I won’t even join the Facebook page until I know the following things:
What are the conditions under which Jim Buckmaster will agree to put up a banner?
What are the details of the advertising contracts? Specifically, how much money will be made and under what circumstances?
Who, exactly, is making the money and where is it going?
What are the details of the large X to close the ad? Will it never show the ad again to people who clicked it? How does this affect expected revenue?
What happens after $1,000,000,000?
I don’t care about the details but these sound like things you should know the answer to. It makes it a lot easier to garner support when the details have solid answers.
After the Facebook fan page got beyond a certain number of users, we could more aggressively take the campaign to Twitter and email.
The idea of branching into Twitter and email sounds great… but where does it end? There should be a ridiculously obvious target to hit here.
If you can answer the above questions and get everything set up to actually work, get an interview with Jim Buckmaster and put it up on YouTube. Build a small, professional webpage with an explanation of what you are doing and the details. Send press releases to newspapers and television stations.
If you can get a real plan and Jim Buckmaster approves of it, this should be a slam dunk to make Digg and Reddit.
BUT, really do it. Find the answers to the questions and get the official signature of Jim Buckmaster. The exposure is a piece of cake. The PLAN is the only thing preventing this from happening. Get that done and you will see the $10^9.
You, and probably almost all of lesswrong, are atypical facebook users.
“Can this Pickle get more fans than Twilight?” has gotten 370,000 fans in a week.
Keep it simple, stupid, and emotional.
This is a case where “Shut Up and do the impossible” applies, not “make good rational argument to advance understanding”
EDIT: We DO need to make good rational plans on how to do this, but that planning can be done by a small group of rationalists. I mean only that the front end should be targeted at less-rational people.
This is a case where “Shut Up and do the impossible” applies, not “make good rational argument to advance understanding”
Shut up and do the impossible! is meant for challenges that actually seem impossible, like getting out of an AI Box. Getting a lot of fans for a cause on Facebook doesn’t even rate “make a desperate effort”.
And it is legitimate to consider at this point if the Facebook fans will actually lead to achieving your actual goal. If Facebook fans are cheap, maybe you need the people who join to also send an email. That is the sort of consideration that you should make now, so it can be properly included in the campaign, and not added as a patch after everyone who has already joined doesn’t care anymore.
(I Agree entirely that these kinds of questions are important for us to consider at this point. Edited, hopefully for clarity)
Hmm, It seems that there should be some consideration of the importance. I agree that this is nowhere near ‘impossible’, but I think it warrants taking a stronger approach than merely deciding to try.
This is the virtue of isshokenmei, “make a desperate effort”. All-out, as if your own life were at stake. (emphasis mine)
That is, you really try and don’t immediately give up, because it’s important, even if the task is crossing a busy street.
If there’s a world-saving button, you should make sure to press it, and equally sure you don’t press so hard it breaks. I would definitely want to be ‘impossibly sure’ that I would/did press it right. (That is, confident to a level I might currently consider preposterous or overkill.)
Likewise we’ve probably already put way more thought into how to do this than the twilight-pickle folks. We are fully justified in putting in this much effort, even if our final facebook page is remarkably similar, because this is a much more important button. (to us.)
So this is a combination of “Simple things can possibly become very hard” and “To the degree that it is important, you minimize risk of failure/maximize your ability to overcome challenges.”
If there’s a world-saving button, you should make sure to press it, and equally sure you don’t press so hard it breaks. I would definitely want to be ‘impossibly sure’ that I would/did press it right. (That is, confident to a level I might currently consider preposterous or overkill.)
In this case, it is important to press the button right. But it is not hard. Being dramatic about the very small effort it takes is not helpful.
You only say that because you don’t know about the angry ninja. Yet.
How important it is should determine what you are willing to do to accomplish it, and what you should be prepared to do. (For even moderately important things, that includes fighting ninjas, and mindhacking)
If this isn’t covered by try harder/extraordinary effort/Do the impossible, then we need a whole new sequence.
You only say that because you don’t know about the angry ninja.
You said a silly thing, and now you are saying sillier things to try to justify it.
If there is a “Save the World” button and I go to press it, and then I discover an angry ninja is guarding it, then I am greatly surprised and I most likely die and never get the chance to “shut up and do the impossible”. If I know in advance that there is a ninja, then it is time to “shut up and do the impossible”. If I have no evidence about a ninja, but I worry about one, and spend my time working out how to get past the ninja to press the button, then I am failing to do the easy thing that saves the world.
This is hardly silly. Our very thread started with a comment about complications to an easy thing.
When something is important, you should not assume you are in the position to properly evaluate its difficulty (or even that you have the right task), and adopt that level of determination. Rather you determine to do the important thing, and figure out what is it and how hard it could be.
You don’t do the impossible because FAI is realy hard, you decide to do the impossible because the world needs saved.
And yes, you weight the risk of ninjas against all other possible challenges and the risks of preparation and inaction, the probability that you’re mistaken about the button and ought to be doing something else, and all other factors within your limits. But you don’t just throw out the idea of ninja-level obstacles.
This means we ought to be preparing to press every possible world saving button, and counter every possible challenge, weighted against how likely they are to present themselves, and to actually save the world. Lesswrong tries at this, but we have a long way to go.
Eliezer initially downvoted (I think sight unseen, the mere concept of) this billion dollar button. I would have rated the likelihood of something like this pretty low without the details of Newmark’s comments, and I suspect this is typical of lesswrongers.
I don’t I think we’ve ever devoted a whole lot of thought to polite viral marketing, Advertising contracts, what to do with a billion dollars, or Facebook.
Now here we are facing a ninja we didn’t train for, and any of us could put up a facebook page and break the button, and we’re not sure how hard to press.
EDIT: We DO need to make good rational plans on how to do this, but that planning can be done by a small group of rationalists. I mean only that the front end should be targeted at less-rational people.
Before that, it really did seem like you were using “Shut up and do the impossible” to dismiss MrHen’s questions as complaints about the difficulty.
I see now that you meant to refer to the task of figuring out how to do execute the idea effectively. A major reason this was confusing is that no one was complaining that this is hard, let alone impossible. There was no reason to support it with “Shut up and do the impossible”. To communicate more effectively, forget the colorful slogans and metaphors (it also wasn’t clear that you meant the “save the world” button as a metaphor for the Facebook group, and not just an example), and just clearly state your position, in this case, what you want to do.
Getting a bunch of people in a Facebook group is easy. Getting that Facebook group connected to $10^9 is not as simple.
If I started a Facebook group that said, “Bill Gates will give away 1 billion dollars if this hits 50,000!” it has absolutely no bearing on whether Bill Gates will give away 1 billion dollars.
This Facebook trick will only work once. Make sure it counts when it works.
That is one viable strategy, actually—get a million fans for something stupid, then aggressively market the real cause to those users.
Edit: There’s definitely a selection bias here though—you only see the “Can this group get more fans than Twilight?” because it got 500,000 fans, you don’t notice the vastly greater number of groups that fail.
I agree that your questions sound important, but there is a bit of a Catch 22 here and not all of them have answers. To get the answers, we need Jim’s attention, but we can’t get Jim’s attention until he sees that we are serious about this. To that end, putting our manifesto on a web site is a very good idea.
As far as closing the ad, my intended design is that closing it would store a cookie that indicates to not show you any advertising on Craigslist. Beyond cookies, it could also be associated with your Craigslist account, though most users interface with Craigslist without signing up for accounts. It can only lower expected revenue, but the kind of people who want to close the ad are probably the kind of people who were not very likely to click the ad in the first place.
Edit: And yes, the title is absurdly long. I have a tendency to abuse title fields in social web apps when there is no effective limit.
So, I guess the first step is finding out how many people we need to get Jim’s attention.
50K is a good guess but anything we can do to get a more accurate answer will help.
Your answer for closing the ad works. Is there anyway to find out more details about much that hurts the dollar value? I imagine that someone, somewhere runs ads like that.
What are the details of the advertising contracts? Specifically, how much money will be made and under what circumstances?
You should be able to set an easy lower bound on this. You said, “With 20 billion pageviews a month, a Google Adwords banner would bring in about 200 million dollars a year.” Just find actual quotes and keep track of the information. Shop around a bit.
Is that really a forceful objection given that the response is “ONE BILLION DOLLARS FOR CHARITY. DON’T BE AN ASS.”? And if we’re just talking plane banner ads, not flashing “You’re a Winner!” pop-ups it’s hard to justify to loss in revenue.
Maybe some kind of compromise where clicking the x hides the ads for 24 hours? My sense is that a lot of people, when they first see the ads, will turn them off. But if once they get used to them they won’t mind so much. I wouldn’t want to lose a huge chunk of revenue just because people were initially bothered by the ads.
I think the objection is forceful enough to potentially derail the whole thing—some people don’t like ads, and if they don’t want to see them, they should have that right without having to go and install an adblocker. Even if the objection isn’t logical, it’s still a very real objection that could and will be voiced.
I can’t find it with a quick Google search—though I will try again later—but I have seen at least one site owner that did this optional advertisement thing with minimal impact on revenue.
Also, with this kind of thing, “permanently” closing the ad isn’t really permanent. It’s permanent until you clear your cookies or use a different browser. It is a shame to have to lose some revenue because some users won’t just deal with the damn dust speck, but my intuition is that we’re looking at a 20% decrease in revenue with this, a difference that could be made up by a better advertising sales team.
The loss of revenue hurts, but I don’t think it’s worth a chance of losing the whole thing because some people don’t want to look at ads.
Reddit does well at unobtrusive ads. Their sidebar ads are easily blocked by adblock, and occasionally they’ll just run an ad with a happy reddit alien saying “thank you for not using adblock!”—a lot of reddit users have their adblock settings set specifically to allow ads from reddit, in order to support the site.
ETA: I suspect the ad would be closed less often if there were a note nearby naming the specific charity to which that ad was providing revenue.
I learned that my initial copy was not viral to motivate people to join based on seeing the group name in their newsfeed. I learned that it is a whole lot easier to get someone to join a group than it is to invite their friends to join the group. I sent out a few mass messages encouraging people to invite their friends, but the third and final message I sent out resulted in a net loss in users for the group.
I do still have control of that group and it’s 150 members, so it’s a good enough place to focus test ad copy for the next group.
That title is absurdly long.
I won’t even join the Facebook page until I know the following things:
What are the conditions under which Jim Buckmaster will agree to put up a banner?
What are the details of the advertising contracts? Specifically, how much money will be made and under what circumstances?
Who, exactly, is making the money and where is it going?
What are the details of the large X to close the ad? Will it never show the ad again to people who clicked it? How does this affect expected revenue?
What happens after $1,000,000,000?
I don’t care about the details but these sound like things you should know the answer to. It makes it a lot easier to garner support when the details have solid answers.
The idea of branching into Twitter and email sounds great… but where does it end? There should be a ridiculously obvious target to hit here.
If you can answer the above questions and get everything set up to actually work, get an interview with Jim Buckmaster and put it up on YouTube. Build a small, professional webpage with an explanation of what you are doing and the details. Send press releases to newspapers and television stations.
If you can get a real plan and Jim Buckmaster approves of it, this should be a slam dunk to make Digg and Reddit.
BUT, really do it. Find the answers to the questions and get the official signature of Jim Buckmaster. The exposure is a piece of cake. The PLAN is the only thing preventing this from happening. Get that done and you will see the $10^9.
You, and probably almost all of lesswrong, are atypical facebook users.
“Can this Pickle get more fans than Twilight?” has gotten 370,000 fans in a week.
Keep it simple, stupid, and emotional.
This is a case where “Shut Up and do the impossible” applies, not “make good rational argument to advance understanding”
EDIT: We DO need to make good rational plans on how to do this, but that planning can be done by a small group of rationalists. I mean only that the front end should be targeted at less-rational people.
Shut up and do the impossible! is meant for challenges that actually seem impossible, like getting out of an AI Box. Getting a lot of fans for a cause on Facebook doesn’t even rate “make a desperate effort”.
And it is legitimate to consider at this point if the Facebook fans will actually lead to achieving your actual goal. If Facebook fans are cheap, maybe you need the people who join to also send an email. That is the sort of consideration that you should make now, so it can be properly included in the campaign, and not added as a patch after everyone who has already joined doesn’t care anymore.
(I Agree entirely that these kinds of questions are important for us to consider at this point. Edited, hopefully for clarity)
Hmm, It seems that there should be some consideration of the importance. I agree that this is nowhere near ‘impossible’, but I think it warrants taking a stronger approach than merely deciding to try.
That is, you really try and don’t immediately give up, because it’s important, even if the task is crossing a busy street.
If there’s a world-saving button, you should make sure to press it, and equally sure you don’t press so hard it breaks. I would definitely want to be ‘impossibly sure’ that I would/did press it right. (That is, confident to a level I might currently consider preposterous or overkill.)
Likewise we’ve probably already put way more thought into how to do this than the twilight-pickle folks. We are fully justified in putting in this much effort, even if our final facebook page is remarkably similar, because this is a much more important button. (to us.)
So this is a combination of “Simple things can possibly become very hard” and “To the degree that it is important, you minimize risk of failure/maximize your ability to overcome challenges.”
In this case, it is important to press the button right. But it is not hard. Being dramatic about the very small effort it takes is not helpful.
You only say that because you don’t know about the angry ninja. Yet.
How important it is should determine what you are willing to do to accomplish it, and what you should be prepared to do. (For even moderately important things, that includes fighting ninjas, and mindhacking)
If this isn’t covered by try harder/extraordinary effort/Do the impossible, then we need a whole new sequence.
You said a silly thing, and now you are saying sillier things to try to justify it.
If there is a “Save the World” button and I go to press it, and then I discover an angry ninja is guarding it, then I am greatly surprised and I most likely die and never get the chance to “shut up and do the impossible”. If I know in advance that there is a ninja, then it is time to “shut up and do the impossible”. If I have no evidence about a ninja, but I worry about one, and spend my time working out how to get past the ninja to press the button, then I am failing to do the easy thing that saves the world.
This is hardly silly. Our very thread started with a comment about complications to an easy thing.
When something is important, you should not assume you are in the position to properly evaluate its difficulty (or even that you have the right task), and adopt that level of determination. Rather you determine to do the important thing, and figure out what is it and how hard it could be.
You don’t do the impossible because FAI is realy hard, you decide to do the impossible because the world needs saved.
And yes, you weight the risk of ninjas against all other possible challenges and the risks of preparation and inaction, the probability that you’re mistaken about the button and ought to be doing something else, and all other factors within your limits. But you don’t just throw out the idea of ninja-level obstacles.
This means we ought to be preparing to press every possible world saving button, and counter every possible challenge, weighted against how likely they are to present themselves, and to actually save the world. Lesswrong tries at this, but we have a long way to go.
Eliezer initially downvoted (I think sight unseen, the mere concept of) this billion dollar button. I would have rated the likelihood of something like this pretty low without the details of Newmark’s comments, and I suspect this is typical of lesswrongers. I don’t I think we’ve ever devoted a whole lot of thought to polite viral marketing, Advertising contracts, what to do with a billion dollars, or Facebook.
Now here we are facing a ninja we didn’t train for, and any of us could put up a facebook page and break the button, and we’re not sure how hard to press.
Ok, I went back and read your edit:
Before that, it really did seem like you were using “Shut up and do the impossible” to dismiss MrHen’s questions as complaints about the difficulty.
I see now that you meant to refer to the task of figuring out how to do execute the idea effectively. A major reason this was confusing is that no one was complaining that this is hard, let alone impossible. There was no reason to support it with “Shut up and do the impossible”. To communicate more effectively, forget the colorful slogans and metaphors (it also wasn’t clear that you meant the “save the world” button as a metaphor for the Facebook group, and not just an example), and just clearly state your position, in this case, what you want to do.
Getting a bunch of people in a Facebook group is easy. Getting that Facebook group connected to $10^9 is not as simple.
If I started a Facebook group that said, “Bill Gates will give away 1 billion dollars if this hits 50,000!” it has absolutely no bearing on whether Bill Gates will give away 1 billion dollars.
This Facebook trick will only work once. Make sure it counts when it works.
I agree, I misread your comment.
That is one viable strategy, actually—get a million fans for something stupid, then aggressively market the real cause to those users.
Edit: There’s definitely a selection bias here though—you only see the “Can this group get more fans than Twilight?” because it got 500,000 fans, you don’t notice the vastly greater number of groups that fail.
I agree that your questions sound important, but there is a bit of a Catch 22 here and not all of them have answers. To get the answers, we need Jim’s attention, but we can’t get Jim’s attention until he sees that we are serious about this. To that end, putting our manifesto on a web site is a very good idea.
As far as closing the ad, my intended design is that closing it would store a cookie that indicates to not show you any advertising on Craigslist. Beyond cookies, it could also be associated with your Craigslist account, though most users interface with Craigslist without signing up for accounts. It can only lower expected revenue, but the kind of people who want to close the ad are probably the kind of people who were not very likely to click the ad in the first place.
Edit: And yes, the title is absurdly long. I have a tendency to abuse title fields in social web apps when there is no effective limit.
So, I guess the first step is finding out how many people we need to get Jim’s attention.
50K is a good guess but anything we can do to get a more accurate answer will help.
Your answer for closing the ad works. Is there anyway to find out more details about much that hurts the dollar value? I imagine that someone, somewhere runs ads like that.
You should be able to set an easy lower bound on this. You said, “With 20 billion pageviews a month, a Google Adwords banner would bring in about 200 million dollars a year.” Just find actual quotes and keep track of the information. Shop around a bit.
Or find a volunteer around here willing to do it.
Is the permanent removal of the ad a necessary part of this?
No, but it minimizes the most obvious possible objection: “I don’t want ads on Craigslist.”
Is that really a forceful objection given that the response is “ONE BILLION DOLLARS FOR CHARITY. DON’T BE AN ASS.”? And if we’re just talking plane banner ads, not flashing “You’re a Winner!” pop-ups it’s hard to justify to loss in revenue.
Maybe some kind of compromise where clicking the x hides the ads for 24 hours? My sense is that a lot of people, when they first see the ads, will turn them off. But if once they get used to them they won’t mind so much. I wouldn’t want to lose a huge chunk of revenue just because people were initially bothered by the ads.
I think the objection is forceful enough to potentially derail the whole thing—some people don’t like ads, and if they don’t want to see them, they should have that right without having to go and install an adblocker. Even if the objection isn’t logical, it’s still a very real objection that could and will be voiced.
There’s one person objecting in the comments on this blog post about my first, failed attempt to do this. http://journal.markbao.com/2009/07/craigslist-advertising-for-charity/
I can’t find it with a quick Google search—though I will try again later—but I have seen at least one site owner that did this optional advertisement thing with minimal impact on revenue.
Also, with this kind of thing, “permanently” closing the ad isn’t really permanent. It’s permanent until you clear your cookies or use a different browser. It is a shame to have to lose some revenue because some users won’t just deal with the damn dust speck, but my intuition is that we’re looking at a 20% decrease in revenue with this, a difference that could be made up by a better advertising sales team.
The loss of revenue hurts, but I don’t think it’s worth a chance of losing the whole thing because some people don’t want to look at ads.
Reddit does well at unobtrusive ads. Their sidebar ads are easily blocked by adblock, and occasionally they’ll just run an ad with a happy reddit alien saying “thank you for not using adblock!”—a lot of reddit users have their adblock settings set specifically to allow ads from reddit, in order to support the site.
ETA: I suspect the ad would be closed less often if there were a note nearby naming the specific charity to which that ad was providing revenue.
Hmmm. Conceded. Since it looks like this was tried before and failed, I’d be interested to hear what you learned from the first attempt.
I learned that my initial copy was not viral to motivate people to join based on seeing the group name in their newsfeed. I learned that it is a whole lot easier to get someone to join a group than it is to invite their friends to join the group. I sent out a few mass messages encouraging people to invite their friends, but the third and final message I sent out resulted in a net loss in users for the group.
I do still have control of that group and it’s 150 members, so it’s a good enough place to focus test ad copy for the next group.