Home

2/20/2022: Surplus

本周的主题是 Surplus 盈余。

经济学的第一课是稀缺。只有理解了这个基本假定，才能理解价格与供需，才能理解生产和消费。然而这个古典假设却离现实有着很大的差距：稀缺制造了一种恐慌的假象，特别是在人们内心脆弱的时候，这种假象得到了集体式的放大。我们亲身经历过的、或是在教科书上读到的每一次崩溃都因此而起。

人们喜欢盈余，在风调雨顺的时候囤积和储蓄，未到山穷水尽，都舍不得拿出压箱底的家底。农耕社会的盈余积累是缓慢的，大自然的随机波动对每一个丰收都报以贫瘠。面对黄土苍天，人们毫无还手之力。

直到机器降临，盈余时代才真正来临。复利的秘密就是让盈余产生更多的盈余，这种累积往往能持续数年，直到一种机器被另一种机器替代，盈余就此易手。

以这样的方式，人们开始真正从时间中获取价值，而不仅仅是任由其带来衰老。盈余是凝结了的时间，可以在另一个时空再次释放。穿越时空是奇迹的同义词。

有了盈余，就有闪转腾挪的时间和空间。

信任是盈余，创造也是盈余。

Essays

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky

本文由《认知盈余》的作者 Clay Shirky 2008 年在 Web 2.0 Conference 的演讲整理而成。这本书出版了一段时间了，在今天仍然具有很强的意义。如果说《娱乐至死》讲的是内容消费，那么《认知盈余》就是在讲内容创作。感兴趣的朋友可以通过这个知乎问答来初步了解这本书的基本观点。

Shirky 以下面这样的一段估算来解释认知盈余的含义：

那么这个盈余有多大呢？所以，如果你把维基百科作为一种单位，所有的维基百科，整个项目——每一个页面，每一个编辑，每一个谈话页面，每一行代码，在维基百科存在的每一种语言中——这代表了类似于人类思考 1 亿小时的累积量。我和 IBM 的马丁·沃滕伯格一起计算过这个数字；这是一个大致估算，但数量级正确，大约 1 亿小时的思考。 那么看电视呢？仅在美国，每年就有两千亿小时。换一种说法，既然我们有了这样一个计量单位，那就是每年有 2000 个维基百科项目在看电视。或者换一种说法，在美国，我们每个周末花 1 亿小时，只是看广告。这是一个相当大的盈余。当人们看着像维基百科这样的东西时，他们会问：「这些人的时间是从那里来的？」他们不明白整个项目相比于整个参与架构（architecture of participation）是多么的微小。
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project - every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in - that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back‐of‐the‐envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve‐out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

以及：

也许这会成功，也许会失败。社会软件的正常情况仍然是失败；这些实验中的大多数都没有成功。但那些成功的实验是相当不可思议的，我希望这个实验能成功，显然。但是，即使它不成功，它已经说明了一个问题，那就是有人单独工作，用非常便宜的工具，有合理的希望，可以挖出足够的认知盈余，足够的参与欲望，足够的公民的集体善意，来创造一个你在五年前都无法想象的资源。
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

今天读来，仍然充满善意。

The Future of Netflix by Evan Armstrong

本文是 Napkin Math 和 The Diff 联合出品的长文，讨论了 Netflix 的发展前景。

讨论的第一部分是从量化分析开始的。对订阅用户的流失/留存分析，文章选择使用观看时长作为主要成分，一个观看了 50 小时的用户比观看了 30 小时的用户更有持续订阅的概率。因此，能否提供充足的可供持续观看的内容就成为了理解留存的关键。

Somebody that has 25 or 30 hours on a streaming service is very likely to remain engaged. Somebody that has fewer than 10 hours on a service is very likely to churn. And so then somebody who has 50 hours of engagement might not be that much more likely to retain than somebody who has 30 hours. So [the question on content’s value is] what's enough content for each user.

当 Netflix 不断进入新市场的时候，往往最先吸引的是年轻富足的城市用户，他们往往更偏好重口味的边缘题材（往往是我们会在社交媒体上听到看到的「神剧」），而当在这个市场渗透率逐步提升后，内容风格开始向均值回归，变得更像传统的电视台。

Let's say, you are in an emerging market, so you're not fully penetrated, then you'd say, well, the first tranche of subscribers to Netflix will be younger, they might be more city dwelling versus country dwelling. You sort of say, well maybe there's this profile. And if we can nail that profile, we can expand outwards because people will be talking about the shows.And so that may push you towards edgier, younger adult content or darker content or content with bigger premises. As you grow in markets, you sort of may say, well, we're whatever, 30%, 40%, 50% penetrated, we're going to start looking more like TV in general.

高质量的剧集持续更新，吸引观众不断回归，但这并不是获取新客，而是留住老客。

A high-quality returning series that people love will sort of tend to shift from an acquisition vehicle to a retention vehicle as the series matures.

上面这些讨论的碎片勾勒了 Netflix 的基本内容策略：通过边缘题材获取新客（因为他们在传统电视上无法找到这类内容），然后通过续集来留住他们；随着市场渗透率走向成熟，内容风格也将更加大众化。这样的策略就像是把 HBO 和 CBS 的策略做了一个捆绑，但在全球市场的庞大用户基数进行平坦，这样算出来一个看起来合理的单用户内容成本。

这也是最近经常想到的：内容战略应该是差异化还是成本领先？差异化往往意味着更高的成本（特别是到单用户成本这个口径上），这也是 Netflix 在前几年广受质疑（或好评）的一点，即其高企的内容制作成本。而今天看来，Netflix 的战略越来越像是成本领先，特别是在考虑了它不断扩张的订户规模之后。

这个观点也越来越适用于更多的平台型公司。在起初，这些公司规模较小的时候，往往以差异化战略切入细分市场，而在当下的阶段，平台的主要价值在于能够提高效率，减少浪费，最终降低服务单个用户的成本。换句话说，战略从差异化转向了成本领先。

与成本领先伴生的是提升商业模式的纵深。文章还把 Netflix 竞争对手的模式分成了 3 类：

Netflix 正在尝试进入的游戏市场也是一种从 Subscription focused 向 Native Attribution 转型的尝试。然而，它还必须面对微软、索尼和腾讯的激烈竞争。

Why You Can't Rebuild Wikipedia with Crypto by Casey Newton with Molly White

Molly White 是一位 Wikipedia 的长期贡献者。她从去年开始维护一个名为 Web3 is going just great 的网站，收集关于 web3 的各种「灾难」。本文是她与 The Verge 编辑 Casey Newton 的对谈文本。

Newton 提到的关于 Wikipedia 是不是特别适合 web3 的问题，这也是很多 web3 的支持者很自然想到的，用去中心化的方式来激励贡献者，让 Wikipedia 这样的社区项目再现活力。

White 的回答是这样的：

I think my experiences with the Wikimedia community have given me a pretty realistic view of how wonderful but also how difficult community-run projects can be. There are some issues that community-driven projects are prone to running up against: deciding issues when the community is split, dealing with abuse and harassment within the community, handling outside players with a strong interest in influencing what the community does. I think this is partly why some of the best critics of web3 have backgrounds in communities like Wikimedia and open source—they are familiar with the challenges that community governance and decentralization can bring. When I watch DAOs spring into existence and encounter a lot of the same difficulties we've seen over and over again, I often find myself wondering how many members have ever been involved in community-run projects in the past. I think a lot of people are dipping their toes in for the first time, and learning a lot of things the hard way, with very high stakes.

其中的关键是说：社区驱动的项目往往需要处理大量的意见分歧，包括内部争议和外部利益的侵扰，而 web3 所倡导的去中心化组织无法在此类问题面前起到足够的作用。这实际上是社区运营的核心，由于社区天生是松散的组织，争议无法避免，而问题很可能不能以民主方式得到妥善解决。社区管理者需要具有极高的治理智慧，以前后一贯的治理政策，为社区的长期发展建立秩序。

以及对财务利益的看法：

Web3 also adds an enormous amount of complexity on top of the already-complex types of issues that the Wikimedia community has faced, because there's money involved. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation handles most of the finances with respect to Wikipedia, and so although the community has input, it's largely not a day-to-day concern. There also aren't really intrinsic monetary incentives for people to contribute to Wikipedia, which I think is a very good thing. Where people are paid to edit Wikipedia by outside parties, it warps the incentive to contribute into one that's very different from (and sometimes at odds with) the incentives for most community members, and is often a very negative thing. Our community has actually spent a lot of time discussing how to handle paid editors, and has even considered trying to prohibit the practice completely. The majority of people contributing to Wikipedia are doing so out of a desire to improve an encyclopedic resource. With web3 you have a whole mix of motivations, including wanting to support a specific project, wanting to do good in various broader ways, and just wanting to make a lot of money. Those things can be in conflict a lot of the time.

White 认为，Wikipedia 的贡献者并没有很强的利益动机，而她认为这是一件很好的事情，Wikipedia 内部一直在讨论如何处理具有外部利益动机的贡献者，甚至考虑完全禁止这些人贡献内容。

Wikipedia 是一个非常独特的项目，然而其治理方式很值得思考。

Shortform

@tobi:

Hell of a deal?

Shopify 的创始人和 CEO 在 Twitter 感叹股价来到新低。

Longform

本周继续在缓慢的啃《凯恩斯传》。此类传记的前半部分往往细节满满，把人物青少年时代种种轶事、家庭背景、情感纠葛、职业发展都做全景式的描绘，然而，也确让读者迷失在细节中，耐性按不住的，可能在 1/3 就弃书不看了。实体书因有物理厚度，特别容易出现这样的情况，电子版稍微好一点。

我大概读到了全书 40% 左右的进度，已经过了 1/3 的绝望深谷，凯恩斯也逐渐开始在政界和学界崭露头角，他的基本政策观点也逐步形成。比如：

我们不应该过分地展望未来；我们的预测能力微不足道，而且我们对事情发展的结果只有最小的控制力。所以，我们这一代人的幸福才应该是我们关注的重心所在；我们必须提防为了某种看上去有利的结果而牺牲大多数人的幸福，因为我们永远不可能知道为什么要冒这个风险。这里还需要强调另一个方面：我们光是试图改善目前的状况（与过去相比）是远远不够的；这种改善必须能够弥补在过渡时期所遭受的所有的损失。

加粗的这句话具有深远的意义。任何剧烈的变化必然都有代价，而任何代价都应该得到偿付，这种偿付的成本应该在变化之初就得到考虑。

本周的分享就是这些。

下周见，

Neo

← Back to Newsletter Archive