If tech CEOs are mayors then why do we expected so much from them?
I was reading an article from the newsletter called the Diff. Which the author gave the analogy that a tech CEO is an overworked mayor. Running a platform is like running a city. As your not just setting a price for your product. But deciding how your platform should be governed.
The newsletter argues:
Moreover, the problems Facebook has to solve are not the cosmic, inspiring ones. They’re pretty trivial, technocratic issues, mostly dealing with competing interest groups rather than competing ideologies. Zuckerberg isn’t an emperor, or even a prime minister; he’s the world’s most competent and most overworked mayor. The question of how much data an advertiser should be able to collect and use, and how they should be able to use it, isn’t a question with the same scope as a treaty or a labor law; it’s a lot more like deciding where a sewage treatment plant goes or choosing which bus route to cut.
This is understandable, platform businesses are more about choosing regulations and how to implement them. But Facebook or Twitter are not signing treaties or bills on these rules. But simply juggling between interest groups over an decision. Reminds me of the YouTube situation. In which YouTube must manage the interests of creators and the advertisers.
With other important interest groups like corporate entertainment and news companies. These interest groups bring YouTube money with adverting. So YouTube tends to give this group preferential treatment. Which YouTube creators deem unfair. Deciding when to notify when somebody uploads looks more like how the bin service should run.
Deciding to send a notification for a new upload. Looks closer to people arguing how bin service should be run. With different neighbourhoods lobbying for better service. Than the drafting of the Maastricht treaty.
Many of the social media problems are strictly practical matters. How do you regulate hate speech? What practices should you adopt to judge content? In twitter’s case do you have enough tools to even deal with the problem?
I'm starting to learn that a platform/marketplace business is a double-edged sword. Yes, you run the casino. So, you get the biggest profits out of the rest of the tech companies. But you have a lot of responsibility. With people expecting you to do magic with limited resources. Or in Facebook’s case make decisions with no good trade-offs.
Do you think going to congress is fun, while both sides are yelling at you are not doing enough? While the congresspeople have no clue what they are talking about.
Jack Dorsey made a joke about this in the recent hearings. On Twitter he made a poll with a simple question mark. With the answer yes and no. A clear jab at the type of questions the congresspeople was asking.
The termination of the ex-president was a hard decision to make. Where the tech leaders had to take into account their progressive employees, the legal liability of a person spouting falsehoods or even violence. Also considering the advertisers paying the platforms. And the fans of the former president.
When you have so many interest groups, some people are bound to lose out. In many companies, your stakeholders can be the shareholders, employees and customers. Some public companies only need to worry about the shareholders.
The article touches on this subject:
GM needs to balance the interests of drivers, dealers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders, but basically all of those groups either want to get more money or spend less money, so GM has the comparatively simple option of building a really good product. But if Facebook builds a really good product for spreading news, they’ve built an exceptional product for sharing fake news; if Google has a good way to surface information, it’s also a good way to surface misinformation.
Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg only get the final say because these decisions are very hard. Facebook is forced to follow local government instructions to remove material from its website. This can be normal stuff like abuse or explicit material. Or political sensitive stuff like removing opposition leaders of the local government, political groups etc.
One example I read on ProPublica was Facebook was removing some Kurdish material with advice from the Turkish government. What was interesting was the internal emails of the thinking. Which tried their best not remove the content. But once it became clear that a ban was imminent. Then opted for a geo-block of the page. Twitter did something similar with the Indian farmers. Geo-blocking best of the bad options when it comes to censorship. As the affected country can’t see the content but everybody else can. Also people with VPNs can still access it.
Removing content that does not cause harm is not something they want to do. As they are American companies with culture of free speech. But governments are an important interest groups that can’t be ignored. If not, they will be shut out of dozens of countries. And miss out on millions of users.
The decision to geoblock content rather than remove the material outright is like working out how to enforce the law in a city. Some people want a no-mercy style approach others to want a selected approach where only serious crime is prosecuted. Your job as the mayor is to take all of these interests and approaches into account. And make an optimal decision using given knowledge.
[use another example]
America tends to take a pretty relaxed approach to regulation. In China tech companies are always under the scrutiny of the government. In an article from the Protocol[insert link], a worker from ByteDance explained that the company had to follow directives from the government. Which called to censor certain words and topics.
It was up to ByteDance to implement the directives:
During livestreaming shows, every audio clip would be automatically transcribed into text, allowing algorithms to compare the notes with a long and constantly-updated list of sensitive words, dates and names, as well as Natural Language Processing models. Algorithms would then analyze whether the content was risky enough to require individual monitoring.
To follow the rules there is a lot of work done behind the scenes to make it possible. Just like a mayor will need to make new housing developments follow building regulations. Bytedance needs to find a way to follow the rules or the government will take action.
Being emperor of Facebook or Twitter does not seem fun does it?
The author notes:
This is the problem of platforms: they build a place, rather than a business, so they can’t enapsulate complexity by making everything transactional. The upside to this model is that it leads to long-term, high-margin growth. Building a platform means homesteading a new economic frontier, and then running it as an idealized government that taxes at the Laffer maximum and most lets participants alone.
Being a tech CEO is hard. Because your not just selling weights. But dealing with numerous people with competing interests. People will always have problems. So tech companies always in a cycle of dealing with demands.
From the newsletter:
Unfortunately, new property rights require an immense and tedious investment in codification. When you’ve solved product, sales, marketing, and operations, the only thing left is politics, and by its nature, politics doesn’t get solved.
How to run python scripts on Google Colab
Did you know that you run python scripts in Google Colab?
No? Neither did I.
Just learned from reading a reddit comment.
I’m going to show you how to do so in this blog post. So you use Google’s compute power to its full use.
If I learned about this earlier then many of my projects would make be easier.
If you saved your script in your google drive folder. Then click the mont google drive button. And provide permission.
I’m just going to have a simple hello world script:
print('Hello World, This is a Google Colab script')
Uploading locally, you can click the upload to session storage. Should work if you file is not too large.
Then you run this statement:
!python '/content/colab_script.py'
With the result:
Hello World, This is a Google Colab script
You can upload to drive using:
from google.colab import files
uploaded = files.upload()
for fn in uploaded.keys():
print('User uploaded file "{name}" with length {length} bytes'.format(
name=fn, length=len(uploaded[fn])))
First the file will be saved in session storage then you can move it into your drive folder.
NOTE: I don’t know if this is a bug. But uploading your py file via the normal file upload on google drive (not colab). Turns the py file into a gdoc file. Which google colab can’t run. So you one will need to upload your file though google colab. To access your files.
Hopefully you found this useful. Knowing you can run some of your scripts on Google Colab.
Where does creating a network and country begin?
I was reading an interview by the musical.ly co-founder and now VP of TikTok Alex Zhu. Describing how creating a social network is like making a new country.
This is how he describes it:
Building an influencer community is very similar to building a new country (economy) from the ground up. In the early stage, building a community from scratch is a lot like discovering new land. Imagine you just discover new land. Let's call it America. Now you want to build an economy. You want to grow the population and you want people to migrate to your country.
Creating something out of nothing is no small feat. You need to answer questions like: How do you create jobs with nothing there? How do you get more people to migrate to your country?
Right now I'm rereading the biography of Lee Kuan Yew the founder of modern Singapore. And something the early chapters remind me of this discussion that Alex Zhu is having. LKY worried a lot about the question of creating an economy. How to create new jobs when you have a new country. While some of Singapore's worries do not translate well into creating a new social media app. Like the question of defence. Being worried about invasions by neighbours or coups. Are not too relevant when getting people to your social media platform. The closest analogy to that is Facebook creating a clone to attack your network. But they have a less than optimal hit rate.
It makes me wonder – Where is the line of creating a new social network vs a country begin?
I found the Alex Zhu example from Li Jin. A great thinker of the creator economy in her article she laid down details on how to improve the creator economy to have some type of middle class. Almost like an American dream for the internet age.
Making people feel they have a shot at success, is the two things being a country and social networks have in common.
But it’s a chicken and egg scenario. How to create a system of value with nothing there?
Alex Zhu gives the analogy between Europe and the new land America of the 1800s.
Let use an analogy: Musical.ly will be America in this analogy, and YouTube/Instagram will be Europe. How do you convince creators from other regions (social platforms) to move to America (Musical.ly)?
The problem with Europe (YouTube & Instagram) is that the social class is already well-established. The average citizen of Europe has almost zero opportunity to move upward in the social class. We saw an opportunity to leverage this. We will build for the average citizen in Europe.
I wrote about this before. YouTube and Instagram lack the dynamism that it once had.
Because of that is harder for newcomers to join the ranks. The algorithm of those platforms favours the incumbents. As they know they can draw in a large crowd. Compared to an untested newcomer. This does not mean newcomers never succeed in those systems. But it’s much harder.
TikTok is famous for allowing newcomers to join the service and allowing them to succeed. There are many stories of TikTokers that only have less than 10 videos going viral. This is much less likely with Instagram and YouTube.
Granted, the design of the service makes life easier. Dealing with 10-second videos makes it easier for the algorithm. To go through tons of examples compared to a 10-minute YouTube video. If you are interested in this then check out Eugene Wei Remains of the Day blog post.
Alex also had some more details about the matter:
In this new land, you have to build a centralized economy in the early days. This means that wealth distribution is accruing to a small percentage of people in your land. You make sure they successfully build an audience and wealth. This makes them role models for the country (and platform). You effectively create the American dream. People in Europe (Instagram) will start to realize that this "normal" person went to America (Musical.ly) and became super-rich. Maybe I can do the same? This will lead to a lot of people migrating to your country (platform).
Here Alex is explaining that you want to have a heavy hand in the creation of the platform. In country terms, the government will be the guiding factor in the economy. Examples are having state-owned companies and subsidies. The Asian tigers [insert link of book] did this in the early years of development. With a large state calling the shots of the national economy.
In this passage, Alex explained how you want role models for your platform. So other people can see the rules and the culture of the platform. In country terms, this will promote some companies and industries over others. And Alex explains if you are doing right then people from other platforms or other countries will be willing to emigrate to the new platform. Due to the chance of success. Starting a flywheel of great talent entering the platform or country.
Therefore, once countries become successful it is hard for them to stop. Unless a major crisis happens and that is a maybe. Then the country will start to decline. In social media terms, this is the power of network effects. Were the flywheel starts spinning. And it’s hard to stop. Only after terrible mismanagement. Or an even better platform (the platform needs to be 10x better though). Then people will move away from the platform.
From reading the Lee Kuan Yew biography and this description of musical.ly and now TikTok. Is that anything great will be very hard in the early days or years. Lee Kwan Yew had to worry about creating a country that had jobs to avoid choric unemployment. Also, build an army so local neighbours don’t invade. Tiktok had to get enough users to start the flywheel. And make sure it does not get crushed by a big tech rival like Facebook.