I have the reputation for being arrogant with many people which is ironic considering that I hold very few strong personal beliefs. I come off strong, and sometimes condescending in my style not because my ego is invested in any particular answer, rather I have taken the time to listen to my betters and although I may not fully grasp all of their arguments I fully comprehend their emotions. As an aspie I do not grasp most non verbal communication. “Intuition” sounds like magic in my book. To compensate for the lack of being able to automatically discern non verbal cues, I heavily analyze peoples physical reactions, and then jot down what they correspond to in my mental ledger. I watch the eyes move. I listen to the tone. I make a note of the pauses. I recognize the difference between when someone talks fast because what they are saying is at the top of their head, and then how they slow down when they come to parts they have to think about. The TL;DR is that I listen to the chirps. I bet my life, not on the words, but on the chirps…
In the tech world we are surrounded by a forest of chirping geeks. It’s a cacophony of noise. Some is happy. Some is scared. Some is bored. It’s always there though. For myself I listen for the over riding mood of the song. If it’s happy then it’s all probably pretty good. If it’s scared then it’s time to balance the checkbook. Using thousands of minds with thousands of viewpoints you don’t find specifics, but you get a clear idea of generalities.
Within those thousands of geeks you can then find the ones that are specialists. The ones that know their field better than others. You narrow your listening from the forest to the canaries. What you find is that many times their bird song is different. It’s happy when others are worried, or worried when others are happy.
I think about this as the canaries of YouTube have begun to lose their minds. I did not stop caring about the platform simply from my own metrics. It’s when Philly D., and Linus create their own platforms. It’s when video gamers who have been the lifeblood of for years start focusing on Twitch. It’s when Hank Green does a 35 minute video where he just sounds exhausted.
Viewers and even people in the real world pat me on the back and tell me to hold on and it will get better. They say that if I just struggle through that somehow YouTube will get back on a good course and it will be a great place again. I find it humorous. Can’t they hear the canaries?
I remember being nervous before the .com bust. Everyone was saying how it was going to be nothing but blue skies, but I could hear the worry from the people I dealt with. They would smile, and say how great things were, but there was a quickness in their eyes. I was too young to know what to do with the information at the time, and did not have the life experience to correlate the mood to anything. I still remember smiling at my buddy as he envisioned his retirement at 40 something and was trying to convince me to follow his lead. A year later he was bankrupt…
I was nervous as hell during the housing boom, as people I knew bought ever more expensive houses, while at the same time my buddies who did renovations were having a harder and harder time closing contracts. It was weird when all you could hear in the media was that you had to buy a house, but I spoke with owners of construction companies that were starting to layoff their employees. I didn’t need to know every specific to wonder why during a “boom” companies would be laying people off…
When I closed my computer repair shop I simply took heed of the mood that was obvious. People did not want to spend money on repairs. Business owners were scared about paying rent so infrastructure projects were off the table. When I listened to the flow of what tech vendors were saying it was obvious products would become ever more hard to repair, and disposable. The netbooks didn’t pan out, but tablets did. It’s not about specific products winning or losing, rather the direction of things. To this day I have zero regrets about shutting down when I did…
The sad thing is that so many people don’t listen. They have a vested interest in things being one way or the other. The CCNA has to be valuable, because THEY have a CCNA. YouTube has to stay viable, because THEY need YouTube to be viable. The world doesn’t work that way. When Netgear switches do the job you don’t need a certified tech to “manage” them. When people who have bills to pay can no longer depend on their platform they have to find a new direction. If you follow the mood of the song you’ll generally be going in the right direction. If you don’t you’ll be trying to repair VCR’s in 2017.
As far as YouTube has been concerned my viewpoint has been solid for a while now. What struck me hard was when Hank Green did his video about the situation. He is a poster boy for YouTube. His main channel has been around 10 years and has 3 million subscribers. He has founded other channels such as Sci Show that required a real business acumen to get off the ground. He’s the cofounder of VidCon, and generally he fits into the world view that Silicon Valley purports to support. “Don’t forget to be awesome”, and all of that. You don’t need to know the specifics of his many businesses, or how the profit/ loss breaks down. He’s darn near the poster boy of the platform. You can tell he’s tired, confused, frustrated, and thinking about what’s next. The canaries are scared…
Just something for you to ponder. Folks get so focused on specific metrics that they don’t bother just to stop and listen to the birds. Just as in the forest when the birds stop chirping you would be wise to make sure your rain gear is easily accessible, and check the map to see where the closest lean-to is, when the geeks chirping changes you should verify where you stand and what resources you can trust. You don’t need to know the specifics of what’s spooking the birds, or geeks, just that if they are spooked there is probably something to be concerned about heading your way…
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