> "Cluetrain" though seems far more like mush to me.
Even after all these years, I have no real idea what Cluetrain is about, other than "consumers now have an internet full of information about products and services, companies will have to change how they market and sell stuff"
That, and the idea that ordinary individuals have much closer reach to a corporate marketing department than before. It all seems sort of boring and obvious now but remember in the 90s online shopping was mostly the digital equivalent to mail-order catalogs, marketing was very one-way through major media channels, etc, and stuff like the ideas in Cluetrain were very far from mainstream at the time.
Did your cable company talk to you in 1999 the way Netflix does on Twitter today? Does your hotel loyalty program talk to you the way Airbnb does? Does United talk to you the way Southwest does? Do they all treat you in the same way as a customer?
If so, yeah, you’re right. This was a waste of time.
If not, the reason for that difference is likely to be found in cluetrain.
It seems obvious now, but it absolutely wasn’t in 1999.
My own sense of it is mostly that Cluetrain is attempting to describe and justify a new modality of relationships based on networks which are both many-to-many and bidirectional.
Ultimately ... this seems to me to reflect either a misunderstanding of how networks work, or a severe underappreciation of the feedback-at-scale problem.
The most notable coverage of the latter is James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State.
The "mass" models of manufacturing, merchandising, and media are all based on the agricultural notion of broad-casting (that is, literally, scattering seed over tilled ground) not only in the sowing sense, but in the harvesting sense. A farmer of staple crops doesn't have individual relationships with each plant, but tends to entire fields or orchards, and utilises maximally efficient methods of collecting in the crop as well.
In broadcast media, the harvest mechanism is advertising. It's interesting to note that even as broadcast media was developing, agriculture had been adopting more precise modes of planting and cultivating, with Jethro Tull's[1] seed drill being the archetype. Ad-tech's targeted advertising bears some relationship to this. For manufacturing, a key factor was the sales channel, itself often through large chain stores (Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Woolworths, A&P Markets, Safeway, Macy's, etc., in the US), which handled the interface with individual shoppers. Both manufacturers and merchandisers themselves relied heavily on advertising for branding. Interactions with customers were largely limited to sales, returns, and for some classes of goods, service (also frequently independently provisioned, though often through licensed or registered agents).
Cluetrain seemed to think somehow that there would be vast improvements in scale, capacity, and quality of direct communications between manufacturers, merchants, and service operators, on the one hand, and their customers on the other. In practice ... that doesn't seem to work, and one of the notable characteristics of Internet monopolies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, ...) is "that there's no way to reach anyone". The same information-technology lever which permits a small team of a few tens to thousands to serve millions to billions ... becomes a vast liability when those billions are upset or dissatisfied over something.
I've been having something of a back-and-forth with dang over HN's occasional role in this as customer-support-of-last-resort. My feeling is that this is a useful service and in fact something of an obligation given YC's role in creating the problem. Dang's argued that it goes against the fundamental ethos of HN in stimulating intellectual curiosity, largely on account of repetitive repetitious repetitiveness.[2] I can see that, in part. On the other hand, the underlying problem itself is definitely a hard one, and has evaded satisfactory resolution for decades. (Or longer.)
I've been mulling how these tensions might possibly be mediated in some way.
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Notes:
1. The agriculturalist, not the flute-heavy rock band named for him.
> My own sense of it is mostly that Cluetrain is attempting to describe and justify a new modality of relationships based on networks which are both many-to-many and bidirectional.
Sort of like Twitter and forums in the days when you could comment on what the company was saying and the replies got the same distribution as the PR.
There are too many things we can no longer have because they will be overwhelmed by spam.
Damned good point and one I'd utterly omitted in my prior comment. Yes, of course, feedback channels also get overwhelmed by actors with ulterior and/or malicious motives. See recent HN discussions on fake reviews and Yelp abuse. Or even encouraging fraudulent credit card transactions with competing merchants.
A friend coined what I call "Woozle's Epistemic Paradox", paraphrasing slightly:
"As epistemic systems become used more widely or by influential groups, there is substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place."
The general notion isn't original to her, though that formulation circa 2017 was my first encounter with it.
My takeaway from Cluetrain was not that there would be actual humans communicating. Point 3: "Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice." Key word being sound, here. Many of the rest of the points discuss how to sound human, but not necessarily how to be human.
Even after all these years, I have no real idea what Cluetrain is about, other than "consumers now have an internet full of information about products and services, companies will have to change how they market and sell stuff"