Good morning. Hello. How are you? #691
Jane and I made a LEGO set. Zuck and the choice between pillaging and farming Facebook and Insta.
Good morning, there, friend. Hello! How are you? What’s today? Wednesday? Man. These five-day weeks are long I do not like them one bit. Okay cool. Let’s do a Wednesday.
Emma thought Jane was ready for a “big girl” LEGO set last night, because she “likes the little pieces” so I went to the room where my lego sets are. About ten years ago I got completely obsessed with LEGO for, maybe two years, and acquired a massive, just absurd number of LEGO sets. I built, oh, you know, maybe four or five of them, but the vast majority — well over a hundred sets — have just been sitting there in the attic for… like seven or eight years? Once Jane was born I figured eventually she’d either get into LEGO, and they’d be hers, or she would not, in which case I would sell them off, since most of them are now out of print and they are all new in box. I still think Jane’s a little bit too young to grapple with these decisions but there are definitely a few sets in there that aren’t, like, collector’s editions or anything. So I pulled out one of the “newer” sets: Emma pointed out that this newer set was seven years old. I didn’t really want to get out a LEGO Friends set since, you know, too girly don’t want to stereotype (yes I own some LEGO Friends sets) but also I didn’t want to pull out some IP she didn’t know about yet, those can come later. So I seettled on the short-lived LEGO Elves line, which was really pretty great. We went with set 41073, Nadia’s Epic Adventure Ship. It was rated for ages seven to twelve, but I thought Jane was ready for it.
I was wrong. Too many small pieces. She could do certain parts, put the small pieces in the right spot on the main built, but she couldn’t do, like, “put these three pieces together and then stick the combined new entity onto the main build” at all. Then once the boat hull was about halfway built and she had the two elven minifigs built, she just wanted to play with it. So I was stuck building most of it, but she wanted to help but she didn’t. But we got there in the end, our first successful non-Duplo kit build.
It was all Emma’s idea. Thank you, Emma.
From here on out, I think we’ll stick to the LEGO Juniors line for a while, age range 4-7, or whatever equivalent set theme LEGO has now with smaller, non-Duplo bricks, but simpler builds. The problem is she really loves those small pieces, the 1x1s and the like, the best. Little jewels and whatnot. But she’s not quite there.
One nice side effect of this is that doing the LEGO set in the evening really wore her out, so while she was still using every cute trick in the book to get me to stay by her side once she was in bed, she fell asleep pretty quickly.
The other nice thing is she did a bunch of drawing yesterday. She hadn’t been drawing in my office in the morning lately, she’s been going across the basement to the dollhouses and playing with the dolls. Emma’s spent significant time teaching various arts and crafts to Jane as they build the dollhouses, so I don’t consider this non-constructive playtime or anything. In fact she did a bunch of clay work yesterday, maybe she’ll be a sculpture. I’m just being a needy parent, and I missed her sitting next to me drawing. It was nice. She did a nice Rainbow Hello Kitty portrait yesterday.
Today Jane is four years, nine months old. I write a her a letter every month on her birthday. Been doing it since she was born. Going to give it all to her as a book when she’s, uh, I don’t know exactly what age. Mature.
Yesterday one of my coworkers was in town. His parents live about an hour west of me and his brother lives about an hour east, so he stopped by Chapel Hill and we had lunch in town on Franklin Street. At Linda’s, which I thought closed in the pandemic, but it is not, that was nice. This was my first coworker I had seen in over two years. It was shockingly normal. And very nice to just shoot the shit with someone about work. Strong recommend. If you haven’t seen a coworker in person in more than two years, consider having an outdoor lunch with one of them!
Facebook messed up my publishing workflow for GMHHAY every morning. Every morning, I finish this post in Substack, I select all with Command-A, and I post it into Facebook, then I drag the playlist screenshot into the post and hit publish. Then I paste the playlist URL and the Substack URL into the Facebook post. I have been doing this for more than a year in the exact same manner. About a week ago, suddenly when I publish the post on Facebook, it no longer immediately shows up on the page I’m on, at the top of my wall. Now I have to go to the top right of the screen, click my name, and go to my own page to find the post. It is not hard but a) it’s messing with my muscle memory and b) it is a needless new extra click and I am short on time in the morning and have this whole process very streamlined. It also seems… utterly needless? I can’t help but wonder: was it on purpose? Or did something break and no one noticed? I mean, I am certainly sympethetic, we break stuff all the time, and god knows at Facebook’s scale weird edge cases are constantly cropping up and even if a million, ten million people are suffering from some bug, it barely registers as something that needs to be done at all, let alone something important.
BUT I will say: this, in combination with Adam Mosseri’s video posted on Twitter yesterday about Instagram’s future, combined with Zuck’s obsession with the metaverse, combined with Zuck’s new announcement that he’s gonna cut up to 10% of their workforce who aren’t performing hard enough… well, I mean, the place just is starting to seem… lost? Like… I guess, if you take as a given that the metaverse is the big new thing (lol), and you need billions and billions of dollars to fund your metaverse initiative, and you have a stable of profitable products, it is logical that you take the revenues from those profitable projects and pump them into your initiatives. I can get behind that, that’s basically my job. And it’s not illogical that you want those products to keep making money.
But at some point, even in this situation, you have to make a decision about whether you’re going to be farming those products for cash, or pillaging those products for cash. They are not the same thing. Farming them means maintaining the ecosystem as it is, for the people who are there. Harvesting the yields, but not doing anything to kill of the ecosystem. Pillaging it is chasing every dollar, ignoring the long-term, overloading the thing with ads, making it less and less pleasant until the users, ultimately, abandon ship.
(As an aside, you’ll note Mosseri mentions “creators” like a bajillion times in his videos. He does not mention the otherside of Insta’s equation, the users of Instagram, the consumers, the viewers, except to call them “you” and imply, strongly, they’re separate things. The “creators” are what matter on Insta now, they are the clients, because, basically, they are the ads they need you to watch. It is inconceivable, or at least highly sub-optimal, that we come to a creator-free Instagram to see content from our friends. Because Mosseri knows that the rot has already set in, our friends are already abandoning Instagram. If he let us only see our friends content, we’d only need to come to the app once a week or so, and that is unacceptable to him. Instagram is not, right now, at a pivotal “farm or pillage” point. It made the decision to pillage long ago. Mosseri just made it plain.)
I think what’s happening is that it is so inherent in Facebook’s idealogy, as it is in most of Silicon Valley’s, that they have not once paused and asked themselves in any serious way if it is worth it to keep changing their products in ways that no one wants in order to wring out any additional revenue they may be able to generate. This yields a short term gain at the expense of long-term revenue stability. “No one uses Facebook anymore” has been a common refrain for a while, but it wasn’t a huge, huge deal for Meta because people were still using Instagram. But now they are making the exact same mistake again and changing and ruining Instagram for the benefit of a couple extra dollars in the short term, but at the expense of owning a viable, long-term cash cow. They are tampering with formerly beloved consumer brands out of jealousy and short-term gain desires, ruining something that comes along once in a generation if you’re lucky. And they’ve ruined two.
Of course, this all ties into the larger forces at work. Meta is a publicly traded company, Zuck doesn’t act half as indifferently to his shareholders as he’d like you to think. Facebook and Instagram (and Whatsapp but I don’t know what’s up with Whatsapp or its revenue or if it is undergoing a similar situation) need to keep growing to keep the shareholders happy. It is inconceivable to Zuck that he just let them deliver even slightly down revenue in the immediate term (farming), but with the accompanying benefit of consistent and long term revenue. Not an option. Shareholders want growth. Thus, he is pillaging: short term revenue gains that will inevitably lead to spectacular collapse. This seems imminent with Facebook and to see him making the same mistake, again, with Instagram, is sad.
Of course, if the Metaverse were coming, and it was going to be as transformative and profitable as he envisions, in a way none of this would matter: Meta will have the new, glorious, wildly profitable new product (lol) that they built themselves, because they can no longer just go out and buy one like they did with Insta and Whatsapp (due to anti-trust concerns._ So, I suppose, if he believes that’s inevitable, from Zuck’s point of view, who cares what happens to Facebook and Insta? The company remains dominant.
There are a few problems with this:
First is the obvious contradiction in that: if you don’t care about your shareholders (like you pretend) and you absolutely believe in the glorious metaverse future (like you pretend), why kill off Insta and FB for short term gain? Who cares what happens in the short term if your long term future is assured?
Secondly is the inverse: if you don’t believe 100% in this glorious future, which is fine, it is a longshot, let’s face it, why would you kill off your current cash cows?
And finally, of course, it’s just a total douche move, ignoring the feelings of hundreds of millions of people who loved these platforms, who loved them just the way they were, who relied on them to stay in touch with people.
According to SmartAsset (whose seed round we invested in back in my VC days!), my current county, Chatham County, NC, is the most charitable county in North Carolina, and the 97th most charitable county in the United States out of more than 3,000 counties. This is based on the percent of income donated and the percentage of people in the county who have donated to charity. Well done, Chatham County, I am growing to love you more and more the longer I live here.
Got a metal playlist today because that’s what was done, you can thank reading that SST records book. There is a new Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou I am very excited that was not a one-off, I hope this means another album. Gotta look into that.