Never thought I’d be stanning for TikTok, but it’s really not just dancing and thirst traps.
There are so many excellent creators on it. Nature focused. Rare book dealers showing their wares. Medievalists. And trades, showing you how things work (herding sheep, thatching roofs, general home repairs). Not to mention all the artists (drawing, painting, sculpting, pottery, stained glass, sewing, etc).
It really excels in the area of photoshop/illustrator tutorials as well. None of the YouTube bloat, just a quick 1 minute video that shows you exactly how to do one cool thing.
Yes the cool stuff is buried under dancing teenagers spitting memes, but there’s exceptional creative stuff on there and an audience that buys that stuff.
No doubt they are there, but they are there by chance/habit (I think) not because the platform serves them well.
TikTok has all sorts of time limits and you can't even upload professionally shot content lasting more than x seconds. It's an app which revolves around the smartphone environment. That's very limiting
Current limits are 10 minutes on my account. And I upload from my computer all the time, after editing on Final Cut Pro. I'm not a "professional" by any definition.
One more: I’ve got a small print shop/publishing business. I’m interested in printing vinyl stickers but searching for “what machines should I be looking for and how should I judge them” has been an awful experience going face first into search engines.
But on TikTok, there are multiple small shops showing the machines they use, and how they use them on the daily. Talking about the problems they run into.
> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature.
Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.
Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people.
Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it.
Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass follow/watch those people.
"Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out."
It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party.
Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
Wow, Google+ sounds like it was actually pretty good. These are all features I've wished Twitter had.
When Google+ came out, I do remember avoiding it mostly out of spite, because Google were so overwhelmingly aggressive in trying to make me use it. And these days I'd probably never type my personal info into any Google property. Still, sounds like a shame it failed.
As a self publisher who’s used Kickstarter for 4 books now, let me say: the creative side of writing the books, doing the layout, getting it print ready, coordinating with artists etc is a beast.
Then when you add on the publisher side of distribution, fulfillment, lost orders, customer service, marketing etc you have a whole other beast.
It’s manageable in the right circumstances, and pieces can be sort of automated or out sourced, but (at least for me) the other grinds begin to absolutely kill my ability to do the creative work. And meanwhile fans are like “omg when’s the next book coming out?!?!?”
That’s said, I think the publishing “industry” needs to be ripped down and overhauled, but the work a publisher needs to do is very valuable and different than the creative needs.
It seems like a creator or their commissioned agent coordinating a disintermediated "supply chain" of service providers, with the creator retaining ownership of the intellectual property rights, could be a viable and lower-overhead alternative.
That exists in the form of "vanity" publishers and "hybrid" publishers, which tend to rip off their clients, instead of providing actual value.
In addition, people tend to vastly underestimate the difficulty of building a successful marketing campaign to actually sell books, in addition to the extreme difficulty of actually building relationships with distributors. Successfully selling a book is not that different than running a business. There's a lot more you need than just coordinating a "supply chain."
I feel like there are a lot of "experts" on publishing in this discussion, but few actual publishers who know the reality of the business.
I wonder how many times a book will not sell without a marketing campaign simply because it is not good. It seems to me that in a world of electronic communication & social media, it should be possible for a good book to become widely known & demanded by simply being good & the news about it spreading.
Individual book sellers still could do some marketing simply to increase sales once such a good book shows up.
Extremely frequently - I love to bash marketing at every given opportunity but books are tough - if I hand you a book you have no way to do a surface evaluation without leaning on associated knowledge - is it by an author you know - is it part of a series you like[1]. If not, then you've got the dust cover summary to go on and those will often be overwhelmingly positive even if it isn't warranted.
A friend of mine is an independent author who self-markets their books and they've learned over years where money will pay itself back and where you're throwing it into a hole - but not investing in promotion at all just means you'll be relegated to obscurity.
When I'm shopping for a broom I have some expectations - I've really grown to appreciate the rubber headed brooms over bristly ones and I am pretty tall so length is a decent consideration... When I'm shopping for a book, what do I have to go on? Cover art and the summary, probably... and those are hardly helpful.
1. Specifically I'm thinking of multi-author series like SW:EU or Dragonlance.
I'm ignorant about the way the industry works, for sure.
I'd love to know how much of the publishing and book-selling industries are coasting on inertia of "we've always done it this way", or the fear of "we've never done it this way".
It seems like electronic distribution should have massive ramifications for the business model. Does the publisher/distributor/retailer model really still need to exist in an electronic distribution world? I don't know enough about the value, beyond purchase aggregation, that distributors in that market actually provide.
What you see as "building relationships" sounds, to me, like needless middlemen exacting a tax on commerce.
Many businesses are little more than expertly coordinating a supply chain. That's a competency that offers a competitive advantage. Why is this business so different?
If all book sales were electronic, that might indeed invite a reassessment of publishers' value in securing distribution. But ebooks are only about 20% of book sales (and that figure is not rising).
I don’t understand this stuff. Politicians have directly ordered closures. If your bottom falls out from under you because you were playing fast and loose that seems inherently different than being told from above “you just cease your main method of generating revenue until we tell you otherwise.”
You're asking me,(general tax payer) to give you money to ride out the storm, but you get all the private gains in the future while I take the risk now.
There is a much more fair way to do this. Firms simply issue new stock and sell it to the market. Firms get the capital they need, the general tax payer isn't holding the bag.
This is the solution. Have the firms issue stock and the government purchase the stock. Obviously make it ultra-preferred with no one else getting preference before the government gets paid.
If firms don't like that deal, they can either get their own funding from the private markets or go out of business.
I don't want my tax dollars supporting million dollar executive salaries and bonuses for executives and management that I think are doing a questionable job. Are we going to have the government dictate salary and bonus reductions and maximums too?
If a business is in a liquidity crunch because they’re shut down and may go bankrupt, their stock is....basically worthless. I don’t think you’ve thought this one through.
If they're worthless, then after the government bails them out, the government should own them. If the government doesn't want to keep ownership, then redistribute the shares to taxpayers (aka "the people") as helicopter money.
Actually you’re right, that should work for businesses with shares. If people are willing to invest. But how would this work in a liquidity crunch? That was the situation we were in. Everyone was moving to cash.
What about non-incorporated businesses? That’s the bulk of small business ordered to shut down.
I find it interesting that this entire thread seems to be about fairness. Whether something is fair to corporations/people really shouldn't be the point. It should be about keeping people alive and having a functioning/prosperous economy. I'd much rather have that than a "fair" economy.
The problem is that during good times, the narrative switches to not regulating "private" enterprise. The financial schemers extract wealth under the guise of "earning" it, while it's all justified by saying that the market will regulate itself.
Yes, not doing a bailout would be imprudent. But this is apparently the only time we get any say. When we don't get to reform irresponsible business/fiscal practices in good times, but they have us over the barrel in bad times, the predictable outcome is spite.
The question is who is making sacrifices, and who will be prospering, and who will be dying.
A 2.2 trillion dollar check was just signed with the american tax payer's name on it. That is money could have gone to retirements, heath-care, and schools. It is reasonable to be concerned that it go to an equal or better purpose, and not to buy a second yachts for bankers.
Nothing about raising capital prevents a functioning economy.
The point is that people have been conditioned to believe we must use public money to save private interests.
If you want long term functioning markets, shareholders have to hold the bag. Otherwise the Bernie Sanders crowd will get bigger and bigger...and rightfully so. And eventually the system will topple via revolution (political or otherwise).
GP is making the point that in this case, the government caused the insolvency of these businesses in significant part through authoritarian closures, not through the irresponsibility of those running the business. Therefore the government (taxpayers) owe them recompense to make them whole.
The shutdown is the government’s fault, period. The damage it is causing is far worse than what would have happened if the government had started taking action in January and ramped up testing capacity. Instead the government did close to nothing and now the lockdowns are the last resort.
Other countries handled this better. South Korea and Taiwan are good examples of countries that ramped up testing and did not need to shut down society.
Shutdowns are not inevitable. They are a result of government failure, and the government should compensate businesses that it orders to shut down.
Disagree. There’s no guarantee earlier government action would have eliminated the need to shut down businesses or ban gatherings. I do think more should be done to support workers. $1200 single payments are not even peanuts.
We know for a fact that some countries didn't need to shut down. Again, South Korea and Taiwan are examples. They are also denser than the United States, and less wealthy, and closer to the source of the virus outbreak. Yet they handled it much better.
By contrast, the United States is less dense than those countries, significantly farther away from China, the richest country in the world, and had months to prepare.
I find it unconvincing that the United States could not have rolled out broad testing and tracing if it had started back in January when the virus was known to be a threat. Even if you're right and all it did was buy time before an inevitable shutdown, shortening the shutdown would have hugely helped to limit the economic damage.
I don’t agree with this perspective. The cost of keeping bars open, for instance, is much higher on society as a whole because of how it would lead to the virus spreading. I don’t see how that makes the public responsible to help these businesses.
When your business does well, you reap the benefits, not me. The belief is you’re entitled to it, because you’re the one who took the risk. So how is it now that we allow you to risk public safety or otherwise we take on the risk and give you grants or cheap loans?
That is really interesting and echoes some of what Camille Paglia has to say about washing in Italian immigrant communities. Do you have the source handy? I’d love to check it out.
I read numerous books on topic of Positive Psychology ... a really good academic one, tying together the field into a unifying framework is: The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being by Michael A. Bishop
I’m in the RPG space myself. Ive basically bootstrapped up a small but profitable publishing company in that scene (http://shop.swordfishislands.com).
I also like how DriveThruRPG gives drm free PDFs. The watermark is up to the creator (I don’t). I wish they took a smaller cut on their market though. :p
There is also the Bundle of Holding, that does bundles of drm free rpg PDFs and content. It’s pretty great as well.
My personal take is that the ebook/pdf/digital book market is replacing the “cheap paperback/trade” market. I use Kickstarter to raise funds for pretty deluxe offset print runs and am then pretty liberal with the digital copies (buy a book get the digital free, charity bundles, bundles, free in person download codes, etc). This seems to have been beneficial because the “infinite digital” product serves as a gateway to the “limited, special, ‘deluxe’” version.
Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing (e.g., I have the digital I don’t need the paperback) so downplaying the digital seems like it would make sense long term for books that don’t make sense to exist in some sort of “deluxe, you’ll want this for 50 years” format.
I've got some of your stuff. :) I think from a BoH, in fact. (Whether part of a bundle or not, Questing Beast's videos are how I really know of your works.)
> Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing
Counter to that is people like Questing Beast, or the guy that did Grognardia, who like to have print. I've been going OSR systems and have purchased way more than I would have because they're electronic and won't take up (physical) space. I almost skipped Whitehack because I could only get a print copy via Lulu.
Granted, you could purchase a PDF and then pay to have it printed, but your point about deluxe editions is dead on. That's why I bought my SO the illustrated Harry Potter books, and why she bought me the Final Fantasy Ultimania books; they're beautiful deluxe books that we'd cherish and pass on to our descendents.
Yes absolutely. It’s destructive to curiosity too imo. If you do go and search for something outside the algorithmic expectation it can break things hard (oh, you looked at a thing about shoes? Let me give you nothing but that). Which makes me hesitant about search terms on some platforms.
Potentially this can be fixable in the long term, but I think humans will almost always(?) be superior curators. Mostly because they’re approaching it from “this is what I like” and not “this is what I know you’re going to like.”
> Potentially this can be fixable in the long term, but I think humans will almost always(?) be superior curators. Mostly because they’re approaching it from “this is what I like” and not “this is what I know you’re going to like.”
This is why I like that youtube actually recommends music channels, mixes and compilations that are curated and uploaded by humans. It'll be a sad day when totalitarian copyright enforcement makes this a thing of the past.
It isn't destructive to curiosity if the algorithm puts you in the curious person demographic. The other week I got a video recommendation for how to extract lidocaine out of anal lube. I don't use lidocaine, I don't use anal lube, and I don't know shit about chemistry, yet here I am enjoying this impossibly niche video.
The problem isn't algorithms. The problem is bad algorithms. Lately YouTube has been on point.
There are so many excellent creators on it. Nature focused. Rare book dealers showing their wares. Medievalists. And trades, showing you how things work (herding sheep, thatching roofs, general home repairs). Not to mention all the artists (drawing, painting, sculpting, pottery, stained glass, sewing, etc).
It really excels in the area of photoshop/illustrator tutorials as well. None of the YouTube bloat, just a quick 1 minute video that shows you exactly how to do one cool thing.
Yes the cool stuff is buried under dancing teenagers spitting memes, but there’s exceptional creative stuff on there and an audience that buys that stuff.