Linked List: December 30, 2016

Friday, 30 December 2016

Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorships for Q1 2017 

Schedule is wide open at this moment, including next week. If you’ve got a product or service you want to promote to DF’s savvy audience, get in touch.

Daring Fireball vs. Facebook 

John Scalzi, reviewing his 2016 web traffic stats:

As with last year, most people coming to the site came here by three ways: Google, Facebook and Twitter, those three arranged in descending order of importance. This is the Internet as it exists now, folks. The one individually-owned site that sent the most people here (Daring Fireball) sent maybe 1.5% of the traffic Facebook did over the year. Which, actually, is pretty impressive if think about relative sizes.

I feel good that DF ranked first among individually-owned sites, but it’s depressing that it ranked first with so little share.

Anil Dash’s Advice for Twitter 

Anil Dash makes many good points about Twitter, but this one is the best:

Your relationship with Wall Street investors (and, to some degree, with advertisers) is fundamentally broken because you’ve gotten trapped into using the wrong metrics to measure the success or progress of Twitter. New signups are flat, and they’re going to stay flat, and every desperate flailing attempt to change that just reminds engaged users that they’re not seeing any progress and they don’t believe you can ship features they care about. Meanwhile, do you know how many new video creators joined YouTube this quarter? Me neither! You know why? Because all the good videos are on YouTube! What percentage of people who visit YouTube each month are logged in? What percentage ever uploaded a video? Answer: Nobody gives a shit. Because YouTube inarguably drives culture, and people (and advertisers!) want to be part of that.

Similarly, when Trump destroys the planet with more rambling, incoherent abusive gibberish, nobody is going to ask, “Did he say it on Tumblr?” Because Twitter is the place that popular culture gets created and discussed! I’m not happy about the fact that Twitter helped Trump get elected, but it makes it damned obvious that investors watching your signup numbers have thoroughly missed the point. Change the metrics, change the story, take the reins and lead them into a better understanding of the world than whatever meager measurements they got obsessed with in 2009.

By measuring the wrong things, not only is Twitter not being rewarded for what it is doing well, but it’s also providing motivation to Twitter to allow bad behavior. I see porno spam all the time now on Twitter, and I’m certain it would be trivial — trivial — for Twitter to block it. But they don’t, and I can only surmise the reason why is that because they’re measuring “activity”, they see all activity as good activity.