Three Chords

I’m not usually the type for new year’s resolutions: generally my attitude for self-improvement (when I can be bothered) is to just get on with it rather than wait around for arbitrary periods. At the end of 2011, though, I decided to make my first real “resolution”, which turned out to be more of a mantra or aphorism: less talk; more action.

This came about in part because of my personal anxiety relating to my life and its meaning. At the time I’d just finished reading the recently-published Steve Jobs biography, and had just begun a work project where we worked closely with Facebook on a new product they were developing. The images of these two founders, Jobs and Zuckerberg, were constantly in my mind. Not that I saw myself as an arsehole-but-genius product person or a billionaire social media zealot, but I couldn’t get away from thinking they were both younger than me when they started their dreams. I don’t want to create the “next Facebook” and I don’t want to build a controlled empire like Apple, but I do want to leave a legacy when I’m gone (whenever that happens) which is more than just “browsing reddit and messing about with facial hair”.

For a period, mostly around the start of 2012, I consumed book after book about startup culture and transitioning from developer-in-a-permanent-role to founder-on-a-budget. I whiled away the hours on transatlantic flights feverishly scribbling down startup ideas in notebooks and wandering San Francisco in a kind of technology-fuelled high. So much was possible. Time is so short. What could I do, rather than just talk about things?

Well, it’s the end of 2012 and I’m still at that developer-in-a-permanent-role stage: and that’s by choice — mostly because I never did come up with a convincing idea for something I could create and build. I’m still working on it. But I don’t think that means my “resolution” was a failure.

By spending a year living with those words constantly in the back of my mind, it forced me to think more creatively and focus more sharply on the things I was capable of doing, all while trying to reach for things I was probably incapable of doing. I knuckled down and got involved with new things in my job, taking ownership of our developer team’s external communications (blogs, tweets, etc) and recruitment — I wanted to build a team I was proud to work with and I did. I spent a month of “no consumption“, aiming to literally live out my “less talk; more action” mantra, and produced a third edition of my university-days print zine, filled with my writing, design and ideas. I rebuilt my long-running personal website and started cycling longer distances. I started making my own beer (rather than just boring people in pubs talking about which ales I liked). Just last week I purchased a new instrument, the banjo, with the goal of challenging myself to do something new rather than continually picking the same chords on the same guitar. I worked hard with a new team at work to launch an experimental and future-aiming product for our business. I taught a month-long class on creating things for the web. Less talk; more action.

None of these things set the world on fire: indeed, most of them were just personal things for myself. But I think that if I hadn’t bothered choosing a mantra at the start of the year, it would’ve been much easier to just carry on watching Netflix, reading reddit, and generally squandering the limited time I’ve been given. The unexpected loss of a family member in late 2010 taught me that life might end at any moment. It’s a cliché but it’s valuable to learn: life is short. Time is, for me, my most valuable currency.

So, for 2013, what next? I’m aiming to keep the “less talk; more action” mantra as a constant, even if it’s no longer “official”. Like last year, though, another “resolution” occurred to me in the closing weeks of this year.

Cynicism and pessimism. Sneering and denigration. They’re almost uniquely British traits, though that’s not to say they’re not found elsewhere. They’re part of a peculiar system of British self-deprecation and desire to avoid being “earnest”. Complaining about trains; passively-aggressively outing others online for their rude behaviour; mocking the attempts of third parties to do things that are considered beyond them. It’s an ugly character trait and one that I find myself using too often.

This isn’t to say that negativity and criticism aren’t valid tools. Of course they are. Nothing and nobody is immune to criticism, nor should they be. But of late I’ve found that the internet in particular is becoming a sea of these things. Twitter alone is filled with hateful — or just bored — statements of spite, dislike and bile, often rallied against unsuspecting targets. This isn’t an observation about internet trolls or teenage Anonymous members wreaking havoc. It’s about recognising the default perspective on events which causes us to react with world-weary grumbles and automatic-pilot cynicism.

At work we recently launched a product I’d worked pretty hard on for the past six months or so. We got mostly good feedback despite some internal battles and we were really excited to put it out to launch. We got some brilliant feedback from around the web — the creators of the design techniques we’d used were really excited to see us using them, promoting us and congratulating us. Closer to home, though, we saw strangers online heavily criticising our work and one wag even accusing us of building “a gimmick“. I even found former colleagues joining the chorus of criticism, unable, presumably, to find any good in the work we’d done. Almost exclusively, this reaction was from British people.

I’m trying not to couch this concept in terms of “oh no, somebody didn’t like my website, so I’m going to write a huffy blogpost about it”. Do you know why that’s difficult? It’s precisely because of this attitude that I’m forced to defend my argument from these imaginary blowhards. These attitudes are so prevalent in our modern “internet society” that people everywhere are afraid to offer their opinions or creative output because of the imagined responses from the army of armchair cynics ready to deconstruct it for nothing. Why should it be like this?

What I am saying is that I think there should be a rule with these things: output must always equal input. If you’re choosing to use up some of your limited time on earth to denigrate others’ efforts and rubbish something (however deserving), you need to balance that by putting your own things into the world, too. This isn’t a rehash of that ludicrous argument thrown at music critics by rock dinosaurs: “if you think it’s such a bad record, then write a better one yourself!”. You don’t need to be demonstrably better than the thing you’re criticising before you can criticise it. No, this is much simpler than that: take a step back and ask why you’re using your energy to put out negativity instead of creativity.

It’s not new-age hippie bullshit. It’s a stance that I hope will force me to reconsider before writing a kneejerk reaction and slagging something off because it’s popular. Earlier this year I wrote a couple of blogposts criticising Menshn, Louise Mensch’s mostly-failed Twitter rival. After giving it a bit of a kicking, though, I did acknowledge that the very fact that Louise and team had bothered to even attempt the task already gained them points, despite the failings of the product itself.

There’s something profoundly valuable about creativity and sharing in it. It can be of help or even necessity to point out the errors of others and discuss the issues involved: I want to make sure I’m doing that for the right reasons, and not getting bogged down in arguing the toss about trivialities instead.

Output must always equal input.

Yesterday evening the Guardian (full disclosure: my employer) published an article by the eminent investigative journalist David Leigh, titled “A £2-a-month levy on broadband could save our newspapers”. Leigh, a veteran report who worked (amongst other things) on the Wikileaks data and the Jonathan Aitken investigation, outlines his credentials immediately with his opening gambit around “surviv[ing] more than 40 years at the coalface of British journalism”.

I’ve written here before about the seeming insistence of the “old guard” of print journalism that the “internet is killing journalism”, so I was intrigued to hear Leigh’s thoughts on the matter. I knew as soon as I read the words “conventional wisdom” that Leigh’s thoughts on the future of print were probably going to differ from mine.

Leigh’s argument, in essence, is that people won’t pay for journalism when they can get it for free from the likes of the BBC. He suggests that since they’re already paying for their internet connection, why not add on £2 a month extra to cover the losses of print newspapers, and distribute this pot amongst newspapers “according to their share of UK online readership”.

I had to stop and re-read his argument again to make sure I’d understood it properly. This was staggering. The man honestly believes that this “solution” would a) actually work and b) would appeal to anybody (except, presumably, investigative journalists worried about their job security). Of course, Leigh’s real argument here is that internet journalism hasn’t found a funding model yet, so therefore, er, we need to artificially keep print alive to make sure we still get quality investigative reporting.

There’s one aspect of this argument which I can’t work out: is Leigh saying that the money raised by this levy would then specifically fund print newspapers, or would it just fund the news company in general? If it’s the former, then the idea is laughable: why would any typical broadband user agree to a large (percentage-wise) increase in their monthly bill, simply to sustain something they weren’t buying anyway? It’s like suggesting I should pay Netflix a little extra each month to help subsidise the going-out-of-business video shop down the road. Now of course, the loss of home video stores wouldn’t be a “disaster for democracy” as Leigh points out, but that’s another problem.

Journalism is not (just) newspaper journalism. The decline of print is not the decline of journalism. Leigh argues that “the lean pickings from web advertising on a free newspaper site will only pay for a fraction of the high-quality investigative journalism that commercial newspapers generate”. This seems particularly short-sighted: in a future media landscape without print (and therefore print advertising), surely web advertising would generate more money by default? Similarly, in a commercial world where the funds for paying for prohibitively expensive print centres and physical distribution were now free, perhaps more money to fund journalism could be found?

There are plenty of online-only news companies turning a profit and paying their journalists. Some of them even do investigations. Without the legacy of print to pay for (and sometimes without even the expense of physical headquarters), costs can be lowered and more funds put into the content itself. In Leigh’s world, though, the only companies to benefit from this levy would be, er, newspapers as defined in 1994. It seems particularly witless to set up a funding model which divvies up the pot of cash based on internet-based access rates, but limits the availability of said handouts to pre-internet companies. Similarly, why choose to distribute the money based on digital access? The Independent, arguably amongst the most at-risk of the UK national newspapers, suffers from both a low print readership and a low online userbase, too. Surely it needs the support of Leigh’s levy more than, say, the Guardian, whose online readership is famously vast. It’s almost as if Leigh has just arbitrarily invented a set of criteria that will protect his role, specifically.

I agree with Leigh that good journalism is crucially important to society and should be preserved. This doesn’t mean, though, that we keep print alive in a zombie state, on a life-support machine while others around it flourish with life. If print is dying, let it die. The economic landscape doesn’t exist in a vacuum: if print is gone then advertisers will need new sources of page space and existing digital ad slots will become more valuable and lucrative. That’s not to suggest that killing off print will magically infuse online ads with dollars, but that throwing money at something already in decline won’t magically rescue it either.

It takes a kind of breathtaking arrogance to proclaim you’ve found “a perfectly easy way to rescue newspapers, ensure media plurality, and monetise the web”. These solutions aren’t meant to be “perfectly easy”. Look at the music industry. Could you imagine if they noticed the amount of people consuming music online for free and insisted that your broadband bill be increased to account for lost sales? Like it or not, that industry has had to update itself and understand the newcomers like Spotify, offering free access to music and distributing advertising revenue back to the record labels. Or indeed, look at bands cutting out the middleman and distributing directly to fans. This is the society we’re living in today and we’re better off for it.

Some journalists can be so precious about mediums that they become blinkered to all others. If print is dying, let it die. Journalism isn’t. I agree we need new and imaginative ways to fund journalism, but the answer to that isn’t to force people to prop up the outgoing model on an imposed tax.

The dust has now settled on Menshn’s recent relaunch, so therefore I’m revisiting the site after my initial write-up about it, written back in July. The headline feature of this new design is a mobile version, so along with my original criticisms, I’ll also cover the new territory too.

It wasn’t the most auspicious of relaunches: a lengthy email from cofounder Luke Bozier managed to include the wrong URL, pointing mobile users at “m.mobile.com” (for a moment I actually thought it was real and was impressed they’d manage to snag such a prestigious URL). The email is timestamped at 23:37, which might suggest a hurried mailshot written when the update was finally pushed out – maybe wait till the morning next time?

The email itself boasted the following claim:

Behind the scenes, we’ve invested in technology that filters menshns for spam in the same way your email inbox might be. Other social networking sites don’t block spam, but from the very beginning we wanted to create a clean, enjoyable platform free from things that degrade the experience.

Other social networking sites don’t block spam? Someone better tell Facebook, Twitter, Google+ … Still, it’s good to hear they’re taking things more seriously. Let’s have a look at the new site.

First I decided to log in. I entered my username and password and was returned to the homepage — with the “login” option still visible. Tried again, same thing. Maybe I got my password wrong? I reset my password and logged in again. Still nothing. I tried opening the page in Firefox and it worked first time. No idea why it wouldn’t work in Chrome.

A quick note on resetting passwords: you only get one go at setting your new password – better make sure there aren’t any typos! Menshn don’t need no stinkin’ password confirmation boxes.

Once logged in I was pleased to see that the previous “mystery meat” navigation (figure 1, below) at the top of the old design has been updated to one that actually looks usable (figure 2, below). Brilliant.

Before:

… and after:

Browsing the site, I was pleased to see it looked much nicer, overall. Use of colour is smart and the typography, while still fairly poor in terms of readability, is generally a little more polished. Some of the headers are enormous, though, making it tricky to actually get to the content.

Revisiting my earlier criticism of the site, I was sad to see they’ve still decided not to show timestamps against menshns, but they’ve at least addressed this in their newly-added “menshn user guide”, hinting that they may introduce them in the future. My tip: introduce them now. The argument about wanting people to be able to resurrect old conversations is overruled (for me) by the sheer lack of context when it comes to responding. Although it does allow them to conceal how quiet some conversations are…

Still no descriptions of the “rooms” anywhere on the page. Honestly can’t get my mind around this one, given that the user is asked to supply a description and a title when they create a room, and the site’s code displays the description to search engines.

In technical terms, things are better: Google PageSpeed now gives a much more respectable 76, compared to v1′s weak 56. A quick .htaccess tweak would probably get them most of the way to 100, leveraging basic HTTP caching. They also seemed to have removed  most of the dodgy javascript popups which plagued v1, making things more accessible in the process.

I turned to the mobile site next. This was a bit of a shock: it looked awful. Given the high profile criticism of the v1 launch and its security holes, I’d expected their next major launch to be a bit more polished. Here’s what I was greeted with when I loaded the site on my (fairly recent Android device):

I’m including this screenshot at full size in order to illustrate just how enormous everything is. Obviously this is a bug: the page (presumably) isn’t meant to load in quite so awful a style, and pinching to zoom out makes things look a bit more normal (see right).

Things are still pretty big, text-wise, and I’m not quite sure why: while larger text sizes are advised for small-screen devices, doing it to this degree seems faintly ridiculous – it’s almost unreadable and most of the headings look ridiculous, like it’s a Fisher-Price design or something. I don’t have an iPhone so can’t test it there, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it probably renders okay on one, and that the developers simply tested it on their own phone and didn’t bother looking at it on any other device.

I had a quick browse but couldn’t get past the typography issues, not to mention having to zoom out every time I loaded a page. Back to the drawing board on that one please, chaps.

Finally, I have to comment on the most recent email debacles from the site. I received six “We haven’t seen you on menshn in a while” emails in a short period, each one with a slightly different number of “interesting posts” to plug:

Yep, this is simply some sort of error, but if I was Menshn, I’d be damn fucking careful sending out emails these days, after the m.mobile.com fiasco above. To top this off, I later received yet another email apologising for this error, with the most insanely-titled subject line ever:

While I respect Menshn for admitting the cock-up and showing me how to unsubscribe/close my account, to send an email with the subject line “Close your account or unsubscribe” is almost hilarious. Is that an order? Maybe I will.

So, final thoughts: not a bad effort, and certainly an improvement, but still a long way to go. Design-wise I think Luke (or whoever else writes the code) needs to take a long, hard look at readability studies (or even just browse other similar websites and pay attention to how they do it), because most of this is a pain to read, still. UI-wise though it’s come on a bit, so kudos there. As for the mobile site: have another go – or at least test it in more devices than you currently are. On the email topic: don’t let this become menshn’s “thing” (eg. sending out silly or poorly-proofread emails).

I’d still say that the site’s goal is missed and that really they should be building their own service which augments existing Twitter accounts (hiding the stuff you don’t care about, showing you the stuff you do) rather than doing it their own way, but that’s me. Keep at it, perhaps, but not without a bit more effort next time.

Sometimes it makes me sad that I’ll never be the King of England. It’s not that I harbour secret desires to dress in ermine, or really feel like my morning routine needs a butler awaiting me with a pre-foamed toothbrush. It’s more simple: the fact that I, a common-born man of no high standing, can never occupy the highest position in British society on the strengths of my wit and intellect alone.

A desire for power this ain’t: I can barely manage a departmental Twitter account, let alone a commonwealth. I’m just concerned that I’ll never live in a truly meritocratic society. Even if we did away with the royal family and the (publicly elected) position of Prime Minister became the highest in the land, it still wouldn’t be so: gone are the days where high-ranking politicians are plucked from working class obscurity, and in some parts of the world, a run on the presidency is figured at almost a billion dollars. With my background and education I’m unlikely to be elected to a seat on the local council, let alone government.

Like so many things, though, the internet steps in to disrupt everything, perhaps even for the better. I’d like to suggest that the internet is the world’s first true meritocracy. Why? Because it strips away the distractions, the disadvantages and the dollars and levels everything – for everyone.

Geeks are pretty smart when it comes to solving problems. Take the issue of user commenting. Slashdot pioneered the use of techniques for moderating user submissions to promote good content and punish repeat offenders, gradually lowering their voice in the discussion until their comments were invisible by default to other users. They even invented “meta-moderation” where moderators got to moderate other moderators’ decisions. Comments could be scored with both a number and a descriptor (“Funny”, “Insightful”, “Interesting” etc) and users could browse at the threshold they preferred. It was really clever stuff.

This forced users to think carefully about their comments and made it almost pointless for known trolls to post their flamebait as their comments immediately vanished from threads. Suddenly it was possible to gain an elevated authority within the Slashdot user community, purely on the strength of your contributions and their quality. All this, regardless of the user’s race, class, sexual orientation, physical condition and more.

Or look at newer sites like reddit. Their “social news” concept sees users upvote and downvote submitted links to present a community-curated view of the day’s interesting stuff. Sometimes it’s pictures of cats, sometimes it’s the news that Osama bin Laden has just been killed. The point is that suddenly, each user has a say in the day’s agenda. Unlike traditional media where privileged editors and producers get to decide that day’s broadcast to the world, reddit lets individuals add their knowledge and opinions to the mix and generates the resulting soup of content. The playing field is levelled: now you can broadcast to the world and have as much say-so as the next man — or even more, if the quality of your content is highly regarded by your peers.

There is, of course, an exception. Gender is still a problematic concept online. Women are still dogged by infantile critics and teenage trolls whose “mock” griefing often plagues prominent female writers across the web. Female gamers in particular are hounded by their male counterparts and some often go to great lengths to hide their gender to avoid the sniping and piss-taking. We can’t perhaps describe the internet as a “true” meritocracy until this issue is resolved. While it’s perhaps an advantage to be able to shed identities at the door when they represent a barrier in “real” life, having to mask a fundamental part of one’s character shouldn’t ever be a requirement to gain respect.

I’m fairly sure I’ll never become Prime Minister, even if we do abolish the Queen and I somehow stumble upon a decent fake Eton graduation certificate. I could become an internet icon, though (still equally unlikely, but  theoretically possible!). Some of the people I look up to most online aren’t rich and famous (or weren’t born that way), aren’t particularly physically remarkable, and are self-taught, hardworking individuals. The internet has an inimitable way of recognising this kind of character and bringing it to the fore: think of every message board you’ve posted on with one wise old owl who periodically swoops down with well-timed thoughts and ideas. Think of that popular Twitter user with thousands of followers who is just a normal person like your mum or your sister. Think about that self-produced album by that bloke you saw in the pub the other week who’s bagged a record deal off simply promoting his music on the internet rather than, say, shagging someone from One Direction.

It’s not perfect (what is?) but the internet is slowly levelling society. From the music and film industries to the publishing world, the arts and journalism. If you’re talented and work hard to improve your craft, your chances are hugely higher for success. That’s why I love it.

 

Menshn is a bold idea. Aiming to replace Twitter is no small thing (I say “replace” because the site doesn’t augment existing use of Twitter but offers a new service entirely) and it’s a brave move to do. It perhaps goes without saying that the project would’ve already died on its arse without the high-profile involvement of UK MP Louise Mensch (who isn’t the namesake, apparently…). For that reason it makes sense that the site initially launched in the US — early adopters would be unlikely to have strong opinions on Mensch herself and initial bugs could be ironed out before the more scathing British public were let loose on it.

And what initial bugs they were. Twitter was ablaze a few weeks ago with criticisms of both the site and its technical creator, Luke Bozier. Turned out the site had a bunch of (hotly denied) security holes, mostly quite basic errors. After these had been fixed and the site moved to a new host, I decided to take a look myself.

Crimes against typography

The first thing I was struck by was the quite ugly design. This example is perhaps unfair since it’s presumably not how the content was supposed to look, but the leading on the quote text is awful:

User interface? We don’t need no stinkin’ user interface!

Ignoring this hideousness, I registered for the site. The confirmation email immediately fell into my “suspected spam” box in Gmail, which was mildly interesting. I activated my account and logged in to be confronted with this toolbar at the top of every page:

This impenetrable interface  gives no clues what the three mysterious icons next to ‘home’ indicate, and hovering over them offers no clues either. Clicking around I managed to figure out what they refer to but it seems like a basic UI fail to not make clear what textless icons actually refer to.

Chronological context is for suckers

I thought I’d move on to some actual “menshns” (I’m still not sure if this is their equivalent to “tweets”). Here’s a random conversation from the front page:

It took me more experimental clicking and hovering to establish that none of these conversations have any indication of time/date. Perhaps this is intentional but I found it irritating and confusing to work out the sequence of conversation, or indeed the time gaps between each one. How can I judge whether a conversation is worth participating in if I have no idea how long ago the last post was?

Talk on topic… if you’re a search engine

Giving up on this, I decided to enter one of the “chatrooms”. I clicked “judaism”, mostly by accident. Here’s what I got:

While I could clearly see a conversation was taking place (again, no timestamps) though, it was a little tricky to figure out what the topic was beyond the single-word title. For this example perhaps “judaism” is enough to go on, but one of the chatrooms linked from the homepage is simply called “why”. I was confused — when creating a room you’re asked to enter a description. Examining the page’s source code revealed this:

Right there in the (invisible to humans) meta tags, we have the room’s description. Why isn’t this anywhere on the page? Surely if the aim is to “talk on topic”, it might help to, you know, tell people what the topic is.

Accessibility fail

I decided to check out some profiles. I right clicked someone’s username and clicked ‘Open in new tab’. I switched to the new tab. Blank page (with a URL of about:blank). What? I looked back on the original page. Look at the status bar when I hovered over a link:

See that “javascript:;” bit? That’s called inaccessibility. It means that Menshn makes use of javascript to show things like the popup box of a user’s profile. What it doesn’t do, though, is use the widely-approved progressive enhancement technique to make this javascript-powered link do something useful when the user isn’t using javascript (or indeed, just trying to open things in new windows). Twitter’s interface is hugely javascript-enhanced, but they don’t make this error. It wasn’t just here either — the entire site uses javascript like this, and all of the functions are defined in a big <script> block at the top of every page, polluting the global namespace. This might be nerd stuff, but it also means the site won’t scale well (try introducing advertising into that context) or work for users on limited devices.

We laugh at bandwidth

More nerd stuff: I ran Google’s PageSpeed tool against the site. It scored a paltry 56 / 100. High on the list of reasons for the poor score was the way it shows user avatars: the site doesn’t seem to resize the user’s uploaded avatar, so if the user uploads a massive image for their profile, Menshn simply downloads it and then displays it as a tiny size, making the user pay the download speed price. To illustrate, here’s the actual size of one user’s avatar (400×400 pixels) compared to the thumbnail size (48×48 pixels) Menshn shows it at — 98% smaller:

All the images suffer from this, with Google estimating it adding over half a megabyte to the page download weight. Poor.

Ego and arbitrariness

Menshn allows users to post updates of 180 characters — why? So it sounds better than Twitter with its paltry 140? Twitter’s limits were defined by SMS limits, as the service started out. Making it 180 is arbitrary and pointless. If you want to give users more text, give them significantly more, otherwise stick to what they’re already conditioned to work with. Although their //username notation adds an extra character over @username…

Finally, the homepage greets you with this at the bottom:

Every time I’ve checked the site, Bozier and Louise occupied the top spots. I assume this is because the site ranks them on their cumulative karma score (or whatever Menshn refers to this score as). What’s the point in a system like this? Showing the all-time highest rated users will end up with a boring, self-fulfilling list, as “power users” are continually highly rated purely because they already have a huge score. A smarter options would be to show users who accrued the most upvotes in a given time period, similarly to Randall Munroe’s elegant solution for reddit’s commenting system.

What I would have done differently

Well, the first point is that I wouldn’t have even started it — so perhaps that’s a plus point against Menshn for even bothering. Personally, though, aiming to compete against the giants is almost always pointless. Menshn might argue that they’re not competing or usurping Twitter et al, and they’re not (they couldn’t). What they have done, though, is built their own platform rather than taking advantage of the existing one. Twitter definitely does have issues with relevancy and filtering, and their Lists tool doesn’t really solve this. If Menshn was an app which used your existing Twitter account and allowed you to filter things into topics, I might have been genuinely interested. Inventing a brand new system with none of the appeal of Twitter and many added flaws, I see no real reason to invest my time in it.

Poor UX/design and some lack of frontend optimisation aren’t impassible problems, but they demonstrate a lack of awareness on how to build a compelling and scalable product. Menshn is possibly the seed of a good idea, but as of today, it’s not germinated enough for it to be useful.