Josh Elman on Medium, “‘How will they make money?’ is the wrong question”:

In all of these cases, the primary challenge with building a large consumer company is not “how will you make money,” but “how do you get to be a long-standing durable network and define a new set of behaviors or verbs?” Once you can do that, it’s very likely you will be able to monetize at significant scale.

Not that I’m any sort of expert in this field, per se, but I think he misses out on how the process of monetizing this user base often sacrifices the original goals of the product. You see this with Facebook: users hate the advertising, it doesn’t fit with the “new set of verbs” they’re used to on the network, and I really think they’ve done a terrible job turning their massive dataset into anything more creative than more targeted ads[1. This is obviously not the first time I’ve talked about this.]. I think part of that has to be the focus on building the product before monetizing it that’s making this more difficult than it seemed at first blush.

I also thought Ev Williams quote was interesting, that the inability to monetize a large user base is a non-existent problem. Again, it’s always going to be possible to monetize a user base – the better question is whether or not you can do so without a) pissing off your users and/or b) selling our the product’s core values and functionality.

Ryan Donmoyer from the “Journolist Listserv”:

The World Cup is a lot like the Senate. All they do is kick the ball around but nothing ever happens and no one who watches knows what the hell is going on.

To be fair, I can’t be sure these are his words or if he’s quoting someone.

Update: Ryan Donmoyer contacted me on Twitter about it and was kind enough to search for the original thread. This quote cannot be attributed to him:

https://twitter.com/Donmoyer/status/350591565221208064

Kickstarter Blog, “We Were Wrong”:

On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people – us included – and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.

We were wrong.

This is how you handle a PR disaster. Apologize and fix it.

Richard Gunderman in The Atlantic, “The Incarceration Epidemic”:

The U.S. incarceration rate has more than quadrupled since 1980. It’s now the highest in the world, just ahead of Russia and Rwanda. It is estimated that approximately 2.3 million Americans are now behind bars. This is about one-fourth of all the incarcerated people on Earth, though the U.S. represents only one-twentieth of the world’s population. When the figures for those under probation and parole are added, about 1 in 18 U.S. men is under some form of monitoring or control. The figure for blacks is 1 in 11.

This is not the first time I’ve seen articles about this topic. It’s a problem that’s been on the rise for as long as I can remember[1. California’s prison crisis has gotten so bad it’s cutting into the state’s higher education budget. It’s a big reason they’re turning to private providers like Udacity for courses, despite the cost of actually “educating” students not being the real problem.]. The Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed in 1978, so this is really a long time coming.

However, it doesn’t really seem like there’s a whole happening to counter-act the issue. It’s far easier, politically, to be “tough on crime” than smart on crime, so sentence guidelines get stricter and the problem gets worse. It least with marijuana laws, it does appear we’re moving forward, but who knows how long that will take before they legalize it at the federal level and stop clamping down on otherwise law-abiding citizens.

Susan Amussen and Allyson Poska in a guest post on Historiann, “who’s really for change, and who in fact is standing athwart history yelling STOP?”:

Those involved in the globalization debate hem and haw about how McDonalds homogenizes foodways around the world, but the debates about MOOCs have (surprisingly) lacked any similar discussion about the homogenization of knowledge and perspective. While this might be less of an issue when the subject of the MOOC is a topic in computer programming, it can be quite serious when MOOCs turn their attention to the humanities and descriptive social sciences. For instance, to talk about World History from a U. S. perspective and present that view as a definitive narrative obscures the power relations between American scholars and scholars in the rest of the world, and makes it even more difficult to construct counter-narratives to American hegemony and Western dominance.

This is actually one aspect of the MOOC debate that I had completely failed to consider - while I had read quite a bit about the dominance of elite institutions and their imposition of their way of thinking, especially their impact on community colleges, it’s their impact on the rest of the world’s way of thinking that’s going to be most detrimental.