically is a bunch of fuzzy-but-attractive-sounding aphorisms though with little in the way of specific mechnisms for bringing them about, or even an understanding of how media landscapes tend to be utterly dominated by centralised, powerful, institutional (corporate, governmental, religious, ideological) interests --- all the more ironic as the authors themselves came from this space. My sense is that RMS's GNU Manifesto is an exception to this tendency to failure: it painted a clear hazard, a specific mechanism (copyleft), and a goal, all of which seem to have largely stood the test of the intervening decades, and has produced actual useful tangible results. Though one might argue that JPB's Manifesto has given us the EFF. This hasn't guaranteed the freedoms Barlow championed, and it's run up against the dark sides of his vision, but it does at least continue the fight, which it seems freedom and democratic ideals always entail. "Cluetrain" though seems far more like mush to me. (I'd really like to hear from those who disagree with that assessment.)
- PaulRobinson 3y ago
  I disagree with the assessment. Sort of. It’s true that it is not pointing to a clear hazard, a mechanism and a goal. But it is a handbook to what happened over the next 20 years. Think carefully about how some challenger businesses went into established markets, and how successful they were because they followed these ideas. Southwest airlines. Robinhood. Airbnb. Think about how they talk to customers vs the old guard. Think about how YouTube adverts typically work vs TV adverts. Then think about some recent conflict between people and “corporate”: Twitter, Reddit, GameStop. Reread the manifesto with these examples in mind. You might say “so what? It just seems kind of obvious”, but it’s hard to remember, in 1999 this was radical - some people said nonsense - thinking. If you were starting a new consumer business, you’d need a marketing agency and an ad agency and you’d have to buy full pages or TV spots to get going and it was ruinous. What cluetrain predicted is all that was going to get way, way, way easier. And here we are. Search and social ads you can target in minutes, YouTube ads you can film on your phone, and social media accounts where you can have conversations human to human. Go look at the Netflix social media strategy and tell me is that more cluetrain, or more the old school? It might not have the specificity you want, but it still somehow ended up being completely accurate and useful to those who could take action with it.
paulorlando 3y ago
Back in 2011 I looked at how many of the URLs in the book had survived. For a Dotcom era book, I think they held up pretty well. Anyone want to update the list? https://startupsunplugged.com/startup-communities/random-factoid-about-cluetrain-manifesto-and-url-longevity/ https://startupsunplugged.com/startup-communities/random-fac... Cluetrain.com: y. Haveanotherbeer.com: n (fake). (bought by Google) deja.com: n; liveperson.com: y. (with diff name) chrisworth.com: y. Boy-are-we-clueless.com: n. Dunkindonuts.com: y. Dunkindonutssucks.com: n. Ford.com: y. Wdc.com: y. Whitehouse.com: n. Whitehouse.gov: y. Thesphere.net: n. mancala.com: ?. panix.com: y. (not updated) rageboy.com: y.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/
CommieBobDole 3y ago
Why is thesis #83 a spam link for boner pills? It used to be "We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.". Now it's "Research in the field of medicine. Now it is easy to buy viagra online for men."
- mherdeg 3y ago
  Nicely spotted. Did the domain lapse and was it re-registered and rehosted for promotional purposes?

87 points by KingOfCoders 3y ago

[flagged]

The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined were major influences on my young brain. I'm glad I, for some reason, decided to read them. Over the years I had several chances to meet Doc Searls and David Weinberger and it was a case of it being a good idea to meet your heroes. They were just very nice to an eager young kid.

Mizza 3y ago
Personally, I can't believe I ever fell for this bullshit, but it is nice to remember the optimistic feelings I had during that era. Now, I am a cynic, and that I ever thought "markets are conversations" was a profound idea and not the Ritalin ramblings of the most annoying guy in the world fills me with self-cringe.
- itomato 3y ago
  But now they seem to be. That’s about all they are. It’s so transactional that the transaction mode has become the relationship, platform and product all-in-one. Right down to Credit Cards and Car Insurance.
  - Mizza 3y ago
    I guess my objection - besides the tedious style - isn't that it's incorrect, but that it's _bad_. I find it deeply unnerving when corporations act like people. I don't want to have a "conversation" with a company if it means they've used surveillance to stalk and harass me across the internet so they can build a data profile of me and my habits. I don't want my life controlled by ruthless monopolies with happy human faces. The result is not corporations that are more human, it's people that are less human. There is a straight line from Cluetrain to OnlyFans fleshmarkets. It worked, and it sucks.
    - parasubvert 3y ago
      So, don't give the corporations you don't like your data? Many people DO want to have these conversations and are okay with surveillance of a sort if they get something of perceived value in return. OTOH, there are plenty of ways to avoid surveillance via ad blocking and onion routers (which is now shipping on all Apple devices). I'm also not sure why you think people are less human in all of this is, or why OnlyFans is "bad". Commercial porn has existed for 50 years, and like the music industry, has had its economics upended because of Mindgeek (or Reddit, or ...) giving most porn away in exchange for surveillance rather than money. OnlyFans brings the 70's NYC Times Square peepshow back to the mainstream. The cluetrain manifesto and that crowd all saw this coming over a decade before the mobile smart phone put this into hyperdrive; to me it's not "bad" it's just "different from the 90s".
    - prepend 3y ago
      > I don't want to have a "conversation" with a company if it means they've used surveillance to stalk and harass me across the internet so they can build a data profile of me and my habits. I feel similarly. I don’t want my grocery store or restaurant to understand me. I just want to buy a gallon of milk and don’t want to discuss my day with them. And I don’t want my order called out to my name. Just give me a number and I’ll listen for it. I think the idea is that relationships make me spend more money. But I don’t want to spend more money on groceries. I want to spend as little as possible. Also in this category is companies that want to wish me happy birthday or happy pride month or anything else related to what I want from them. I don’t need my water company to wish me happy new year, just provide water efficiently.
      - dreamcompiler 3y ago
        A major credit card company (whose cards are usually green) used to bug me with surveys asking what else they could do to make me happier. My answer: Get more merchants to accept your card. How about cash back? No, cash back means I paid too much in the first place. How about free movie tickets once a year? Won't make me use my card more. How about free access to airport lounges (as long as you pay an extra $500 a year)? No. Then what can we do? Improve. Your card's. Acceptance. Hmmm. How about a free credit checkup? Aaaand this is why I no longer respond to surveys: There's often one blindingly obvious thing a company can do to improve customer satisfaction, and coincidentally it's usually the thing the company least wants to do. So survey responses that tell them "Do the obvious thing" just get ignored.

mojomark 3y ago

[flagged]

wffurr 3y ago

[flagged]

marcus0x62 3y ago
Dr Bronner's did it better. http://all-one-typography.com/Dr_Bronners-label-Peppermint-32oz.jpg http://all-one-typography.com/Dr_Bronners-label-Peppermint-3...
- wffurr 3y ago
  Huh, my comment got flagged off. I guess I missed the clue train!

gbxyz 3y ago

mods, I suggest adding (1999) to the post title.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

netbioserror 3y ago

There are some really good points here that are soured by an almost high-school-socialist level of rhetoric. Probably would've been better written as a continuous essay or treatise instead of a list. I'm sure, 24 years later, the authors would acknowledge that. But they can probably say the same in not so many words: The Internet has enabled customers and employees to be far more informed and aware than ever before; companies trying to depersonalize and reduce will die, while those trying to personalize and communicate can win the loyalty of both. I doubt publicly traded companies are even capable of this, and with the money printer constantly spinning, I'm sadly unsure they need to be.

mistrial9 3y ago
on the one hand, denounce meme-level political analysis ("Socialism"); then in the next breath, declare that the money-printer is on, favoring Big Corp, and helplessly observe that they will not and maybe cannot, do 6th grade level social citizenship. OK!
- netbioserror 3y ago
  >social citizenship Good god man, grow some self-awareness.
- superq 3y ago
  This is a great comment for its unintentional humor.

ryandrake 3y ago

The "power of conversations among people" espoused by the Cluetrain Manifesto never really panned out, thanks to companies poisoning the well by absolutely cramming it full with spam, SEO, Social Media Marketing, astroturf, fake reviews, soon ChatGPT, and by Social Media companies filling it with outrage and battles. Genuine conversations now pretty much happen within small filter bubbles. Most of what you see on the broad, open Internet is either Marketing, "Influencing," or outrage. We've left the Cluetrain and ended up in the Dark Forest Internet[1]. 1: https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
bilsbie 3y ago
An elegant sentiment from a more civilized age.
bilsbie 3y ago
This could be an amazing opportunity though. It’s what everyone wants.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Totally agree (well, most people), but as I recall there was some language in the TikTok bill subjecting any onlinecommunity over X people being subject to "monitoring" by the government. This advice should maybe be heeded: https://youtu.be/WP-lrftLQaQ https://youtu.be/WP-lrftLQaQ
  - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
    [dead]
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Is that just a factor of time plus the tendency for gamification of <identified positive thing>? KPIs become meaningless over an amount of time depending on how well thought out they are. All things need to evolve to outrun the corruption of what they used to be. Feels like this is a universal truth.

heisenbit 3y ago

Corporation have capital and can shoulder risk. To the degree that medium to long term insights have value their access to capital ads value.

superq 3y ago
"capital ads value"

shove 3y ago

Oldie but goodie

santoshalper 3y ago

Two things stand out: 1. I really miss the days when I was optimistic about the internet. Though to be clear, 1999 was not peak internet optimism and this was more of a reaction to us already seeing signs of corporate takeover. 2. If we're being real, a lot of this is seriously pretentious bullshit.

jrm4 3y ago
But you NEED the stuff we call "pretentious bullshit" to be a useful "Overton Window" endpoint. This is precisely why I'm so pro e.g. Richard Stallman/GPL et al. Not because I actually do all that shit, but because I recognize how useful an absolute weirdo at that endpoint is.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Without those at each far end, the centre would be shifted closer to the other. An incomplete theory of mine is around problems of using behavioural patterns to identify potential criminals. Not all deviant behaviour is criminal, but identifying deviance and somehow cutting it off or minimising it, just means that the next inner level of the bell curve of that deviancy becomes the next target. Eg. Everyone who's killed an animal larger than a mouse put on a watch list for sociopathy. Ok, so once that's done, we need yet another level to score some cheap political points. Ok, how about kids who have amputated their siblings dolls, yeah, they're fucking nutters... It's an incomplete theory because it fails the slippery slope logical fallacy, potentially fatally. But behaviour patterns are already used to predict where crime will occur based on where it has previously occurred. This feels like an ever tightening loop that acts to increasingly justify itself whilst trapped in an echo chamber of our very own unintentional design.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    I have no idea what you are even trying to say here because the underlying idea is so far from mine. Also -- uh, black enslaver? hope I'm reading that wrong
    - 3y ago

nologic01 3y ago

What a complete fail... Subtitle: The end of business as usual. At least they got that right: Today Apple hit the 3 trillion valuation mark. The very concept that the economy is a decentralized something is up for discussion.

parasubvert 3y ago
Not a fail - a raging success of a manifesto that was largely ignored by the old guard and the results were, predictably, winner take all for those that saw it coming. And by now the conversations have been corrupted because the old guard did eventually catch on and flooded the channels with shit. That said, what does the valuation of a company have to do with its participation in an economy? The only implication to me is that some corporations are so valuable that there's no way they can be taken over by a hostile entity. Revenue is a more important indicator. Apple is big at $400 billion, but there are lots of other big companies.

polynomial 3y ago

Wait, so the fundamental principle of the Cluetrain Manifesto is that "Markets are conversations" and we've just invented the greatest (in some sense of the word) conversational (literally: chat) technology or all time? (or at least in in our relatively short history) Can't even imagine what Rageboy would have had to say about all this.

superq 3y ago
read that way, pretty soon Alexa will order things you don't need. (so, no change except for who's placing the order)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mpweiher 3y ago

Related: The Gluetrain Manifesto: https://web.archive.org/web/20041022054701/http://gluetrain.com/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041022054701/http://gluetrain....

api 3y ago

(7) is completely wrong. Hyperlinks do not subvert hierarchy due to network effects combined with the fact that the lookup system, DNS, is hierarchical. Nobody uses hyperlinks anymore except to link into social media silos or “up” to media sources. The web as an actual web died and nobody noticed. It’s pretty thoroughly dead now. Creating your own home page or even a hosted blog is now a weird niche activity.

dredmorbius 3y ago
I'd argue that creating your own homepage or a hosted blog were always a niche activity. Though at one time, so was posting any online content whatsoever, and the first small niche was a much larger share of the second small niche.
jrm4 3y ago
I'd hold the phone on that one, literally today? I think there's not a bad chance right now that social media somewhat collapses and people significantly return to more things like that; a possible happy medium with -- ideally federated services, but if not, even just like 20 or so twitters and reddits instead of two?
- api 3y ago
  If the fediverse ever gets big enough to be a juicy marketing target or able to sway elections then the same bad actors that destroyed e-mail, Usenet, the open web, and social media will come for it.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    I don't disagree that it will try, but I'm generally pretty hopeful that it won't be all bad.
parasubvert 3y ago
This is far too cynical. Firstly, DNS is mostly irrelevant to hyperlinks, it's been a long time since everyone fought over getting "the right .com name". With a proliferation of TLDs, is this is really even a big deal? The web is still there as the foundation and glue. It's not dead, it's used all the time for eCommerce, support, documentation, research, forums, and most importantly for universal interoperability across whatever "silos" are out there. URI, HTTP, MIME, HTML, and JavaScript are literally the glue that holds even the silos together, or allows our myriad devices to interoperate with them. How else did TikTok take off? Hyperlinks! There's no central hierarchy , the network effects of the web won out. I think the issue people have is they confuse network effects with even distribution. But that's never been the case: think of the countryside Vs cities. Network effects often lead to huge clusters. Even peek web circa 2012 had Google Reader as the ultimate blog aggregation experience. All the architecture and tech of the web is sitting there ready to be used. It's up to software creators to make decentralized software people actually want to use.

dredmorbius 3y ago

Two significant past discussions: The Cluetrain Manifesto (2022)| 42 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395587> The Cluetrain Manifesto (2016) | 31 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220242>

thom 3y ago

A spiritual successor to the Cluetrain was Hugh McLeod's Hughtrain: https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-hughtrain-mkii/ https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-hughtrain-mki... If you read it in the most cynical possible way, it actually came to fruition in a way the Cluetrain didn't.

parasubvert 3y ago

I find it fascinating that some comments think this was wrong. Yes it was pretentious and arrogant. But it wasn't wrong. It was right: too right, and was winner take all for those who figured it out (Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, many others), before spam invaded and made the conversations much harder. The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still the decentralized underpinning of the internet, but people have forgotten why they're there. It's almost an archeological dig for the new generation. It's a foundation ready for decentralization but tech folks were frustrated when people CHOOSE to live in large cluster silos, socially (eg. meta, tiktok, Twitter etc) . But in most other domains with network effects, this clustering isn't entirely surprising. Network effects is often a euphemism for "winner take all". Same confusion as to why AOL was so popular for so long. But the web moves on. Ask yourself: how did TikTok take off? Or how do new sites come about and grow (as is happening with Bluesky, Mastodon and others? How many businesses do I transact eCommerce with directly? If we truly had a big bad hierarchical dystopia , it wouldn't happen. It requires hard work to get noticed, but the hyperlink (and HTTP/MIME/HTML/JS) is still the foundation of all of our interop. which is why Elon shutting off Twitter unauthenticated hyperlinking this weekend is the biggest signal he wants to tank the site: no more network effects for you! What's interesting to me is that technical folks never quite "got" the web, the way the mailing list archives from the 90s understood the web. It was built, deliberately. People now assume it's a utility that was always there. They've not experienced true silos (CompuServe Vs AOL Vs GEnie, anyone?). But still, the evolution stalled. RSS Feeds were the closest we got to an evolution , though ActivityPub is finally showing promise 15 years after AtomPub belly flopped. People have to build compelling software to make users want a more decentralized experience, and that's hard to fund when your investors usually want winner take all network effects.

nologic01 3y ago
Well, if you narrow enough the scope of the analysis a lot of things can be "right". My brilliant manifesto talks about cars, with round wheels, on paved streets, taking people places - it will be a wonderful democratization of travel. Come buy a car. I forgot to manifest that the road is severely inclined and the cars lack breaks. > The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still the decentralized underpinning of the internet The web is whatever Chrome and Safari say it is [1]. Its not winner-takes-all on some level playing field. Its a winner-takes ALL, including the playing field. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

skyechurch 3y ago

>Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. At the present moment the human voice online is none of these things, as the market pressures which led to the hated 80s corporate speak are now felt by everyone - the risk one might "lose subscriber" or that one could be "cancelled". If you want a real human conversation now you have to use the abandonware IRL protocol.

dredmorbius 3y ago

"Cluetrain", J.P. Barlow's Manifesto, and ESR's Cathedral & Bazaar were all influential and widely-lauded at the time, but strike me now as various degrees of misguided and/or naive. All three documents were highly aspirational, in that they pointed to a vision of the world the authors wanted to see, though the specific mechanisms and implications were less than clear, and over time, many dark and/or futile implications have emerged. "Cluetrain" specifically is a bunch of fuzzy-but-attractive-sounding aphorisms though with little in the way of specific mechnisms for bringing them about, or even an understanding of how media landscapes tend to be utterly dominated by centralised, powerful, institutional (corporate, governmental, religious, ideological) interests --- all the more ironic as the authors themselves came from this space. My sense is that RMS's GNU Manifesto is an exception to this tendency to failure: it painted a clear hazard, a specific mechanism (copyleft), and a goal, all of which seem to have largely stood the test of the intervening decades, and has produced actual useful tangible results. Though one might argue that JPB's Manifesto has given us the EFF. This hasn't guaranteed the freedoms Barlow championed, and it's run up against the dark sides of his vision, but it does at least continue the fight, which it seems freedom and democratic ideals always entail. "Cluetrain" though seems far more like mush to me. (I'd really like to hear from those who disagree with that assessment.)

PaulRobinson 3y ago
I disagree with the assessment. Sort of. It’s true that it is not pointing to a clear hazard, a mechanism and a goal. But it is a handbook to what happened over the next 20 years. Think carefully about how some challenger businesses went into established markets, and how successful they were because they followed these ideas. Southwest airlines. Robinhood. Airbnb. Think about how they talk to customers vs the old guard. Think about how YouTube adverts typically work vs TV adverts. Then think about some recent conflict between people and “corporate”: Twitter, Reddit, GameStop. Reread the manifesto with these examples in mind. You might say “so what? It just seems kind of obvious”, but it’s hard to remember, in 1999 this was radical - some people said nonsense - thinking. If you were starting a new consumer business, you’d need a marketing agency and an ad agency and you’d have to buy full pages or TV spots to get going and it was ruinous. What cluetrain predicted is all that was going to get way, way, way easier. And here we are. Search and social ads you can target in minutes, YouTube ads you can film on your phone, and social media accounts where you can have conversations human to human. Go look at the Netflix social media strategy and tell me is that more cluetrain, or more the old school? It might not have the specificity you want, but it still somehow ended up being completely accurate and useful to those who could take action with it.

paulorlando 3y ago

Back in 2011 I looked at how many of the URLs in the book had survived. For a Dotcom era book, I think they held up pretty well. Anyone want to update the list? https://startupsunplugged.com/startup-communities/random-factoid-about-cluetrain-manifesto-and-url-longevity/ https://startupsunplugged.com/startup-communities/random-fac... Cluetrain.com: y. Haveanotherbeer.com: n (fake). (bought by Google) deja.com: n; liveperson.com: y. (with diff name) chrisworth.com: y. Boy-are-we-clueless.com: n. Dunkindonuts.com: y. Dunkindonutssucks.com: n. Ford.com: y. Wdc.com: y. Whitehouse.com: n. Whitehouse.gov: y. Thesphere.net: n. mancala.com: ?. panix.com: y. (not updated) rageboy.com: y.

cratermoon 3y ago
https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/

CommieBobDole 3y ago

Why is thesis #83 a spam link for boner pills? It used to be "We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.". Now it's "Research in the field of medicine. Now it is easy to buy viagra online for men."

mherdeg 3y ago
Nicely spotted. Did the domain lapse and was it re-registered and rehosted for promotional purposes?