A newsletter-based social network? (Ricky Weekly #47)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
My dear friend and former colleague Wil is secretly a talented artist, and this is what he thinks of me (taken from his newsletter) 😭
Thing on my mind:
Note: I recorded an audio version of this newsletter in my app Palcast if you want to hear my voice instead. After listening you can use the app to talk to me about it. Click here to download Palcast (iOS beta).
Since I started Ricky Weekly about a year ago, my friends Wil, Jiwon, Greg, Jared, Richard, Sidney, and Jason all have started their own personal newsletters, and I’m sure there are more friends thinking about it (looking at you, Negar). I welcome this development, even if it’s just bringing back personal blogging from blogging’s early days (Remember LiveJournal?). Longer, written content from friends help me connect with their minds and hearts way better than the shit we post on Instagram.
But I know this is a very small part of the newsletter trend. The recent popularity of newsletters on services like Substack is mostly coming from writers who write to accrue influence, which is kind of like the later version of blogging that was more professionalized, just with a different distribution mechanism. I guess SEO got too hard, RSS got killed, Twitter got crazy, and Medium couldn’t dole out enough algorithmic distribution to attract new writers, so people lost interest in blogging as a viable way of building influence. Then Substack pointed people to email inboxes as an acceptable way to distribute their content, and here we are. The upside is that it motivated a lot more people to write resulting in some great content, but the downside is my email inbox feels so fucking violated.
Between the two kinds of newsletter writing, I’m much more interested in the personal kind because they feed my soul. Unfortunately, it seems niche and artisanal in a culture that prefers steroids. We prioritizes work over friends and non-work relationships. Writing is already hard, and people would only invest the effort if it’s for work. There’s already too much read, so we prioritize work (or really, lots of pretend-work) content. Friends take a backseat, just like how we take our partners and families for granted because they’ll always be there.
That’s why Facebook is really a once in a generation company for getting you to prioritize your friends. They did it by focusing on students who don’t usually have work to choose over friends. They also were maniacally focused on 1) getting you to friend as many people as possible, even people you’re barely friends with and 2) making posting and interacting with content super easy and bite-sized, even if they verge on being meaningless. That was alright because in aggregate, the size of your friends network and the frequency of bite-sized content posted to the network made prioritizing friends more compelling than work. Instead of catching up with one friend, you can see what 100 friends are up to. Instead of having a meaningful conversation, you can read some short updates, poke each other, like some pictures and pretend these things are meaningful social interactions. Just like sometimes we get caught in pretend-work, the Facebook bundle is good for pretend-social. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Of course it’s not all pretend, social media is meaningful. You don’t always have to get super personal for interactions to feel meaningful. Just trying to make a point.
Facebook’s growth team famously said that a new user needed “7 friends in 10 days” before they got it and stayed a user. That’s not THAT many friends. If there was a newsletter-based social network and I have 7 friends writing on there when I joined, would I “get it,” stay, and start to carve out time to read and even write? Maybe. Maybe not because I may not care enough about these 7 friends. Maybe the content wouldn’t be frequent enough for me to develop a habit, or reading long written content just feels too much like work (that’s why I include a picture and a recommendation in this newsletter to make it easier to consume).
Piece of content I recommend:
Are Founders Allowed to Lie? by Alex Danco
This topic comes up from time to time, not usually framed as simply as lying or not lying but definitely something that touches a nerve for lots of founders. I remember several years ago I was talking to a successful founder about my fundraising pitch, and he said “instead of agonizing over whether what you’re saying is true or untrue, think if it useful or not useful [for fundraising].” Alex Danco does a good job explaining how the dynamics of Silicon Valley and the kind of companies we start here enable a level of “pre-telling of truths,” how with enough authenticity you can be shielded from consequences, and how the relationship between founders and VCs is a lot like the relationship between kings and priests.
Bonus: How The U.S. Stole the Middle East by Johnny Harris
Johnny Harris makes great videos. If you haven’t seen his Vox Borders series, you should. I’ve always found the Middle East super confusing and this is the most clarifying video I’ve seen on the topic.
🤗
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “From Socialcam to TikTok: How we figured out video social in a decade”