MetaDiscussion on What We’re About: Here’s an Excerpt from an Article That Rewards Reading

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)

So what kind of medium is the web if the boundaries are so unclear, and if the fundamental question is WWIC? This is from an interview with MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey:

What makes MetaFilter a success?

Matt: I’d like to think it’s intense moderation and customer service.

That is the point that I am trying to make. The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. “Intense moderation” in a customer service medium is what “editing” was for publishing.

Working Within a Customer Service Medium

That’s what I tell my Gutenbourgeois friends, if they’ll listen. I say: Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don’t just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you’ll sell things. (Don’t count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They’re clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don’t want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It’s a better online spend.

I’m winging it here, but I mean it. I own SavePublishing.com (that I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it is, I think, emblematic). I also own WhyWasntIConsulted.com, and welcome suggestions on what to do with it. Obviously. (Oh, and CommentsAreClosed.com.)

The days of the web as all-purpose media emulator are numbered. Apps on mobile are gaining traction; the web browser, despite great and ongoing effort, will not become the universal platform for everything ever. Apps provide niche experiences. People apparently like niche experiences enough to pay for them. This is serious.

Sadly, mobile apps, as a class of software, are less free than many would like, in terms of both freedom to tinker and freedom from payment. This upsets people who are commited to the WWIC web, but for other people, like publishers who have been told that they “don’t get it” for a decade, the idea of a defensible territory, a walled garden, looks just swell. That the new thing might make, instead of lose, money is a morale booster. So media properties are migrating into these apps, where boundaries between reader and publisher can be defined and enforced. TV is migrating back to TV, but “smarter.” To read a book people will turn to their phones. But the web is where they will go to complain.