Jonah Peretti

This Felix Salmon interview with Jonah Peretti is terrific. Tracing Peretti's broad and meandering background gives many hints as to how he has come to be the reigning king of viral content, and his interdisciplinary explorations play no small part in his pattern recognition.

[I had no idea until I read this interview that Peretti's sister is Chelsea Peretti (most recently of Brooklyn Nine Nine fame). I saw her open for Sarah Silverman at the Largo in Los Angeles a few times.]

On the origin of the Huffington Post:

“I knew that Arianna’s friends, who were on television but not on the Internet, were going to create a sensation if they blogged. You remember when celebrities first started tweeting? Everyone freaked out: “Oh, I can’t believe a celebrity’s tweeting.” Blogging at that time was all about people in their pajamas, the person who couldn’t be on TV, the little guy who finally has a voice. I knew that people would freak out if Larry David or Tina Brown or a senator or a congressman started to blog. We knew we could make that happen. We already had all these people committed, from Alec Baldwin to Larry David and Tina Brown—all going to blog for the first time for us on Huffington Post in the first week that we launched.

I knew that that would create a sensation, that some people would hate it, and that some people would love it, but that it would be an incredibly exciting development that every blogger would have to watch, and be excited to watch, and want to form an opinion on. That was what would generate the viral spike. The question was, all my previous projects did a spike and then crashed.

So I was like, “What keeps people there?” One of the stickiest sites on the Internet was the Drudge Report. With always-fresh headlines and splashes and things like that, people would come back every single day. That site was built over a really, really, long period of time, and had the Lewinsky scoop and other things that drove its usage. Tons of people have created clones that never took off, because they’re sticky but not contagious.

There were these two models that we just kind of bolted together. One was to make the site itself viral, which was celebrities blogging. I was very focused on making sure that they used the default blogging tools of the Internet. I think that everyone expected us to have some Flash site that wasn’t a real blog. I went to Ben and Mena Trott, who had started Six Apart. We used Movable Type, which at the time was the premiere blogging platform. We modified it a lot in order for it to work, but it had permalinks it was reverse chronological. It had all the things that blogs were supposed to have so that people who knew about blogging would see it and say, “Oh, Larry David is blogging.” Not, “Larry David’s doing some weird new thing that Arianna Huffington invented.”

We knew that was the piece that was going to make it take off and be contagious. Then Andrew posting links and headlines that were constantly updated would be the thing that made it sticky. You’d come to see the celebrities blogging, you’d say, “Wow, what does this mean? That blogging has evolved in this different way.” And then you would say, “Oh, there’s a good link here. There’s a good link here.” And you would just keep coming back every day. Even if Larry David didn’t blog again for three months, you’d be checking the site because you’d have great links to content around the web. That was sort of the idea.”

On reality TV:

“JP: One of the reasons reality TV became so dominant was because people looked at time as being the metric. And the reason that reality TV works well for time is that the classic reality TV formula, in the beginning, was the tribal council and somebody getting eliminated. So you could have 50 percent of the show being boring filler and you’re kind of wanting to change the channel but you’re like, “Oh, but I wonder if my favorite person’s going to get eliminated.” So you have to watch to the end to see the elimination. In a way, that was a way of gaming time. You could look at that and say, “Oh, they spent an hour watching this show, including the commercials. That means it must be a really high quality show.” But it also might just mean that they figured out a hook that incentivizes you to watch to the end and then did a lot of mediocre content in the middle.”

On headlines:

FS: John Herrman [then of BuzzFeed, now of The Awl] wrote that piece about headlines.

JP: John wrote a piece saying the Internet provides many headlines for every article, sometimes better than what the author wrote, and that there just shouldn’t be headlines on articles. Headlines are generated on Twitter and all these different places and it is something that we think a lot about. What do people add to a story when they share it? In some cases it’s better than the headline that our team wrote and in some cases shows why content matters to them. Because you say, “I’m sharing this” and explain why you’re sharing it.

Miscellany

1. Fewer Harvard MBA's took jobs in finance this year than last. That might be a good sign for the stock market according to one theory.
2. Don't like the idea of the Miami Heat's Big Three taking pay cuts to lure in Carmelo Anthony to form a Big Four super team? Perhaps the solution is a radical one: remove the ceiling on individual player salaries. There is no small measure of poetic justice that the a team in which its top three stars took a discounted salary to allow their owner to sign other strong players (the Spurs) just defeated a team in which the top three stars took the maximum salary possible, leaving the rest of their roster very undermanned (the Heat).
3. We're living in an art market boom. I'm saving up for my first Jeff Koons'. I may have to settle for stealing a kleenex after he blows his nose in it.
4. The wonderful economic test beds that are multiplayer video games. “A multiplayer game environment is a dream come true for an economist. Because here you have an economy where you don't need statistics. And elaborate statistics is what you use when you don't know everything, you're not omniscient, and you need to use something in order to gain feeling as to what is happening to prices, what is happening to quantities, what's happening to investments, and so on and so forth. But in a video game world, all the data are there. It's like being God, who has access to everything and to what every member of the social economy is doing.”

Eugene not that great

Everyone was all abuzz about a computer program named Eugene supposedly passing the Turing Test last week.

A Slate article has some passages from one of the judges' conversations with Eugene, however, and it's not impressive.

Judge: Hello, what is the weather like tomorrow?

Eugene: In my native town people says that meteorologists are like sappers: they make a mistake only once, but the difference is that sappers do that once in a lifetime and meteorologists - daily. Do you like weather today?
 

Here's another exchange.

Judge: Yes, I am a doctor. Are you healthy?

Eugene: Well, so tell me about your work. I think - doctor is a nice specialty!
 

It's no wonder that this judge “eventually guessed Eugene to be a foreign female child.” I had hoped for better from a program that shared my name.

(h/t Ken)

The Nash Equilibrium of Silicon Valley

A "Nash equilibrium" solution is one where, when both parties have considered all available moves, minimizes damage to themselves under the assumption the other player is a selfish dickhead. In a capitalist environment like America's, with no social controls or other factors besides ruthless logic, this is the default behavior. And it should be, if games are strictly competitive and humans are built like computers.

A "Pareto optimal" solution is one which, given all the possibilities of action, produces the best outcome for both parties (with some negotiable surplus).

The Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates that a Nash equilibrium solution is not always Pareto optimal. The "confess-confess" solution is the Nash equilibrium. You will always be better off screwing the other person over, whether they are honest or dishonest. The "deny-deny" solution is Pareto optimal. If both parties can somehow trust each other, they will both be better off selecting this solution.

...
When someone like Elon Musk comes along, someone who is clearly is working very hard toward Pareto optimal outcomes (watch or read about his personal history), we simply cannot fathom that his actions can't be explained outside a traditional Nash-equilibrium, dog-eat-dog model of capitalism.

Of course, this applies way beyond Tesla. I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism. I don't think this anxiety is misplaced. Rather, I think that technology, specifically the World Wide Web presents a "way out" of this dilemma. It will take time, but ultimately, the Web's power is that it can mimic the "accountability" aspect of local transactions, but on a global scale.
 

From Chris Johnson, whose blog I just stumbled across for the first time.

The unfortunate part of the Game of Thrones between the tech titans in Silicon Valley (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter) is that the industry as a whole has tended towards Nash Equilibriums. 

In general, healthy competition is good for consumers, and I'm of that camp, especially when there is one dominant entity. In many areas, though, we have companies devoting precious resources to building out a near clone of another's company's services just for defensive purposes. It's not just an issue with patents. Is it critical that we have yet another streaming music service? Another mapping app for mobile devices? Is it good for consumers when services for one company are kept off another company's hardware/software ecosystem just for competitive reasons? So many of our best and brightest are building repeated work because of tribal (company) affiliation.

Personal statistician

Another sign of the gradual ascent of statistical analysis within sports: some NBA players now employ a personal statistician.

Justin Zormelo, a 30-year-old Georgetown graduate, is at the forefront of a growing industry, his services a must-have accessory for the playoffs. Zormelo, who spends hours every day hunkered over a laptop in his home office, has become the go-to source for players who want a private guide through the emerging world of advanced analytics.

Let others conduct wind sprints and weight-room sessions. Zormelo, who works for individual players and not their teams studies film, pores over metrics, and feeds his clients a mix of information and instruction that is as much informed by Excel spreadsheets as it is by coaches’ playbooks. He gives players data and advice on obscure points of the game — something many coaches may not appreciate — like their offensive production when they take two dribbles instead of four and their shooting percentages when coming off screens at the left elbow of the court.

...

Zormelo’s career took off three years ago when he began working for Kevin Durant, the league’s leading scorer and most valuable player. Zormelo spent last season living out of two suitcases in Oklahoma City as Durant’s full-time stats guru. He attended Thunder games with his iPad in tow, watched film with Durant at night and even slept on Durant’s couch. Zormelo ended their season together by presenting Durant with a five-page report full of pie charts and bar graphs.

This season, Zormelo worked with All-Stars like Paul George of the Indiana Pacers, John Wall of the Washington Wizards and Rajon Rondo of the Boston Celtics. At least three of his clients are still in the playoffs. When they require hands-on involvement, he heads to the airport.
 

One of the chief challenges for teams that employ quantitative analysts is getting the coach and players to embrace the recommendations that come from the analysis. It's a good sign for those teams when players themselves are turning to the numbers for self-improvement, though the conflict between recommendations from a player's own statistician and the team's analysts can be troubling.

Fluid team sports like basketball are trickier from a strategic standpoint than a sport of individual confrontations like baseball. In baseball, individual statistical achievement and team achievement are usually highly correlated. In basketball, one player may pad their scoring stats by shooting a lot, but that may not be best for the team.

Atul Gawande once wrote a great article about how most of us could benefit from more coaching. It seems that one of the greatest investments for someone with wealth would be coaching, and yet I don't observe that happening.

I suspect that the people hire coaches when the marginal value of the coaching is very clear, and that tends to be in areas where the price or market signals are explicit and efficient. Athletes have very public contracts, their statistics are tracked at an increasingly fine resolution, the correlation between improved play from coaching and both team success and personal financial wealth is visible and clear.

Many people hire fitness coaches because they can see the results on the scale each morning, or in the bathroom mirror, and in society's well-documented preference for people who are fit.

Hiring a coach for your professional career may have greater returns, but the signals may not be as consistently reinforced or even as measurable as for an athlete, and where do you find a good coach anyhow when the labor market is so tight? Given that the practice is not common in many disciplines (take product management as one example) there is real inertia that means most practitioners have to own their own development.