Dan Olson and platform purpose.
If you haven’t heard or seen anything by Dan Olson, you should go to his channel, Folding Ideas, on YouTube and watch something now. There is a blend of content to choose from: he has movie story analyses, a deep dive into Fifty Shades of Grey, a introspective piece on how he accidentally “did a colonialism” in minecraft, and his most watch video “Line Goes Up”, a piece that examines and deconstructs the NFT and NFT bro marketplace. He creates well-written, well-crafted, considered, and thought-provoking video essays, presented in an approachable way, and he’s brilliant. I could go into him at length, but, as I mentioned, he’s thought-provoking, and he provoked a thought that I wanted to speak to.
I was watching an older video of his in the background while I was making my kids’ dinners, and his piece on Vidme made me start thinking about Facet.
His analysis goes into Vidme as a YouTube competitor, what it means to be a video hosting provider and the relationship between creators and content platforms. It’s a quick and great perspective on the genre, but in his typical calm and matter-of-fact method, he eviscerates the Vidme platform. He doesn’t dissect its content or its interface or its advertising (although he opens with it initially), he challenges Vidme at its core. He questions its being.
It spurred a fear deep down. What if he was to analyze Facet? What would he say and speak to? There are a lot of parallels here.
False Friends
He discusses how platforms attempt to make creators their allies, but as the platform scales, the content creators become background noise to the true users: advertiseres
Uncodified Relationships leads to exploitation
Without a structural commitment to a relationship with the content providers, the “just pals” and “we’re all in this together” statement feels like a disingenuous lie to get creators to generate content so that they can then be quickly left behind for the true “pals”, the advertisers.
Duplication
If you’re just a copy of another platform, who are your real users going to be?
Cultivate what you want vs. toxic communities
Without cultivation and moderation, the content can become a toxic blend of ideas and people that were kicked off other platforms.
You need to tend your garden to grow what you want.
Features and competitors flaws.
There are opportunities to create a better platform, but Dan points out how Vidme didn’t choose to add any new features or analyze their competitor’s flaws to give users what they really wanted.
The point that really got to me was the “Launch Feature” comment, and how the launch is a promise to the user. It’s the initial agreement between the company and their users/audience that speak to the values and priorities of the companies.
It was a fantastic point that I think will be the seed of a daily existential crisis for Facet. What promises am I making, and how am I fulfilling those promises?
The “duplication” comments were also penetrating. If you’re just going to be someone else, then why bother being at all? Duplication means you’re just setting yourself up to be a worse version of the other, subsisting on the lost users that haven’t found out about the other yet or the dregs that have be spurned by it.
It’s important to “be something”. It’s important to define yourself or others will define you. With Facet, we invite comparison because of the giants around us.
Are you like Instagram?
Are you like Snap Chat?
Are you like Facebook?
Are you a journal
The comparisons are large and forceful and oppressive. And the other networks are so large and offer so many things that it’s hard for people to find the spaces between, making it not only important to be different but to be loud about those differences.
Dan’s video is a reminder to constantly examine how Facet answers those existential questions and then how we proesent those answers.
