On
5 June 2010 tagged Geek, Internet
I think I’ve finally figured out why everything sucks. And it’s actually kind of awesome.
I bought my first guitar when I was 16 with my own hard-earned dishwasher money. It was a crappy classical 6-string. I thought the muffled plunking it made sounded like an orchestra. It didn’t.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master anything. The Beatles played for 10,000 hours before they really became The Beatles. Before that, they were just another band with potential.
I never got to anywhere near The Beatles, but I improved over the years. I played in coffee shops and open mics. I wrote songs. I sold tapes. I even figured out how to play a decent finger-picked “Blackbird.”
Of course, not everyone who practices something for 10,000 hours becomes a master of it. I didn’t. But almost no one becomes a master of anything without putting in the time.
We all love the story of the childhood prodigy who picks up a violin for the first time and plays flawlessly. But that’s just a story. A one in a billion exception. For most of us, doing anything new, we’re going to suck at it. For a long time. And we may never not suck at it.
Suppose Gladwell is right and it really does take 10,000 hours to master something. Let’s set the bar lower. Let’s say that it takes half that time to be merely good at it. And just to be generous, let’s say half again just to not suck at something. That would mean it takes 2,500 hours of practice to just not be awful.
Now ask yourself, what have you done for 2,500 hours? That’s 104 days. 14 weeks of constant practice. Just under four months of nonstop repetition.
Very few of us have spent that much time doing anything besides sleeping or watching TV. I’m sure I’ve spent that much time reading, writing, making photos, doing design, and playing guitar.
But there’s one thing we have now that The Beatles didn’t have. I didn’t have it, either, back when I was making those sad plunking sounds.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have the internet – the biggest no-experience-required open mic night ever created. It connects us all, whether we’ve put in 10,000 hours or ten.
It’s only because of extremely fortuitous timing that the world was spared my 16-year-old Beatles impersonation. I put in those hours before everything was digital and duplicated for free, forever. Make no mistake, if MySpace had been around when I was 16, my furtive recordings would still be haunting me.
Maybe it’s only because of fortuitous timing that we even expect anyone to be good at anything now. We were spared hearing The Beatles when they were new. There’s no record of Shakespeare’s embarrassing early attempts. No MP3s of Bach’s school choir. Maybe if we were more used to seeing people suck before they get good at something, we wouldn’t expect perfection from day one.
Just think about the millions of people on the internet, each in their own timeline of learning something new. Most people will never get to 2,500 hours. They’ll never not suck. It’s not personal, it’s just math.
So that’s why the vast majority of everything on the internet sucks. It’s because most of the people doing it, most of the time, just haven’t put in the hours yet. And most of them never will. So only a small percentage of all the people online will ever be vaguely good at whatever it is they’re doing.
But here’s the thing: I think this is beautiful. People are out there, trying new things, learning the hard way, and sharing their experience. That gives me hope.
I’d rather have an all-inclusive network that everyone can contribute to, than a network that’s closed to everyone who isn’t perfect. How else will anyone ever learn to do anything?
And here’s the really interesting part: What if The Beatles had the internet? Sure, we would have had to endure their early sucky years, but they would have been able to learn from everyone else as well.
There are studies that show connecting to the internet changes our brains. And getting feedback is how we learn. Maybe all the sharing we do online is actually accelerating the learning curve. What if, once we connect online, we can actually lower that number even more? What if the tradeoff is between keeping the early embarrassing work private, and getting better at your new skill faster in public?
I know which one I’d choose. (I’m doing it right now.)
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UPDATE: As usual, Clay Shirky said it better.
On
1 June 2010 tagged Community, Crowdsourcing
One of my favorite NPR shows is Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. It’s a weekly news/comedy show, where a host and a panel of comedians play a game that involves the week’s news, the audience, an interview, and lots of spontaneous jokes. (If you’ve never heard it, go have a listen.)
I was listening to it this weekend when it occurred to me that Wait Wait is a particularly good example of crowdsourced media, and could actually teach us a few good lessons about participatory projects.
(Before I go any further, let me just cop to the fact that “crowdsourcing” is a stupid buzzword. But like “blog” before it, sometimes it’s the stupid term that sticks. For my purposes, it means collaborating with the people who used to be the silent audience to make something better than you could make alone.)
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It’s all about the mix of voices.
Too many crowdsourced projects reject the entire idea of professional editors/curators. And on the other side of the coin, many professional journalists will tell you that only the professionals should be making news, and their community has no role.
But Wait Wait has a mix. There’s the host, who emcees the shows, the “panel” of comedians, and of course Carl Kasell, the official scorekeeper who’s been on the air for over 50 years. They’re the official voices. But also included in the mix are the callers, who call in to participate in the show, and the audience, who register their feedback in real time, often with laughter.
The trick is that the interaction between the official voices and the “everyday” voices makes the whole show better. Without the callers, it would just be a few people trying to crack jokes. Without the panel, it would just be a newsy call-in talk show. But together, it’s faster, better, and way more funny.
Lesson: Good crowdsourcing is when adding the audience’s voice makes the content better, not worse.
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When audience voices become part of the show, it’s in a strict structure.
Too many community projects become derailed because they take in too much unstructured input. Online forums can be derailed by the first comment because there’s no structure imposed on the participant.
But on Wait Wait, when they put a caller on the air, it’s in a very structured context. Callers come in to play games, the rules are clearly spelled out, and the stakes are low. The context gives the callers the ability to participate, the listeners a clear way to understand what’s happening, and everyone the comfort to have a good time.
Lesson: Set context when asking for user participation.
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Games can propel a crowdsourced project to the heights of hilarity, or right off a cliff.
In online community settings, “gaming” has a bad rap. You set up a careful community structure and people come along and treat it as a game, ruining it for everyone else.
But games are powerful motivators. In fact, all community projects are already games, if seen from the right angle. The only question is, does the game make the content better, or worse?
On Wait Wait, the panel is playing a game. They earn points for their answers. But the show is not really about the game – the game is just a loose structure to hang the jokes on. It propels the show, but never upstages it.
Lesson: Examine the game mechanics in your own projects, and make sure the way to win the game makes your site better, not worse.
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Games require rewards, but be careful.
No talk of games would be complete without mentioning rewards. Wait Wait has rewards, but they’re never anything valuable enough for people to get competitive about.
There’s really nothing at stake. When one of the panelists wins the game, all they get is a cheer from the audience and then the show’s over. And when callers play a game, their only prize is to get announcer Carl Kasell’s voice on their home answering machine. When they play a game with a famous caller, they play to get Carl Kasell’s voice on someone else’s answering machine.
I particularly like this reward because it’s just random enough to be funny, costs the show nothing to produce, but is still something the caller might want enough to make the game interesting for the audience. The key is that all the rewards are just valuable enough to propel the show, but not so valuable that real competition crowds out the fun.
Lesson: In games, big rewards make drama (“You are the weakest link!”), small rewards make comedy. Set the reward in the right place for the experience you want to create.
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Encourage the audience to level up.
Crowdsourced projects often make the mistake of giving all the tools to everyone. This leads to role confusion among the participants. Not everybody wants to do everything all the time. Give them something small to do, and then allow them to level up gradually.
On Wait Wait there are many levels. The first would be the listeners, who hear the show on the radio or podcast (that’s me). They can level up to become a caller if they call in at the right time and get selected. They could also level up to become an audience member to watch the show live. I suppose they could then become someone famous enough to get interviewed or join in the panel – a long shot, of course, but a guy can dream.
And the dreaming is the point. When a listener hears a caller answering questions, they’re always thinking, “how would I answer?” And that’s the key to leveling up: as soon as you think about what you’d do, you’re on your way to the next level.
Community projects could mirror this by giving new users a clear path, limited tools, and an awareness of that those on the next level can do. Before you know it, they’ll be leveling up like crazy.
Lesson: Give your audience something to earn.
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Have some damn fun.
Community tools can sometimes overemphasize personal drama. (“My name is Inigo Montoya. You blocked my father. Prepare to die!”) Do we all have to be so terribly serious all the time?
Think about this: Wait Wait is a show where people are routinely wrong, get caught on national radio not knowing things, and ultimately win or lose a contest in front of an audience. And it’s one of the funniest hours on radio!
There’s no personal drama. No “I didn’t come here to make friends” reality TV bitchiness. And no forum-style flameouts. How do they do that?
I think it has something to do with the five points above. But having some damn fun is just as important.
Lesson: Community managers often deal with angry people, irate over some tiny slight. It can be hard to infuse an internet project with as much joy and humor as Wait Wait. But I can’t help but think that many would be better off if they did.
So that’s just a few things I’ve learned about creating community settings on the web from listening to funny people joke around about the news on the radio.
Next up: How plumbing toilets is like forum moderation.
