Let Go and Haul: Happy Halloween / lessons from the dancefloor đŚ
Week 43, 2018 â Brooklyn
Journey: where weâre at
For me, this month has been prioritizing systems design work â both in terms of the platform/navigation and the brand. I spent a few hours hiding under a blanket from the gross rainstorm yesterday flipping words around for our âbrand pillarsâ and it was so nice to feel somewhat competent at something lol. So much of being a founder is doing things you donât know how to do / are figuring out how to do, itâs actually a lil strange to do something that feels like âoh I got thisâ. I wonder what that does to a brain after a while.
Weekly demos have been getting pretttttty exciting recently. Some of the ML stuff weâre working on is blowing my mind, but youâll have to wait and see ;-)
Journal: what I learned
Iâve been thinking a lot about community recently. What a good / bad / absent one feels like; how we built community at Last.fm and This Is My Jam, what I learned from interacting with the Vine community. Lessons, mistakes, pure un-replicable serendipity, and how online communities have evolved over time.
When did we made the shift from from generally calling communities âsocial networksâ or âsocial platformsâ? Did it happen around the same time we thought it would be okay to just throw everyone on a platform in a big pile and let them do more or less whatever they want under the banner of free speech? I wonder.
When we use a more technical term that is a level of abstraction away from the thing weâre really talking about, we become more removed from it. Sometimes this is deliberate â for example, medical students are trained to use technical language that create emotional distance between the person learning to perform surgery and a cadaver on the operating table. Christian Madsbjerg writes about this in The Moment of Clarity, (a book I read years ago as part of Leisa Richeltâs UX Bookclub London. Thanks Leisa!) The author goes on to say âBut does the business practitioner need the same detachment from the human world? Why are we trying to distance ourselves from the people we claim to serve?â Other than times when certain types of emotional distance might be required during a nuanced negotiation for example â I wholeheartedly agree. Language that gets in the way of thinking about the person using the thing youâre making is danger danger.
And when you think about it this way, the differences in the sentences âbuilding a communityâ and âbuilding a social platformâ are pretty profound.
So how does one build a good community? After writing and editing countless lines of community guidelines, FAQs, answering thousands of user support emails, talking to users about their experiences and desires non-stop, designing moderation and safety systems etc etc. I think it primarily comes down to two key things:
1. Be clear about the rules up front
2. Actually enforce them
When I think about the real world, and the people I know who work in the service industry, this stuff is normal. The more âdangerousâ the community, the more strict the rules are. Restaurants reserve the right not to serve disruptive/disorderly patrons. Sometimes they have a small sign about this. My dad and sister are ski patrols. There are very clear signs in the mountains about what the rules are. If you disobey them you get your lift pass revoked (well, more likely they take you off the hill on the rescue toboggan after dragging your ass out of a snowbank, but same thing really).
As a lifetime concert/club-goer, music is one of the best places to study community and how to safely bring people together for an event. Recently Iâve seen a trend in Brooklyn parties that clearly states what the rules are, has multiple posters throughout the venue/site to remind you of what they are, and security that will definitely chuck you out if you disobey them. The result? For the most part, people are respectful and nice. The environment is non-threatening. This, people, is what a good party should feel like. Hereâs an example from last night.
The internet has a lot to learn.
Jams: what Iâm listening to
So, I think itâs time to let you all in on the secret of this section. I missed the ritual of sharing one song a week so much with my old company This Is My Jam, that I resurrected it here in this newsletter and expanded it to include video too (because obviously).
Today some friends from London were tweeting about this tonight, and aw, itâs so nice to know other people miss that thing too! Now you know :) Okay, onto the jams.
This track from Swiss electronic artist SHALT.
This entire Spotify playlist that is a dream curation of true Balearic that I canât believe I just found out about. Thanks James Murphy. Wait for that moment when Donât You Know by Jan Hammer group comes on.
The production value in the LSD âThunderclouds video Kofi showed the team this week. Is making media in styles that are harder to copy on Insta a thing?