Weekly update: people love legal horror stories
To my new subscribers, thank you for joining the 12 Challenges journey! Here, I give a quick update on what I did this week.
This week, the main event was a guide I wrote on how to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech, based off my legal horror story featuring the extremely lovely people at Facebook’s law firm, Perkins Coie.
The guide did great on Hacker News, reaching the no.2 spot. This led to 20k page views. Since it was a 16 minute read, I’m going to conservatively estimate that 19.9k people read it fully to the end.
Let’s quickly dwell on how bizarre Hacker News is. Started as a side project of Y Combinator (YC), it quickly became central to the entire tech information ecosystem, and has remained so for around 15 years (with a nice side effect of crazy amounts of soft power for YC).
It’s solely because of Hacker News that my guide went on to be picked up by
— thanks ! — which is the largest tech Substack blog with 500k subscribers, and by the TLDR newsletter, which has 1.25m subscribers.And yet, Hacker News’ design feels like a relic of the early noughties, and infuriates enough people that there’s a cottage industry in simply copy-pasting the content into a different format.
And the commenters are frequently brutal, with my personal favourite being BrandonM’s 2007 takedown of a recently-launched app:
“Is it reasonable to expect to make money off this?”
That app was Dropbox, which is now worth $11bn. So probably yes.
On that note: I found the Hacker News comments for my guide full of insight (and surprisingly supportive — I guess BrandonM is on holiday). Here are some questions the comments got me asking:
Was I too fast to tell people to comply with cease-and-desists? I do believe that if there’s substance to the cease-and-desist, and it ‘feels like’ the platform would pursue you in court, then you should optimize for protecting yourself — especially if, like me, you’re a solo developer. However, it’s also true that a lot of cease-and-desists haven’t got a legal leg to stand on, and a few people pointed out that choosing to ignore the letter completely worked for them.
Is talking to a lawyer good advice? I was lucky enough to talk to amazing lawyers. But some lawyers suck. So this advice is only as good as the lawyer you end up talking to. Cease-and-desist letters from Big Tech are such a niche thing that many lawyers won’t have the expertise to know what to do. It’s worth looking out for that.
Should I have referred Facebook to Arkell v Pressdram (thanks to Mordisquitos for pointing this out)? That might have been a bit too much, but fellow UK cease-and-desist receiver Mohammed Shah does find comfort in using a different misspelling for the name of the Facebook lawyer harassing him, every time he replies. So inspired by that, I’m planning to add a section to the guide on how to preserve your humanity and good humour while going through these kinds of legal episodes.
To round out the cease-and-desist piece, I am thrilled that my guide to dealing with legal bullying by Big Tech companies reached 1000s of developers. I think it’s possible that the guide causes at least a handful of people to be better-prepared for legal bullying, and emboldens them to keep working on cool stuff even when it’s adversarial to Big Tech — in which case, I can tell myself it achieved my woolly 12 Challenges goal of making the internet a bit better.
And I’m still exploring a Challenge expanding on the cease-and-desist area, which could end up looking like:
A one-page site (e.g. howtoceaseanddesist.com) with a wizard/flowchart on what you can do after receiving a C&D - and also to test if you are at risk.
A simple database, probably hosted on Airtable with a form on top for submissions, collecting example stories of C&Ds together with how the receiver responded, and the eventual outcome.
Interested in which you’d vote for, so please feel free to drop a comment.
TrojanTok (Challenge 2)
Still working on getting TrojanTok (the project to use TikTok to undermine TikTok) up-and-running.
It’s been a little slow, particularly since I started feeling like:
To be good at TikTok, I’d have to use TikTok (more on this below)
If I used TikTok, I’d become addicted to TikTok (due to the combination of my personality and how addictive TikTok is)
If I became addicted to TikTok, I’d end up spending roughly an hour a day on it (based on these US figures)
Which would be around 6% of my waking life (17 hours a day)
And I like my waking life as it is, thank you very much
So I decided to change tack a little and look for a content creator to forge the way ahead on this front. Call me a coward if you like — just please, I beg you, don’t make me watch any more TikTok videos.
In the last couple of days, I found someone who seems awesome and shares my enthusiasm for TrojanTok. We’ve agreed on an initial trial period of 30 days, so I’m very excited to kick this off starting early next week.
Why do you need to use TikTok to be good at TikTok?
TikTok is an incredibly textured and idiosyncratic world of content, with thousands of 'house styles' for successful videos. Practically every day there's a new trend to jump on, and every few months the algorithm shifts to favour different styles of content production.
So you need to understand what people enjoy consuming on TikTok, and you need to get a feel for the black box algorithm - you can't come at it blind. And to do that, my conclusion is that you need to use the platform. Ideally, often.
I could be wrong, in which case drop a comment.
Linknames (Challenge 1)
I still haven’t worked up the courage, or figured out how to word the approach, for letting Donald Glover know about a very special linkname I’ve bought for him.
I have, however, figured out an alliterative headline for the article I’m going to write about it, so that’s a useful start:
Giving Glover Gil.ga
The headline makes more sense if you read this article. And yup, that’s a domain that I now own. Someone needs to check me into domain-buying rehab, I truly have a problem:
I also wasted valuable 12 Challenges time watching this incredible Eric André Show interview with Glover (NSFWish!), which he speaks very little in.
Some stats
🎉 Reached 100 subscribers this week! Once again, huge thanks to those who have joined. I’m going to try hard to write stuff that you’ll like.
In case you’re a numbers geek, the conversion from view to subscriber was 0.2%, which means I need roughly 500k more page views to reach my goal of 1000 subscribers. Challenge accepted!
That’s all for now — have a great weekend and I’ll be back on Tuesday or Wednesday with something, likely about the impact of AI on the ads industry.