metamick

metamick@nostrplebs.com

co-founder & ceo of geyser.fund

The Ides Of March isn’t just another music NFT—it’s a revolutionary approach to digital music collecting and creation on Bitcoin, using Ordinals, empowering fans to own, remix, and shape their music experience like never before.

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To begin, Obsidian employs plain text Markdown formatting for notes, just like all Nostr-based blogging platforms. This makes it an ideal choice for creating, formatting, and editing Nostr posts.

In his 1918 book, Folklore in the Old Testament, Scottish social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer documented similarities between Old Testament stories, such as the Flood, and indigenous legends around the world. He identified Livingston's account with a tale found in Lozi mythology, wherein the wicked men build a tower of masts to pursue the Creator-God, Nyambe, who has fled to Heaven on a spider-web, but the men perish when the masts collapse. He further relates similar tales of the Ashanti that substitute a pile of porridge pestles for the masts. Frazer moreover cites such legends found among the Kongo people, as well as in Tanzania, where the men stack poles or trees in a failed attempt to reach the Moon.[19] He further cited the Karbi and Kuki people of Assam as having a similar story. The traditions of the Karen people of Myanmar, which Frazer considered to show clear 'Abrahamic' influence, also relate that their ancestors migrated there following the abandonment of a great pagoda in the land of the Karenni 30 generations from Adam, when the languages were confused and the Karen separated from the Karenni. He notes yet another version current in the Admiralty Islands, where mankind's languages are confused following a failed attempt to build houses reaching to heaven.
Source: en.wikipedia.org

According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar (שִׁנְעָר‎). There they agree to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Yahweh, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.
Source: en.wikipedia.org

Substack insists that advances are determined by “business decisions, not editorial ones”. Yet it offers writers mentoring and legal advice, and will soon provide editing services. YouTubers can post what they like, within broad guidelines, but they cannot monetise content around what YouTube deems “controversial” subjects, including abortion. Twitch has imposed rules for its streamers’ behaviour offline. On May 5th Facebook’s “oversight board”, which rules on editorial matters, upheld Donald Trump’s ban from the platform.
Source: www.economist.com

And financing is getting simpler. One startup, HIFI, helps artists manage their royalties, paying them regularly and fronting them small sums to make up shortfalls. Another, Karat, extends credit to creators based on their follower count. Helped by such services independent artists took home 5.1% of global recorded music revenues last year, up from 1.7% in 2015, calculates MIDiA Research, a consultancy. In the same period the share of the three largest record labels fell from 71.1% to 65.5%.
Source: www.economist.com

The more possible it becomes to make a living out of online content, the more precarious becomes the position of the companies that have acted as intermediaries between creators and consumers. Newspapers, which solved a physical distribution problem that no individual writer could hope to overcome, are one example. Substack’s leaderboard includes journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias who have found that readers are willing to pay them far more than the outlets that used to employ them (and that newsletters give them greater editorial freedom, too). Some newspapers, most recently the New York Times, have forbidden writers from launching personal newsletters without permission. A tyrannical few deny their writer-serfs bylines, ensuring that the value from every article accrues to the brand and not the author.
Source: www.economist.com

Mr Morgan is a living example of the observation in 2008 by Kevin Kelly, a technology writer, that any artist could make a living with just “1,000 true fans” willing to spend $100 a year or so on whatever the creator makes. With that, he wrote, “You can make a living—if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.” The broadening range of online monetisation methods is making it easier to wring that sort of money out of devotees. Video-gamers can top up the money they make from streaming by working as paid wingmen on gaming platforms such as China’s Heizhu Esports. Some creators see non-fungible tokens, a method of certifying digital creations, as a way to earn more from their superfans. With platforms like Teachable or Podia, which deal in pricey online courses, creators can plausibly get by with more like 100 true fans, Ms Jin reckons.
Source: www.economist.com

The main way to monetise online content has been advertising. Making real money requires a huge audience: even 1m views on YouTube might make the poster only about $2,000. Some types of content attract even lower ad rates. PornHub says its amateur contributors earn an average of $0.60 per 1,000 views; 1m hits would net just $600. Ads can make megastars rich, but cannot provide a living for small-time foot goddesses and other niche creators.
Source: www.economist.com

The trend towards subscriptions, and other models of monetisation, is changing that, bringing with it the possibility of a creator middle class. Consider Craig Morgan. The sports journalist was laid off last year by the Athletic, an online publication, after the pandemic put live sport on hold. A friend suggested he try writing a newsletter. AZ Coyotes Insider was launched on Substack in July. Its detailed updates about a single National Hockey League team—everything from goaltender Darcy Kuemper’s knee injury to the immigration woes of defenceman Ilya Lyubushkin—are not designed for a wide audience. But with a subscription model, they don’t need one.
Source: www.economist.com

Yet what of those creators with more modest followings? A few online stars earn megabucks, but the tail is long (see charts). Spotify says it wants to give “a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art”. But only about 0.2% of the 7m-plus musicians on the platform make more than $50,000 a year in royalties; just 3% make more than $1,000. There are 20m gaming “experiences” on Roblox, but nearly 15% of all play takes place on one game, “Brookhaven RP”, according to analysis by Ran Mo of Electronic Arts, a game developer. On Patreon, where people can subscribe to creative services of all sorts, 200,000 creators earn a total of $1bn a year. The top earner makes around $2m, but about 98% make less than the federal minimum wage of $1,257 a month.
Source: www.economist.com

The dancers of TikTok and pranksters of YouTube, whose popularity rises or falls on the tweak of a recommendation algorithm, may seem easily replaceable. In reality, the opportunities for interaction with online stars may make their audiences more loyal than those of other celebrities, Mr Kemp points out. Jennifer Aniston and her buddies were in people’s sitting rooms for half an hour a week. Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s top bopper, is in their pockets all day. “After a decade of building their audiences, a class of Super Creators have emerged that have leverage over their aggregators,” wrote Rameez Tase, head of Antenna, an audience-measurement company, in a recent blog post. “They simply built such large, engaged audiences that those audiences would follow them anywhere.”
Source: www.economist.com

As platforms fight over the most popular content, bargaining power is being transferred to the people who make it. Simon Kemp of Kepios, an internet research firm, compares platforms’ negotiations with top creators to TV networks’ wrangling with the cast of “Friends” over each season’s contracts. Many offer better terms to their most successful creators: Twitch reportedly pays a higher share of subscription revenues to its top streamers; Substack offers advances to writers it believes will be a hit. The share of revenue that creators can earn seems to depend on how easily they could leave. Moving one’s email list away from Substack is simple, so the firm lets writers keep 90% of their revenues. Game-makers on Roblox, who are basically stuck there, keep about 25%.
Source: www.economist.com

YouTube, which has long given regular video-posters a 55% cut of ad revenue, is developing new features including tips in the form of paid “applause”. It says the number of channels joining its paid “partner programme” in 2020 was more than double that in 2019. In all it has paid contributors $30bn in ad-revenue shares and subscription fees in the past three years, far more than any other social platform. Last year TikTok, a short-video app, launched a “creator fund” which it says will dispense more than $2bn to users in its first three years. Douyin, its Chinese twin, is investing $1.5bn with the aim of doubling its creators’ revenues. Snapchat, another social-video app, last year launched Spotlight, a sharing feature through which it is paying $1m a day to the creators of its most popular clips.
Source: www.economist.com

In response, platforms that once paid little or nothing to creators are ponying up. Companies “need to either offer some way to monetise that content on-platform, or…they'll become just a promotional hub, where people essentially advertise the content that they're monetising on other platforms,” says Josh Constine of SignalFire, another venture-capital firm.
Source: www.economist.com

One consequence of the internet is that “value has shifted away from companies that control the distribution of scarce resources to those that control demand for abundant ones,” writes Ben Thompson, author of the tech newsletter, Stratechery, who calls such firms “aggregators”. Because the platform sets the conditions for a piece of content’s success, via its algorithm, suppliers have to adapt to its rules, thus commoditising themselves. In this world of abundant supply, content providers become as interchangeable, and have as little bargaining power, as Uber drivers.
Source: www.economist.com

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Source: www.wired.com

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.
Source: www.wired.com

But doesn't the Web foster more freedom for individuals? It is a leveling of hierarchy. An individual can put up a Web site that, if they put enough work into it, looks just as impressive as the largest company in the world. I love things that level hierarchy, that bring the individual up to the same level as an organization, or a small group up to the same level as a large group with much greater resources. And the Web and the Internet do that. It's a very profound thing, and a very good thing.

But doesn't the Web foster more freedom for individuals? It is a leveling of hierarchy. An individual can put up a Web site that, if they put enough work into it, looks just as impressive as the largest company in the world. I love things that level hierarchy, that bring the individual up to the same level as an organization, or a small group up to the same level as a large group with much greater resources. And the Web and the Internet do that. It's a very profound thing, and a very good thing.
Source: www.wired.com

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
Source: www.wired.com

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
Source: www.wired.com

So Steve Jobs is telling us things are going to continue to get worse. They are getting worse! Everybody knows that they're getting worse! Don't you think they're getting worse?

So Steve Jobs is telling us things are going to continue to get worse. They are getting worse! Everybody knows that they're getting worse! Don't you think they're getting worse?
Source: www.wired.com

What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver? The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't. That's going to break people's hearts. I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much---if at all.

What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver? The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't. That's going to break people's hearts. I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much---if at all.
Source: www.wired.com

What will the economic landscape look like after that democratic process has gone through another cycle? The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this Web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place.

What will the economic landscape look like after that democratic process has gone through another cycle? The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years
Source: www.wired.com

If you look at things I've done in my life, they have an element of democratizing. The Web is an incredible democratizer. A small company can look as large as a big company and be as accessible as a big company on the Web. Big companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars building their distribution channels. And the Web is going to completely neutralize that advantage.
Source: www.wired.com

Other times, creating a new category means “niching down” on a particular subset of customers.
Source: categorypirates.substack.com

It’s a winner-takes-all game.
Source: categorypirates.substack.com

I believe it is completely backwards to think that the point of investing is profit. The point of profit is investing.
Source: www.axiombtc.capital

All this is intended to represent the cycle of capital through a business. You get liquid, homogeneous capital (money), you transform it into illiquid, heterogeneous capital (productive assets), to create a product, keeping a little liquid to cover the costs of delivering the product; and if you profit, that means you get to go again and create even more capital, except that this time you get to fund it yourself. In the context of financial analysis, one of the key implications I intended to communicate with this principle is that the measure of success is not that the yellow number goes up, and it’s not even that the dark blue number goes up. It’s that the dark blue to purple ratio stays high. Because that is the only sustainable way that the orange number can go up. And this is where wealth comes from. Everything else here is valuable only insofar as it lets us do this efficiently.

All this is intended to represent the cycle of capital through a business. You get liquid, homogeneous capital (money), you transform it into illiquid, heterogeneous capital (productive assets), to create a product, keeping a little liquid to cover the costs of delivering the product; and if you profit, that means you get to go again and create even more capital, except that this time you get to fund it yourself. In the context of financial analysis, one of the key implications I intended to communicate with this principle is that the measure of success is not that the yellow number goes up, and it’s not even that the dark blue number goes up. It’s that the dark blue to purple ratio stays high. Because that is the only sustainable way that the orange number can go up. And this is where wealth comes from. Everything else here is valuable only insofar as it lets us do this efficiently.
Source: www.axiombtc.capital