(Results shown above for @pontifex_es, the Pope’s Spanish-language account, one of the demo options)
Anyway, I set things up with the API so I can do it for arbitrary twitter users rather than just the demo options, and while I can’t make it pretty like the above, I present to you some of the results for, of course, @dril
And some inferences about dril’s consumer preference are below the cut:
Definitely curious how accurate this “consumer preferences” thing is.
One thing that stood out to me in the dril results was
Likely to be influenced by brand name when making product purchases: NO
Which is surprising since dril mentions brand names all the time. It’s conceivable that “mentioning brand names all the time” doesn’t indicate being “likely to be influenced by brand name,” but that seems mighty counterintuitive.
(BTW, the API gives you numbers that are either 1, 0.5, or 0 for consumer preference items; I converted 1 into “YES,” 0 into “NO,” and excluded the 0.5s, which seemed sensible, but I haven’t looked in to what these numbers really mean. I did check the results of my own code against the demo app using some twitters you can use with both; this confirms that I’m not getting the encoding backwards on the consumer preferences – i.e. 1 is indeed “likely” not “unlikely” – but some of the other scores are numerically different, although they have a similar ranking order.
I suspect this is a difference between the “v2″ and “v3″ APIs, which return very quite different result schemas – v2 returns some kind of standard error statistic, for instance, while v3 doesn’t. I assumed v3 was better because the number was higher, but sometime I’ll go back and look at the v2 results)
(Results shown above for @pontifex_es, the Pope’s Spanish-language account, one of the demo options)
Anyway, I set things up with the API so I can do it for arbitrary twitter users rather than just the demo options, and while I can’t make it pretty like the above, I present to you some of the results for, of course, @dril
And some inferences about dril’s consumer preference are below the cut:
In 2012, Sethi was featured on NY Daily News, CNET, Huffington Post, and other news outlets for hiring a woman off of Craigslist to slap him across the face whenever he was distracted from his work. Impressed with the observable effects of operant conditioning, Sethi founded Behavioral Technology Group in July of the following year.
1109514775 asked: "acute sleep deprivation has an antidepressant effect which can be traced specifically to the resulting REM deprivation" -source? I have observed that to be true for myself, but given the general consensus that sleep deprivation is not good, I thought I was mistaken in my perceptions and/or an outlier.
In the course of the same Google search I found this 2002 paper, whose abstract calls the idea into question, but in the process refers to it as “time-honoured":
New data cast doubt on the time-honoured conviction that REM sleep deprivation is more effective [at reducing depressive symptoms] than non-REM SD.
(Reblogged for people coming in from the SSC link who have the same question.)
Dreamed that I was dating some girl and we were having relationship issues. I went to Nassim Nicholas Taleb for advice, and he told me that “the most important tool for lesbians in relationships is the use of spreadsheets.”
People with a bee in their bonnet about modern media ~romanticizing cutesy dysfunction~ never seem to care about, say, the entire canon of country music
I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.
I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.
Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:
1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.
2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house.
3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well.
It is only about two statements that I saw go by:
1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing.
2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.
Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.
It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously.
Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.
So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.
Really?
There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers.
BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half.
Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing.
I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy.
Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.
This, my friends, is a real world consequence.
This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.
Hold that thought.
I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.
Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.
The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.
And we sold out of the first printing in two days.
Two days.
I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.
Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.
That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out.
The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’
went digging through a bunch of the post-weinstein rash of creeper/rapist/harassment/etc industry callout shit this evening and boy I’ll tell you, that is just the thing to bring my budding urge to burn the world into full flower. this is just me throwing my wineglass petulantly, I guess, you know if you’re into that or not
I have seen a lot of talk lately from various writers (e.g. Franklin Foer, Farhad Manjoo) about “the Five” – the five highest-valued companies in the world, which are all tech companies and which seem to be a new breed of corporate giant, different from anything we’ve seen before.
(The most common list is FAMGA – Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple – although sometimes one hears it as the FAANGs, with Netflix swapped in for Microsoft)
I am definitely curious, and worried, where the Five will end up taking us. The writers sounding the alarm about the five make some good points. However, I want to air a few frustrations with the anti-Five stuff:
1. It’s both cute and frustrating to see mainstream liberal journalists reinvent anarchism on the fly, apparently without realizing they’re doing it. The critics of the Five make the true and important point that the Five are less like traditional corporations and more like governments. Unlike most other companies, you could not accurately describe Amazon by pointing to any one core service or product it provides; instead it is simply a force that does many things under one name – less a thing like McDonald’s and more a thing like the government of France. The anti-Five writers say this lack of unifying purpose is disturbing, especially when combined with great power. But how does this differ from the governments we already have? That is, in a world with so many powerful governments, why should we be disturbed by the rise of few more?
2. The obvious answer is “governments are accountable to the people.” But how much do the anti-Five writers really believe this? Consider one of their other complaints, that Facebook’s “News Feed” (often referred to as though it’s some sort of news network, rather than just a dashboard) influences public opinion heavily and for the worse. Perhaps it even undermines democracy – all these people get fake news from Facebook, and next thing you know, they’re voting for Donald Trump!
But if the people are this easily deceived/confused (remember, Facebook does not present itself as a news source, comes with no imprimatur of quality … ), how on earth are we to expect them to steer the government sensibly under normal conditions? Manjoo has likened Facebook to a “Ministry of Information,” because it has now said it will take some responsibility for the content that appears on it, and … oh no, does that mean Facebook will control what billions of people read? Well, yes, but only if they’re looking at Facebook, the exact same way that CNN and Fox can control what millions of people think by tweaking their programming.
There is nothing internally wrong with this kind of consequentialist thinking, wherein one acknowledges that most people get their news from a single extremely fallible source, and goes on to hold that source responsible for electoral outcomes. But it does mean that you’ve let the people off the hook, because apparently “changing the channel” is beyond them. You can be a grim realist and concede that democracy is pretty fucked, but if so, we don’t have much more control over our government than we do over the Five, do we?
(Besides, we do have a kind of control over the Five. Unlike governments, they don’t have a monopoly on the use of force […yet], and cannot take money from consumers or Wall Street that is not willingly given. If they turned really evil, it would be possible to boycott them en masse. I’m not saying it would happen, but it’d be possible.)
3. We should not be too quick to say that the dominance of the Five over other tech companies is reflective of some sort of pernicious market power. Remember the other criticism people make of the tech industry, that it’s full of bullshit startups that don’t do any real, technical innovation? For all their other flaws, the Five are doing real stuff, and many others are not. Manjoo tells the story of Snapchat, which got bigger and bigger until Facebook decided to swat it down by releasing its own Facebook version of Snapchat’s “Stories” feature. Which sounds like it was extremely easy, because the Stories feature wasn’t a technology, just an informal idea that anyone could code up on their own.
Snapchat, as Manjoo described it, was not a technology company. It was like an automotive startup whose popular new product is a car with a cool, sexy paint job. Nothing new under the hood that would be hard to copy, just a set of colors people like, ones that have never been done before in quite the same style. If Ford or Toyota now were to come out with a similarly painted car of their own, would it be evidence of the deplorable dominance of Big Car over smaller upstarts?
