Sign up for news
Archives

What? You mean not all endeavors to capitalize on the creativity of crowds (to borrow phrasing from James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds) are a spectacular hit? So Heinz, in an advertising contest for it’s ketchup, has found out.

My snarky, but I’d argue amusing, catch of this typo, and Raph Koster’s post about not being snobby about user generated content, has got me wanting to clarify a few thoughts on Web 2.0. (Though I doubt that post was even referring to me, in that I generally doubt anyone reads this blog other than those who specifically post, link, or otherwise interact with me about it – just a certain pessimism I employ in any creative endeavor).

First off – user generated content is cool. As someone who gets paid to do creative work, I know how rewarding it can be and because of that I try to encourage folks I come into contact with to pursue expressing themselves creatively in any way shape or form. A lot of time folks express apprehension over being bad at it – but mostly everybody’s bad at it at first. Or some folks think just because they’re not going to put out Shakespeare they shouldn’t write, for instance. I try to convince them putting out Shakespeare isn’t the point, it’s just the existential pleasure that comes from one, expressing yourself, and two, seeing people enjoy and be affected by that (I don’t use the phrase existential pleasure when I do this, though). Shakespeare was, I imagine, much more concerned with those two things then being better than… uh, Francis Bacon? Er, something like that.

So lowering the barrier for people to feel that is cool. Very cool. Check.

But that’s not Web 2.0.

The model that’s worked really well for games is that, hey, people buy a game. They’re entertained. They can then also create new portions of the game and share them with other players. The game creators take the time to ensure their product has entertainment value, and then share the ability to create entertainment with their users – indirectly, possibly, not always, enhancing the value of their own product. But the focus is typically on providing value to their consumer than it is simply increasing the value of their product via a network effect (although the former can get you the latter).

How’s that different from Web 2.0? Well, the barrier to creation is none, most companies give away their tools or services for free. (Although maybe they have higher tiers of users/subscription types).

Which leaves companies to focus on trying to monetize (god I hate that fucking word) their users’ contributions. Let’s take a quick look at that word – if someone wanted to make money off a better product or by giving more value to their consumers, they would say that. To “monetize” something, is try and look for value where there currently is none. And so it becomes easy to look for opportunities to charge people (maybe not always the consumer) instead of looking for opportunities of giving them value for their dollar.

Now Web 2.0 sites have gotten better at this, so they start making lots of money. What do the users get? Nothing really, other than attention based on their work (I’m gonna get back to this one). One might say it’s a symbiotic relationship, but if you compare what one side gets vs. the other, it seems to be a bit more parasitic – the Web 2.0 companies simply bite many pieces of lots of people than just biting one big piece out of one person. I just don’t think Web 2.0 companies focus as heavily on empowering their users as an end in and of itself, as the games who have sucessfully explored user-created content have, than empowering their ability to make money off of their users.

The next problem is the type of content that is rewarded on Web 2.0 sites. Quality work isn’t the defining factor of success. It’s anything that will get you attention, since that’s the only value users of these sites get. It’s a lot easier to make something sensationalistic and crude to get attention than it is to make something thought provoking or with emotional depth. It’s not just that there’s a lot of crap, it’s the priorities of the communities that are creating it. If creative expression was in fact the primariy value that culture rewarded, the content would be different (most of it would still be crap, and a small portion of it would be good, but it would be fundamentally different content across the board). As it is, truly creative expression is allowed but not necessarily rewarded, so it tends to be on the fringe. So we get a lot of sensationalistic crap, and a small portion of really entertaining, but still sensationalistic, crap. Although the use of the second crap is my own value judgement. And to be fair, I readily admit a lot of my own professional work falls under that same designation.

Which gets to to main difference between “users” and “creators” (Raph Koster argues there is none, or it’s artificial). There is and it’s not in the resulting work – the defining factor is their level of commitment. “Creators” – like people who upload videos to YouTube that are truly interested in making film – are going to spend more time on it. Eventually they will tend to want the expressive power they can’t get on anything like a Web 2.0 site, because they’ll get better at creating in their medium. So while lowering the barriers to creative expression is cool, don’t expect the media of Web 2.0 sites to effectively replace any other media (another big sell of Web 2.0).

That spectrum doesn’t end with a creator. There’s a part of it that most people, on or off the spectrum, ignore. For lack of a better description, this is the myth-maker. The modern-day shaman. This type of creator has realized their content has a role to play in society at large (a role typically played by mythologies in older cultures) – to help shape it and act as a positive force in it. They have taken upon themselves to play this role, this responsibility, because no one else does or will. It’s a fundamental role but one that gets overlooked a lot, even by people who are at the very height of their creative ability. And when people talk about Web 2.0 and user created content being the Next Big Thing(tm), they also are ignoring the power that people who take on this role have. Being able to upload your content and share it with others is not going to make anyone make that perspective shift to myth-maker – it just takes a lot more than that it would seem.

5 Responses to Web 2.suck

  • Patrick says:

    Remember, crap leads to more fertile soil, which leads to more healthy organic systems emerging thereof.

    Also, I find you use of the term “bite” a bit pejorative, a business needs cash flow and preferably, profitable cash flow, so “monetizing” at some point is nessecary. I can be negative sum for the community, but I think its clear ot both of us that that is not sustainable. If you look at YouTube, which hasn’t been seeing massive cash-flows from revenues paid by companies using it for negative-sum marketing campaigns, this is illustrated. I think you’re a bit biased because you work for EA, a company which, Club Pogo subscriptions not-withstanding, is the king of getting people to pay one big sum for content. There are other business models, perhaps better ones. Models that distribute more widely the costs and contributions. I think you’re going to see more experimentation out there in that wild west, so thats where I’m heading. By this metaphor, I’m currently in like, eastern Oklahoma, trying to plough through to Nevada by the end of the year.

  • borut says:

    Hmm, well I can see the argument that even given the existing environment of content, more experimentation may eventually lead to more benefits. But I don’t know that I’m really convinced this experimentation is driven by Web 2.0 sites – would it be happening anyway? Are we just more aware of it because people are empowered to share it? If someone’s passionate about expressing themselves, there’s usually lot a lot of things that will get in the way of that, large internet infrastructure notwithstanding. The sharing becomes a factor when people in turn are really creatively inspiring each other through the small things they’re sharing, and you get a lot of cross pollination of ideas. Have there been any good Web 2.0 examples of this? Most of the ones I can think of are all game related.

    I do find it funny that you’d say I was biased as an EA employee – I’ve only worked here for 4 months after all… And I’m pretty sure at some point in my life I expressed to other people that I would never work here. :)

    I don’t know if I’d say EA is the “king of getting people to pay for one big sum of content” – in that they’re the biggest game publisher, maybe.

    Although I definitely agree has EA made a large number of questionable decisions in the “charge money for something” vs. providing actual value, ala Battlefield cheats for the 360 (which is however an example of not charging one big lump sum for something). :)

    By bite I really mean to emphasize the fact that there are costs people often don’t realize in using those sites. It does take a chunk of time & energy out of a person to get value from those sites, but maybe just a little bit of your time gets just a little bit of value, and that’s ok. That’s about how I use Flickr. But the fact that they’re analyzing my photos to sell that information to other people has the potential to go to many, many bad places (currently I believe it’s only the model of camera used, but add some image recognition algorithms and I’m not feeling very comfortable about using Flickr.)

    I still say the model of saying we’re going to provide users with tangible value first, then empower creativity, does more to actually empower creativity. Because people don’t have to resort to looking for the only value they get from the product by posting their work (and how that changes what they will make), they become more inclined to actually be creative. I suspect. :)

  • Gilbert Bernstein says:

    Don’t get too glum. At least you’ve got random readers who respond, which is more than a lot of blogs get.

    The value of a site like youtube might not be so much in empowering creators as in widening one part of the media production chain. It’s not a revolution of the whole chain, but it did such a good job with stage that the bottleneck has been shifted out to the difficulty of creation and of getting recognition, rather than bottlenecking on distribution.

    Just today I saw a paper video (on youtube) for a Eurographics paper being linked to by a music/video hobbyist site. Alternately, you could take the insane amount of buzz that Jeff Han’s multitouch project up at NYU generated. Until recently, I don’t think researchers could possibly hope to be able to communicate like that to the general public. It was just too hard to distribute the necessary media.

    I’m not sure if this is more of just an issue of internet distribution as opposed to more traditional means, but it does seem like some of these web 2.0 services are becoming important substrates for the web, similar to google, or the AIM protocol/service.

    … (long and possibly unnecessary)

    Well, so if you look at the previous examples, you have the researchers conducting a shit load of research and making videos. (which they were going to do anyways) and then you have these blogs, which are scouring for and filtering content for their readers. You could view youtube in this case as easing the job of both parties. Not that the blog couldn’t have linked to a video download from the university page before, but having youtube host the video, and allow the blog to embed it on their page does a lot to making things easier on both parties.

  • Martin Alterisio says:

    If you led an army against self-proclaimed “web 2.0” I’ll be behind you all the way. It doesn’t have to be an army, just a raging mob armed with banners reading “O’Reilly: SHUT UP!” will do.

    —- WARNING: HEAVY BIASED RANT FOLLOWING —-

    Once upon a time we had a dream called the web, a place for all to share a thought, chat, and where everyone had a chance to participate in its conception. Then they came… the marketing people: “Wow! What a nice idea, let’s make it our own and earn some bucks on the process!”.

    They did something we didn’t thought of, hiring graphic designers, “Cool! Rounded borders!”. But there wasn’t enough budget so designers had to code the site too, no problem, “even my 10 year old kid can code in PHP, Perl or Javascript”.

    But maybe that was a good thing, because no software architect would have ever dared to design a fat client on Javascript… But, oh! my browser is consuming double the memory of the Java Virtual Machine, and some years before we dismissed the Applet idea because it was such a memory clogger, how’s that for ironic?

    You know what I think? I’ll stick to my old round-shaped wheel, it just work fine, I don’t see any point on using this “Wheel 2.0” of yours.

    —-

    Sorry for not sticking to the silent-reader stereotype as always, I’m just an user.

  • borut says:

    Gilbert: Oh, my pessism is mainly a tool for improving my own work (you can’t make it better if you can’t think about how it sucks) – but thanks. :) And I do appreciate the comments.

    That’s true about how YouTube acts as infrastructure to enhance the ecosystem of posting/filtering ideas. But for any particular application (like video, or photo sharing), that means one winner will pretty much dominate most of the others in providing their one service in the infrastructure – it’s just not this revolution that is promised in many places. Especially, I’m sure, many recent internet company business plans. :)