Anil Dash

Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indicates he understood much of what I was trying to say here. I'm cautiously optimistic to see the company's response, and willing to give them time to do it properly. Maybe we can get a good result.

I like Popchips; I probably eat them once a week. Well, I used to. But they stopped that habit, and revealed a much larger, more complex problem with their company and with the ecosystem of people and companies that they partner with.

Popchips asked their celebrity spokesperson (and Popchips investor, if this Quora thread is to be believed) Ashton Kutcher to make a series of advertisements for their product. Pretty standard stuff, though the idea of tying the campaign to his status as a newly-single man is a bit odd since he went through a fairly prominent divorce that ended with a noticeable amount of public drama. Tastelessly cashing in on one's personal life is the stuff of celebrity, though, so let's sell some potato chips!

I've always wanted to have very positive feelings about Ashton Kutcher — he's a totally mainstream celebrity who seemed to have sincerely embraced the tech startup world that I spend so much of my time in, and that should be a validation of our impact. Then I saw this shit right here:

Don't watch it; It's a hackneyed, unfunny advertisement featuring Kutcher in brownface talking about his romantic options, with the entire punchline being that he's doing it in a fake-Indian outfit and voice. That's it, there's seriously no other gag.

Naturally, a bunch of us (initially mostly Indian diaspora members whom I follow on Twitter) started complaining about it, and a number of like-minded allies also registered their offense as well. I can't imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad "funny" accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.

We Can Do Better

Here's where I want us to do something different. I don't want to merely say "Indian people in the U.S. are going to boycott Popchips!" Or to just get the usual mumbled apology for the company where they offer the bullshit non-apology apology of saying "We're sorry if anyone was offended" and then take the ad down, but continue on with the campaign, padding out the apology with a few generic tweets to a contrite blog post.

We've all seen that shit before, but I want to do better.

I think we can attack the process by which these broken, racist, exploitative parts of our culture are created. I think the people behind this Popchips ad are not racist. I think they just made a racist ad, because they're so steeped in our culture's racism that they didn't even realize they were doing it. (If you don't quite follow what I mean there, you need to learn about Jay Smooth's How To Tell People They Sound Racist.)

Here's what I want to have happen instead:

• Popchips should not pull this ad down: Instead, they should leave it up and link to not an apology, but an explanation of how their process failed and resulted in this racist ad being created. I think this company doesn't want its culture to be racist, and they can best demonstrate that by showing how they learn from examples where it happens despite their best efforts. It's like if rat droppings were found in a bag of Popchips: You wouldn't solve it by saying "We threw away that bag of chips!" You'd solve it by saying "Here's what we're doing to clean up things at the factory."
• The firm which led the creation of the ad, should name the team members who participated in its creation: Zambezi, which made this ad, should let its staff own the mistake and talk about how they'll prevent it in the future. Don't falsely feature the one or two people of color who undoubtedly were part of the team, but show them all together, talking about how they came up with this idea, and what the responses were in the room. If someone said, "I don't know, this might not fly!" then share that with people so others in the future can better learn to trust their instincts on this. If your team isn't very inclusive, and everyone thought it was okay because they come from similar cultural backgrounds where these kinds of offensive things aren't considered hurtful, then talk about how it's something you need to learn. It's fine to say something like, "Our creative director is Brian Ford, and he grew up in Oregon where he didn't get exposed to very many Indian people who could explain how hurtful this kind of media can be." But don't sweep it under the rug.
• The PR firm which promoted this campaign should acknowledge its failure: Alison Brod PR, which proudly proclaims its investment in, and promotion for, this campaign and for Popchips, also bears a lot of responsibility here. At a fundamental level, a good public relations firm is supposed to protect its clients from communications mishaps and errors in judgment that are obvious or preventable, like this one. But putting that shortcoming aside, the firm likely had a hand in coordinating the Popchips Twitter presence where other celebrities such as Diddy and Kim Kardashian and Ryan Seacrest had their accounts used to promote the campaign. Now they are tainted with being associated with tweeting links to racist ads, which probably jeopardizes future relationships they might have had with Brod PR. Again, this is something that's addressable by talking about the culture of the company, and what changes will have to be made so that there's enough knowledge (and courage!) to identify when clients have the potential to send out a racist message, and to stand up to those clients to make sure they don't do so. Alison Brod needs to be the person who acknowledges the failure of responsibility on this campaign.
• Ashton Kutcher should personally apologize: And not just for the jokes on Two and a Half Men!
  There are things any celebrity shouldn't do, regardless of the paycheck. This is of particular importance to me because, oddly, Ashton Kutcher and I cross paths professionally in some ways.He advises or invests in a lot of startups, including notable ones like Foursquare and Square and Flipboard and AirBnB, if you believe this crowdsourced Quora list. We even share some mutual advisorships as I understand it, with companies like Vox Media and Votizen (both of which I advise) and the UN social media campaign against malaria (which I support) all being areas of common interest, though I've never encountered Kutcher in those contexts. I met him once at a conference, and he seemed nice and pretty smart; Friends who've talked to him about their companies indicated that they genuinely felt he had something to contribute aside from his celebrity. Because he's of unusual prominence in the tech space, and because so many of those technical companies have key employees or founders of South Asian descent who've given pieces of their own company to Kutcher, the onus is on him to respect his business partners. This begins by communicating specifically about what he did wrong. But frankly, Kutcher's apology would be the easiest and most obvious part of this process, and thus the least valuable.
• The media who covered this campaign should admit their blindness to the obvious offensiveness of this campaign. Stuart Elliott in the New York Times and Sarah Anne Hughes in the Washington Post notably covered this campaign with no note of how obviously offensive the featured ad is. While Hughes has since updated her post to reflect some of the blowback, it's astounding that this wouldn't be obvious on first glance to those who are paid to understand media and culture. Worse, the fawning and non-critical coverage in venues like the New York Times lets PR firms like Brod and ad companies like Zambezi count this sort of campaign as a success. "Look how many media impressions we got!" There's also an egregious abdication of critical duty in not pointing out that this ad campaign doesn't make any sense. If Kutcher is the "President of Pop Culture" (which he obviously can't be, because I am), then why is this series of ads about dating? If the site they're encouraging people to visit is about a premise that you're "dating" these potato chips, why is Kutcher trying to promote a title for himself? And why would someone who just went through a messy, acrimonious public divorce be a positive image for a brand that wants you to get involved romantically with its chips? I'm no New York Times or Washington Post writer, but I caught these subtle errors in the campaign, even as an amateur.

But back on topic: We need to change the way companies respond to the constant stream of racist and sexist advertising campaigns that they launch in the media. The rote, scripted response when an offensive ad faces complaints is to have the featured star (Kutcher, in this case) and a PR spokesperson for the brand both put out tepid apologies. The ads get pulled off the air or off YouTube, and then they wait for the dust to clear.

What Will Make Them Change

Those superficial corrections don't change the process. Back at the office, the Chief Marketing Officer knows that all the people who hate that brand followed them on Twitter for the day to see how they'd respond, so they later crow to the CEO, "We got a 12% bump in social media metrics, looks like I get my bonus!" The PR firm says "Well, aside from the tiny minority of people who complained, we actually got a ton of media mentions, so I can still use this to pitch ourselves to our next client!" The advertising firm says, "We can still talk about making an ad that got millions of views on YouTube, and having worked on a multimillion dollar campaign for a national consumer brand".

And the end result is, nothing actually changes. Nobody is made to actually understand what they did wrong, with the lesson instead usually being "Well, you can't please all the people all the time."

Understand, Keith Belling and Pat Turpin and Brian Ford and Chris Raih and Alison Brod and, yes, Ashton Kutcher: Right now you're making the world worse. Not just for me, or a billion other Indian people, but for my son, who I am hoping never has to grow up with people putting on fake Indian accents in order to mock him. Maybe people won't be familiar with that stereotype if you, yes you personally, can refrain from spending millions of dollars and countless hours of your time on perpetuating that stereotype in order to sell potato chips. Potato chips! You're hurting people and demeaning them in order to sell your chips.

Here's the thing, Popchips: I think you want to do the right thing. And I believe you can. I think you can say honestly, "We made a mistake, and didn't realize how serious it was. This is how we're changing the way our company works, and the way we listen to people and value inclusive perspectives, so that we don't make these mistakes in the future." Because you have a good product! Remember that? I know it's old-fashioned, but sell your product on the virtues of being a good product! I promise that'll work, and be more sustainable long term, than hitching your brand to the public's knowledge of the dating life of a recently-divorced celebrity who's willing to perform in brownface.

Go make things right, Popchips.

If there were one lesson I'd want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I've said before, know your shit. Know the discipline you're in, know the history of those who've done your kind of work before, understand the lessons of their efforts, and in general look beyond the things that are making noise right now in order to understand bigger patterns of how technology works, both literally and socially.

This is a difficult challenge, because today's media about the technology industry will not teach entrepreneurs and creators what they need to know about the history of the technology industry.

I don't just mean this in the obvious way — nobody thinks you can earn a PhD in computer science by reading a tech blog. But I mean the broader landscape of sites that attract attention from technology developers and startup aficionados are woefully myopic in their understanding and perspective of the disciplines they cover. [Disclaimer: This post mentions lots of sites that write about tech; I write for Wired (ostensibly a competitor) and advise Vox Media (parent of The Verge, mentioned below), as explained on my about page.]

Open For Comment

Let's take one example from a month ago. A blogger named Saud Alhawawi reported (judging by Google's translation) that Google is going to introduce a blog commenting system powered by their Google+ platform. If you work at a company which makes tools for feedback on sites, or if you care about the quality of comments on the web, this would be important news, so it's a great thing that it got picked up by WebProNews and TheNextWeb.

Given that Google generally refuses to comment on such pronouncements, and therefore would be unlikely to confirm or deny Alhawawi's blog post, the burden is thus on the rest of the tech blogosphere to explain to their readers the implications and importance that such a product would have, if Google were to launch it.

Fortunately, we have a very good record of how the major tech blogs covered this story, if they did. Techmeme has admirably preserved links to the many pieces written a month ago about this story. As you might expect, most were regurgitating the original stories, with a few mentioning Alhawawi's source post. These reposts showed up all over the place: 9to5 Google, BetaBeat, Business Insider, CNET (which oddly credits ReadWriteWeb but links to TNW), DailyTech, MarketingLand, Marketing Pilgrim, MarketingVox, MemeBurn, SlashGear, The Verge and VentureBeat.

Lots of linking with just the barest amount of original reporting, which is actually a fairly efficient way of getting a story out. But while I admire many of the smart people who work at a lot of these outlets, apparently no one who was linking to this story has more than the slightest bit of knowledge about the discipline they were covering.

What's Missing?

As you might expect, nearly every story mentioned that Facebook has a commenting widget similar to what Google is presumably creating. Google and Facebook are competitors, so that's a wise inclusion. Most also mentioned DIsqus, and sure, that's relevant since they're a big independent player. I don't expect that these stories would be comprehensive overviews of the commenting space, so it's fine that other minor players might get overlooked.

What is ridiculous, and absurd, is that not a single one of these outlets mentioned that Google itself had provided this exact type of commenting functionality and then shut it down. Google provided this service for years. And that last Google commenting service, called Friend Connect, was shut down just three weeks prior to this news about a new commenting service being launched.

That's insane. Whether you're a user trying to understand if it's worth trusting a commenting service, a developer judging whether to build on its API, an entrepreneur deciding if you should incorporate the service or worry about competing with it, or an investor who wanted to evaluate Google's seriousness about the space, the single most salient fact about Google's attempt to create this new product was omitted from every single story that covered it.

Worse, the sites themselves suffered for this omission — when everyone is covering the exact same story, if one site had gone with a headline that said "Google's New Commenting Service: The Secret History of How They've Failed Before!" they could have actually gotten more page views and distinguished themselves from the endless TheNextWeb regurgitation.

This isn't a case where a few lesser outlets omitted a minor point about a headline. It's a case where a story that was interesting enough to earn a full Techmeme pile-on was lacking in coverage that would be necessary for understanding the story at even the most superficial level. As you might expect, a few of the larger outlets have big enough audiences that their commenter communities were able to add the missing salient facts to the story, but on both The Verge and Business Insider, the comments which mentioned Friend Connect were buried in their respective threads and, as of a month later, not highlighted in the original posts.

Do Your Homework

Fortunately, whether or not Google makes a commenting widget isn't that big a deal on its own. Maybe they will or maybe they won't, and maybe it'll fail again or maybe it won't. But the key lesson to take away here is that we know a few things are wrong with the trade press in the technology world:

• In tech financial coverage, there is a focus on valuation, deals and funding instead of markets, costs, profits, losses, revenues and sustainability.
• In tech executive coverage, there is a focus on personalities and drama instead of capabilities and execution.
• In tech product coverage, there is a focus on features and announcements instead of evaluating whether a product is meaningful and worthwhile.
• Technology trade press doesn't treat our industry as a business, so much as a "scene"; If our industry had magazines, we'd have a lot of People but no Variety, a Rolling Stone, but no Billboard.

There are many more examples of the flaws, but these are obvious ones. What we may not know, though is that there's another flaw:
* For all but the biggest tech stories, any individual article likely lacks enough information to make a decision about the topic of that article.

Imagine if Apple launched a new version of the iPad and a story did not mention that any prior versions of the iPad existed. This is the level of analysis we frequently get from second-tier tech stories in our industry. And that's true despite the fact that technology trade press is actually getting better.

We need a tech industry that values history, perspective, and a long-term view. Today, we don't have that. But I'm optimistic, because I see that people who do value those things have a decided advantage over the course of their careers. One place to start is by filling in the blanks on the stories we read ourselves, perhaps by making use of a comment form?

Update: The students did it! The re-vote from the board yielded a unanimous vote in favor of forming the Coexist club. I'm sincerely thankful to the students, to their advisor Christina Baker, and to Superintendent Bruce Deveney for their leadership and for making the right choice to support every student.

A brief personal note: Though I usually write about tech geek stuff here, I'd been following a story from my high school alma mater that was of particular interest to me, and I wanted to take a moment to write a note to the members and supporters of Coexist, the Gay-Straight Alliance at East Pennsboro High School. East Pennsboro's mascot is the Panther, and most of the football games and pep rallies I went to tended to talk a lot about "Panther Pride".

First, to the students behind Coexist, thank you: I appreciate anyone who is trying to be a voice of love and tolerance in a place that, all too often, has forgotten to value those principles. I know it's not an easy conversation to have, and I appreciate your courage. I also wanted to give a little bit of perspective from someone who's fought those same struggles, though it was quite a few years ago.

Who the heck am I?

As background, I'm now living in New York City, where I've been very fortunate in my life and in my professional career to get to have opportunities I never could have imagined back when I was a student at East Penn. I was in the Computer Club back then (computers weren't very popular yet), and today I get to work with a lot of the people who make the websites and apps you use every day. I was in the Youth in Government program, and today the non-profit that I've been running gets to work with all levels of government from city government here in New York all the way up to the White House. And I was in the Newspaper Club, which helped me see myself as a writer and has led to me now having the ability to have my words published where millions of people can see them.

So, in short, I've been really lucky. But I also spent a lot of time in high school figuring out my identity and my place in the world, and I deeply wish there had been a place or a club that would have supported that effort. Though things are slightly more diverse in the school district now, at the time I was attending, there were almost no other students who were of the same background as me, or raised in the same religion, or who had the same skin color, or who ate the same things for dinner, or who spoke the same language around the house. That was a deeply isolating realization.

What's more, I knew I didn't conform to the traditional male gender roles as they'd been described to me in that community. While today I identify as a (boring, old) straight male who's been married for years and has a happy little baby boy, I never took for granted that I would settle on an identity that is so privileged in our culture. Instead, I identified very strongly with all my close friends who were lesbian, gay, questioning or queer, as I knew they had to actually reckon with their identities, just as I had.

When I first moved to New York City, I saw the Pride Parade here, and I had only known the word "pride" from hearing the phrase "Panther Pride" at pep rallies back at East Pennsboro. At first, I thought this must have been two different meanings for the same word. It seems clearer than ever to me now that, actually, they were very much two uses of the same word being used to represent one important concept.

What I Learned

When I say that I reckoned with my identity, I don't just mean that I was figuring out who I am. I also mean that I had to confront other people's biases and prejudices about every aspect of myself. Over my years going to East Pennsboro schools, I had my nose broken, my car vandalized, my parents prank-called, and had a teacher call me out during school hours for not being of her preferred religion. Worse, I struggled enough with being different that I questioned myself, thinking I must have been crazy or wrong or misguided, or that the things that made me unhappy must have been my fault. At my worst, I wasn't just miserable and self-destructive towards my own life, I was mean-spirited and unkind towards other students who were probably going through similar things.

But eventually, I figured it out. And the combination of my loving, compassionate, patient parents along with my incredibly understanding, tolerant, and supportive friends got me through. I knew, though, that there were adults in positions of power, whether they were teachers or administrators or just parents in the community, who thought struggles like mine were wrong or bad or selfish or just a cry for attention.

I know I just seem like some guy who's twice your age talking about stuff that he might not understand, but I really have been in your shoes. I got kicked out of class a few times for everything from wearing lipstick to wearing a dress to writing "love sees no gender" on my t-shirt. But I also remember sitting with Ms. Baker in Ms. Vasquez's English class, where everyone rightfully ignored those parts of how I expressed myself in order to focus on what I was actually writing. It made a huge difference in the course of my life.

The only distraction, then, was by those who chose to make an issue of how I expressed myself and my identity. And the only thing that helped me overcome those distractions was having a supportive community of friends who showed me that they accepted me for who I am.

Tonight, adults who've been chosen as leaders in your community are going to make another decision as to whether they think you deserve to exist as an official club to support your fellow students. They'll argue whether it's a distraction from learning, and whether the school district has enough money to support the minimal costs for the program.

Let me be clear: There is nothing more important we can learn as young people than to be kind, tolerant and accepting of others. The truth is, most of what I use on a day-to-day basis to do my job or to take care of my family, I taught myself in the years since I went to high school. But had I been left to fend for myself and taught that my differences made me a bad person, I can't imagine I would have had the motivation and drive to achieve the successes that I've had.

To those who want to make this a budget issue: I'll pay for it. Myself. Total up the most exorbitant, extravagant cost that you can imagine for the administration of the Coexist program or a Gay-Straight Alliance at East Pennsboro, and no matter what you think the price tag is, I'll make sure it gets covered. This justification is now officially removed.

Going Forward

Tonight, your school board will make a decision about your club, but also about the culture and mindset of the community going forward. Judging by the wisdom you've already shown, there's not much I can teach you about the world that you haven't already figured out in high school. But I will share one lesson that I think might not be obvious.

Ms. Alger, Ms. Gaughen, Mr. Helm and Mr. Tyson aren't your enemies. And they're not motivated by hate. They're just adults who've forgotten what it was like to have to struggle to discover who you are. Maybe they were fortunate enough that they didn't even have to go through that struggle. It's like someone who's always had perfect vision not knowing why some of us feel so vulnerable when we don't have our glasses or contact lenses around; They don't know what it's like to not be able to see the road ahead.

The thing I've learned in the years since I was at East Pennsboro is that sometimes adults need to learn from kids, and that sometimes educators and administrators have to learn lessons from students. So use the board meeting tonight, and the conversations going forward, to show the same compassion and forgiveness and understanding towards these adults as you would toward your peers.

I think the discipline and heart and passion you've shown for an important cause is going to make history tonight, and you're going to make a real change in your community and in the world. I am so proud of what you have already done, and so inspired by the effort you've put in, that I am not sure I even have the words to do it justice. I'm optimistic about tonight's school board decision, and even more optimistic about the incredibly bright futures you all have ahead of you.

This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose.

It's an interesting time for those of us who care about reading on the web. My friends at Readability have launched an awesome API that marks the maturation of a really powerful network for synching the things you read across a ton of great apps and devices. It's pretty exciting.

And also, it's a time for the nascent space of reading improvement tools, as pioneered by Instapaper, Read It Later, Readability and others, to reach that inevitable point in a young tech space's development where things develop into a shitshow flamewar that nobody comes out of unscathed. Or, maybe this time, we just don't have to go through all of that again.

Where We're At

First, I should loudly and clearly disclaim: I'm theoretically conflicted all over this. I am an enthusiastic and proud advisor to the good people at Readability and consider them friends. I am a long-time fan of Marco Arment's from even before Instapaper was created, and whenever we've seen each other socially, I've been really impressed by his thoughtfulness. I still have some equity in Say Media (the successor to Six Apart), which theoretically benefits from publishing sites that run ads which these apps hide. And I'm sure there's more little details you could suss out if you were already convinced that I'm acting in bad faith or don't mean the words that I say here. Rest assured, after a dozen years of blogging here, I write what I write here because I mean it, and I know it to be true, and I hope that's enough to explain my motivations.

Until a few weeks ago, Instapaper was the inarguable mindshare leader in this space, pretty much synonymous with the concept of saving articles on the web for later reading, even though the other apps in the space have also been very popular for some time. Meanwhile, Readability has been pursuing a network strategy, building its reading functionality first into an API that's been adopted by a bunch of apps, then launching iOS and Android versions of reading apps under its own name. These were very well-received, and for the first time, another reading application got as much attention and praise from the tech elite as Instapaper's been getting.

That's when things got complicated.

You see, Readability's original plan was to work with Marco to license a version of Instapaper as the flagship Readability client. Marco describes much of this in great detail on a recent episode of his Build and Analyze podcast, which I think is generally very fair, but you can get a brief description of the story from the posts that both Readability and Marco wrote about the end of their partnership. It was amicable, well-handled and resolved as happily as could be, given the circumstances.

In fact, the only thing I disagree with Marco about in his assessment is the most direct cause of the business partnership between the two companies being unsuccessful. Simply put, Readability and Instapaper weren't able to work together because Apple changed the rules of the market. The deal they had made would probably have been something that could work, if Apple hadn't changed the rules about in-app subscriptions at literally the moment when the joint app was submitted for consideration in the app store. That is, of course, Apple's right to do, but it means that whatever schism happened didn't occur because of malice or ill intent or duplicity by either party; It happened because sometimes shit happens.

This matters because, since the success of the recent Readability app on iOS, things have gotten tense, not between the creators of the two apps, but between supporters, fans and enthusiasts in the community for both apps. And, since I've been through this kind of stupid fanboy battle before and know exactly what it costs, I want to explain what I think is at stake and why we're headed down a dangerous road.

Legitimate Debate

There are a few points of inarguable agreement and a few points of legitimate debate which it's important to dispense with if we can have a useful conversation about the future of reading tools online. Here are the premises from which I'd start:

• Most content sites on the web are unpleasant to read, and conventional advertising is a big part of the reason why.
• The behavior of sending content from the web or apps into other services and synchronizing between those apps is only going to become more common, and hopefully will become mainstream.
• People like the creators of Readability, Instapaper, and the other early tools in this space are real web people, who are both able to, and interested in, hacking on the web because they care about it. This hasn't yet attracted the folks who just have dollar signs in their eyes but don't care about it.
• Sites which publish original content can't survive indefinitely if a substantial percentage of their readers either block ads or read their content in apps which don't display those ads, unless there is some other way for them to generate revenue.
• Advertisers will not be so dumb as to continue buying ads on sites at current rates when a significant, or particularly valuable, segment of the audience starts viewing the content through reading apps.
• Nobody's solved this problem yet, and it's still very early days.

I'm hoping those baseline assertions can be agreed upon; If anything there is really objectionable to you, I can't help you, because you're crazy. So, where are the things we can disagree about? Right here!

• Most reading apps have a way for users to pay for the app itself, either as a one-time purchase or a subscription. Many publishers find this objectionable, as the publishers get no revenue from these applications and readers who use them do not consume ads except (usually) when adding the content to their reading app.
• Apps like Instapaper make the argument that publishers will be able to get the same CPM advertising rates for people who save articles into their apps because the regular web page is displayed before being reformatted into a cleaner format. Some publishers object to this model on the ground that advertisers are becoming aware of this trend and will start paying lower rates as a result.
• Apps like Readability offer a system where a subscription payment holds the majority of its revenues (in their case, 70%) for publishers, but requires the publisher to register with the app in order to receive their payment. Some people consider this objectionable because it's opt-out instead of opt-in for the publishers, and because it's not clear enough what happens to unclaimed payments.
• A few people object to reading apps because they want a site's publishers and designers to have final authority over how their content is displayed to users. Most of us consider this untenable because it's in tension with the design of the web.

People may quibble with the wording or emphasis I've placed on various points above, but I think these capture the major discussions going around, and I think reasonable people can fall on various sides of these issues, or may fall on both sides of these issues at various times. Here's the thing that I think is most clear: Reading apps give people a better experience on the web, but do so in a way that's in tension with current publishing business models, and it will take painful, disruptive changes to resolve this tension.

Now, with the reasonable overview out of the way, we can talk about how we people who love the web continually fuck ourselves up.

Crabs In A Bucket

I've known John Gruber and Merlin Mann a long time. Though it's mostly been online, I try to have dinner with them once in a while when we're in the same cities, and if we were proximate, I'm sure our kids would hang out. They're good guys, and I appreciate that they're caustic and funny and am happy for their success.

When Readability first came out for iOS, a lot of people targeted their enthusiasm for the app as criticisms of the dominant player, Instapaper. Marco understandably shared a bit of his hurt at this development on his Twitter account, stoking the expected sympathy but also stoking a bit of rage as people sought to show their loyalty to Marco by "fighting back" at Readability. Marco had used the word "copycat" in a tweet, and that was the early criticism, that Readability was too similar in concept to Instapaper and that this was a dishonest enterprise. Obviously, given that none of these people had leveled this charge at Read It Later or the many other apps that were in the space, this was a reaction to the unexpected popularity of a challenger that they weren't ready to recognize as a member of the in-group.

The second wave of the defense mechanism that had been triggered focused on our tech community's signifiers of authenticity. I saw a number of critical posts which (falsely) described Readability as "VC-backed" or as a "big company" swooping in on the little guy. Again, these folks never criticize Apple or Microsoft's mistakes as being due to their being "VC-backed", and Readability's team is a handful of folks, so certainly bigger than Instapaper, but a tiny company by any measure. The issue isn't whether both of these apps are bootstrapped — they are — but rather whether enough small distinctions could be found to say why one is "good" and the other "bad".

This is where things were a few weekends ago, when I was even trolled into some stupid tweets that made it look like I was picking sides, when really I was just annoyed knowing I'd have to write the post you're reading now.

But with most disinterested bystanders finding these angles of attack ineffective, critics honed in on what they saw as the biggest area of objection with Readability, one which obviously could be legitimately disagreed about, but which would be especially useful as a wedge between the two apps if it could be painted as evil. This was the system that Readability had devised for handling publisher payments. John used this point to characterize the Readability team as "scumbags", Merlin chimed in with a tweet on the topic, and Readability responded with an explanation of what the company is about.

Now, I should be clear: The Readability folks aren't scumbags, and John's being a bully by using his platform to say that. That's his right, of course, but my long-time impression of John has been that his intent is to speak truth to power, and while I am all for his name-calling when it comes to giant institutions and powerful industry titans, I think it's inappropriate and beneath him to do so for individuals who are working in good enough faith to carry on a discussion at a personal level. Put another way, if you can email somebody and find out their side of the story, you don't need to publicly insult them, which is good because public insults aren't particularly effective anyway.

[Update: A few people have asked why I say John's being a "bully" here. There are a few aspects, mostly related to his unique place in the Apple/iOS media realm. First, because he routes so much attention through his links, lesser blogs will compete to restate his opinions (such as criticizing Readability) ever more pointedly, in hopes of earning a link. This is already taking a place. More broadly, instead of conceding that he merely has one of the possible positions on Readability's publisher program, he encourages his Twitter followers to believe that Jeffrey Zeldman and I are motivated by a greed we're attempting to hide from people rather than that we come about our opinions honestly. As stated above, I have a lot more shares of an advertising company (Say Media) than I do of Readability, so if we want to grant the premise that I have no character and am sneaky and desperate enough to mortgage more than a decade's worth of reputation that I've earned for some short-term possible return, certainly I'd be betting on the side of publishers making money with more banner ads, rather than on them getting paid through some evolution of a consumer payment system. Similarly, you'd have to believe that the Readability team's nefarious planning deduced that the easiest way to profit from publishers' work was not by making pirated Kindle books or spam blogs, but by creating an incredibly powerful realtime content normalization and synchronization service, getting it integrated into many of the best apps in the industry, creating cutting-edge apps with what's among the best design and typography ever done in an app, and then hoping nobody would notice what they were up to. By the same logic, John must secretly be advocating his position in order to undermine all but the smallest, most vulnerable reading apps so that people are forced to read his site in its original format, where it displays the ads that pay his bills. I don't believe that's true, though. I think John thinks he's more likely to get people in our corner of the tech media world echoing either his criticisms of me and Jeffrey or of Readability if he makes them more pointed (which generally does work), and then will publish and promote the recitations of those same attacks as "evidence" of correctness. Assembling a mob where membership is earned through repeating a slur instead of adding facts to a discussion, and then rewarding those members with attention and amplification is, put simply, bullying. I point this out not because I bear some ill will against John — I sincerely don't — but because I know how this dynamic works in tech media because I used to exploit this kind of thing myself until I thought better of it.]

As I started to get dragged into a discussion with John on Twitter tonight about how "we can legitimately disagree about the mechanics of this payment method and suggest ways to improve it", I realized: We're doing it again. We're fucking ourselves. We're crabs in a barrel, all pulling each other down, and the whole web is going to lose as a result.

How We Screw This Up

I learned a lot of lessons from the stupid blogging tools war of the mid-2000s. I haven't shared a lot of them because, well, I've been busy and not that many people care. Suffice to say, there was a time when many of the same people who have Very Strong Feelings about the current wave of reading apps had strong feelings about WordPress vs. Movable Type, or Tumblr vs. WordPress, and I was delighted to troll them into either agreeing with me or battling me, either way. By the end, I was doing it with the awareness of how silly it all was, but when it began, I didn't realize the cost it would exact.

For example, fairly early on in WordPress' ascendance to dominance amongst more robust blogging tools, Matt Mullenweg made a stupid mistake and put some spammy links on the WordPress website. This was early on, before Automattic was even a company, I think, and it was immediately fixed. Matt learned some lessons from it, went on to make a great product, and made a strong company and has made the web better overall.

But at the time? I took it as proof that we were right, that we must be the good guys, and that he was wrong and probably bad. That there was something about our competition that I thought had to exist on a moral level. And even though I never explicitly egged them on to do it, our community picked up that baton and ran with it. We'd always prided ourselves on how we never asked people to switch from (the then constantly-failing) Blogger to Movable Type, but Matt was regularly asking people to switch to WordPress. The nerve! Asking people to use his product! Dave Winer used to get similarly hurt that we "let" Movable Type users attack his Userland tools, but we'd never known how to appease his frustrations because we hadn't ever encouraged them to attack. In hindsight, though, it's clear we could have set a tone of disapproval of those kinds of criticisms if we'd have understood what he meant.

That's the nature of how our insular tech communities are when they're in their early stages. I got a sense of the shoe being on the other foot when one of the first times I mentioned Tumblr in a marketing page I made for TypePad, I got an angry response from Marco. I hadn't said anything negative about Tumblr, but had clearly struck a raw nerve with my offhanded mention, and I realized that Tumblr was then still young enough that Marco saw any mention by a competitor as existing in that moral ground of the competitors having to be motivated by some nefarious goal. We settled things amicably right after, but it was striking for me to see how easily I could offend someone whose work I admire.

What About Our Friends?

The worst part of seeing how these petty scuffles play out was that the insidious desire to recast a competition between a number of really good tools as a battle between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys was encouraged by well-meaning, supportive people. I know exactly how good Marco feels to see John and Merlin go to bat for him because I've been on that side of it; Back in January John and Merlin spent the entire first segment of a podcast together talking about how much they loved Movable Type, and it warmed my heart. They used to do the same when Movable Type was in a category as vibrant as reading tools are today, and when the stakes seemed high enough to be worth tearing a competitor down.

That's not to say that folks like John and Merlin aren't sincere in their reasons for supporting Instapaper and criticizing Readability — I think the points they use to back up their arguments are their honest beliefs. But their motivations? It's their wonderful, horrible personal loyalty. It feels good to pick a team and go to war for it. And the thing is, it can be effective, because it does help the eventual winner.

Which is never either of the players that are engaged in the stupid battle.

Because when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.

How We Lose

I strongly fear we're about to cause the same damage to the reading tools market that we did through our stupid fights in blogging. We've got two great, vibrant reading tools that are innovating in the space. To my mind, they're entirely complementary and should really be working together. As I see it:

• Readability is a really useful network for encouraging and supporting reading, that syncs up your reading content to apps on any device. Its own apps are just a few good choices among the many that connect to the network.
• Instapaper is a powerful, best-in-class reading app for serious readers. It has a passionate community that supports it, and focuses on being a great iOS experience.

To me, they're just not competitors. It's only the most short-term thinking that would make them so. But those who are fixated on that short term thinking might want to get their shots in on their less-favorite player. And if they do so, they'll destroy both.

Because if we succeed in vilifying Readability for trying to figure out a publisher payment model, Instapaper is going to go down with it for charging for its app. If we succeed in attacking Instapaper for providing ad-free views of content within its app, Readability is going to go down with it.

And the only survivors will be the competitors with inferior products who don't have nearly as good an experience, as much passion for innovation, or as much love for the web. What those competitors do have, in some cases, is $100 million in venture capital funding. Enough to wait it out while these two tiny little bootstrapped players get torn apart by their own fans.

It doesn't have to be this way. I think fans/supporters/whatevers of both these tools can keep their strong opinions but back down their rhetoric while still saving face. Simply ensuring that critiques of any of the debatable points above are, as they say, insightful and not negative would go a long way. But it's just as important to understand the larger industry trends that are being influenced here, and how they tend to play out. Directing our fierce loyalty to one of a small number of early players in a space usually encourages either an arms race or a war of attrition. And the victors end up being the giant lumbering competitors that don't even get caught up in the battle.