📚 ONDC expanded, Tools for censorship, Dating app paradox, Dutch infrastructure

Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran + a lot more for the curious YOU

Hi and welcome to the post #150. 🎉

It feels good to be here. For the last 150 weeks, the ritual of curating a weekly post has kept me excited, focused and sane. This joy of discovering something new and sharing it with someone who cares is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

I’m glad I started this. And I am thankful to you for joining me in this journey. It would not have been as much fun without you. If there is anything that you would like to share about your experience of Staying Curious, do share in comments or over email. It feels great!

Here’s what we’re covering today:

And now, onto the 150th …

---

🔍 Mini-research

We live in an imperfect world and so expecting to do a perfect product research is kind of an illusion. Maret Kruve recommends doing mini research and shares 25 mini-research ideas for inspiration. 

Here’s her definition of mini-research:

Mini-research is about

• Looking for actionable insights

• with minimal effort

• using any combination of methods necessary.

It involves conducting a condensed version of a full research study, focusing on one key inquiry, and gathering just enough information to make an informed decision or recommendation.

It is not about cutting corners or sacrificing quality, but rather being extremely efficient and targeted with the research scope and methods.

She shares the most commonly used tactics. You can refer to the post as a reference list. Here’s my key takeaway while taking the mini-research methodology. :

Aim for sufficient accuracy. Assess the level of detail and accuracy needed for your project, and aim to collect just enough data to meet these requirements. If a few confirming examples are sufficient to support your conclusions, do not seek exhaustive, statistically significant data. It is important to recognise when additional data does not significantly improve your understanding or decision-making and find the balance between data sufficiency and efficiency.

---

🛠️ ONDC Expanded

For the uninitiated, ONDC is one of the key initiatives in India’s ambitions Distributed Public Infrastructure approach of enabling business & economy. It has wide ranging applications from ecommerce to service economy, and is supposed to power the next phase of expansion in digital penetration in our economy. 

I have covered a couple of good references for ONDC in the past posts (#69, #97, #131), Rahul Sanghi’s “ONDC: Remixing Commerce” gets added to that list now. It’s comprehensive - it covers basic as well as does a gret job to provide level 102 inputs on the topic. Rahul has captured execution inputs and learning from the businesses that have gone live so far.

His writing style is fun & the storytelling filled with memes and pop culture references makes the long read a breeze. I am glad I read it in full.

A couple of snippets that I found worth sharing here.

How Beckn is powering the fundamental building block of the ONDC network - a commercial transaction?

You can visit this directly here.

Further, key challenge that ONDC must address to gain widespread success

More than digitisation, more than efficient management of supply chains, maybe even more than bringing buyers and sellers together, the critical role of centralised platforms in e-commerce is to function as proxies for trust. 

I don’t need to know the seller of the party-balloons I just bought on Amazon because I know Amazon will give me a refund if anything’s amiss (and vice versa). Same goes for Uber, whose neck is on the line if there’s a safety issue with one of their drivers. Same for Swiggy, who will instruct the restaurant to send over another pizza if the first one smells funky.

…

Trust is the oil that lubricates the rails of e-commerce. And perhaps the biggest challenge for ONDC is to figure out how to embed trust in a decentralised system. As you’ll find out in the last section, many of the issues that participants have faced in the early days of ONDC can be traced back to this issue.

---

✂️ Tools for Censorship 

Ada Palmer’s essay has one key message: none of us is immune to becoming a tool of censorship if we fail to recognize its manipulative tactics.

We live in a world where free speech and censorship are at the crossroad more often than we can imagine. And it is so, because the tools of censorship may not be that visible & obvious. The world is not always 1984sh, yet censorship can be more prevalent than what you imagine.

In other words, when we look at history’s major censorious regimes, all of them—I want to stress that; all of them—invested enormous resources in programs designed to encourage self-censorship, more resources than they invested in using state action to actively destroy or censor information. This makes sense when we realize that (A) preventing someone from writing/saying/releasing something in the first place is the only way to 100% wipe out its presence, and (B) encouraging self-censorship is, dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do.

Think about how many man-hours it takes to search thousands of homes one-by-one to confiscate and destroy a particular book, versus how cheap and easy it is to have a showy book burning or well-publicized arrest of an author which scares thousands of families into destroying the book if they have it. Will the show trial or book burning scare people into destroying every copy? No, a few will keep it, even treasure it more because of its precious scarcity, but the number who do is no larger than the number whose copies would’ve been missed by the ever-imperfect process of the search, and the cost in manpower is 1/1000th of the cost of the search, freeing up resources for other action.

For this reason, censorship systems want to be visible. They don’t tend to invisibly and perniciously hide their traces, they tend to advertise it: in big printed letters, blacked-out passages, or a brightly-colored screen. Even when a blocked website redirects you to ERROR: THIS WEBSITE IS BLOCKED, that is a deliberate choice—very different from, for example, the period in which Amazon’s website invisibly redirected searches away from Hachette titles to non-Hachette books.

Treat this piece as a food for thought. 

---

👫 Dating App Paradox

Business of dating apps requires solving some of the most complex engagement & retention problems. Greg Rosalsky’s “The dating app paradox” talks about some of those. He posits that today dating apps may be worse than ever and shares why he thinks so.

This is the most obvious articulation of the problem in this business:

Call it the dating app paradox: Dating apps are supposed to be matching lovebirds together, but once they do, the lovebirds fly away — and take their money with them.

But that’s not it! Making business while solving for this paradox has meant these apps have done many ‘wrongs’. They are not alone, but are becoming good examples. 

Dating apps aren't alone in seemingly getting worse when they try to make money. In fact, last year journalist Cory Doctorow coined a term for this pattern: "enshittification." Basically, Doctorow says tech platforms start off trying to make their user experiences really good because their first goal is to try to become popular and achieve scale. But over time, they inevitably pursue their ultimate goal of making money, which ends up making the whole user experience "enshittified."

It's possible that dating apps face adverse selection. Basically, a new app starts up, and hopeless romantics looking for real love begin flocking to it. But so do sleazy types who lie on their dating profiles. Over time, the earnest daters go on a bunch of bad dates, encountering people who have no interest in real relationships or whose profiles are completely misleading.

Like lemons driving good cars out of the used-car market, maybe sleazeballs push great catches out of dating apps and ultimately ruin the quality of the whole app experience. So people go to a new app with the hopes of finding something better, and the cycle starts again.

---

🙏 Social Credit 

Katja Grace shares some classic ways humans can get some kind of social credit with other humans.

1. Do something for them such that they will consider themselves to 'owe you' and do something for you in future

2. Be consistent and nice, so that they will consider you 'trustworthy' and do cooperative activities with you that would be bad for them if you might defect

3. Be impressive, so that they will accord you 'status' and give you power in group social interactions

4. Do things they like or approve of, so that they 'like you' and act in your favor

5. Negotiate to form a social relationship such as 'friendship', or 'marriage', where you will both have 'responsibilities', e.g. to generally act cooperatively and favor one another over others, and to fulfill specific roles. This can include joining a group in which members have responsibilities to treat other members in certain ways, implicitly or explicitly.

She claims that these have existed for a long time, yet we don’t have a formal system around these even today. The things we ‘owe’ have gone through systematization and formalization. And that seems to have helped them scale.

She wonders…

Will we one day formalize these other kinds of social credit as much as we have for owing? If we do, will they also catalyze oceans of value-creating activity?

I found the above articulation of ‘social credit’ unbelievably simple and easy to understand. These ways can become a better guide to think about what we need to do to create more value.

---

🇳🇱 Dutch Infrastructure 

How the Dutch solved street design: A short video talking about Dutch street design and how it makes their city safer. The comparisons from the US (and other places including India) show the stark difference in approach. 

And if you wonder why your commute speeds are decreasing in whichever cities you live in, here is an explanation from the post:

In simple terms, the Downs-Thomson paradox claims that traffic will increase without limit until the option of public transport (or any other form of transport) becomes faster than the equivalent trip by car. It draws the conclusion that people do not care whether they drive, walk, bike, or take the bus to any location — they just want to get from A to B in the fastest and most convenient way possible.

Bangalore Metro, for example, should solve for the faster public transport model. Till then, we continue to do the race with the cyclists and bike taxis.

This River Is a Model - the Netherlands has incorporated managing floods as a core element of governance and infrastructure development (and management). Those canals and windmills are charming landscapes for us outsiders, but for the Dutch they are the means of survival. This story goes into the technical details, and surfaces the effort that goes behind making the Dutch landscape what it is today.

In the Netherlands, you can experience climate vertigo while standing on flat ground. Those iconic windmills you see on postcards? They’re technically windpumps that move water out of the polders to ditches and canals that run alongside the dikes.

A farmer, a historian, and a geologist surveying that landscape will each see different things, according to their professional training and personal experience. A water engineer, meanwhile, sees a diagram filled with numbers: specifically, the maximum discharge rate that can be accommodated along each section of river protected by dikes.

Depoldering the Noordwaard required building 70 kilometers of new dikes, 33 bridges, and 31 pumping stations, and moving 4 million cubic feet of soil — a tremendous effort. But this was justified by the potential to lower river levels by as much as 60 centimeters, which would make a significant contribution toward meeting the “hydraulic objective” of 18,000 cubic m/s. When the river was running high, water could flow into and through the center of the Noordwaard, preventing flooding elsewhere. To date, this has only happened a few times. One engineer told me that when a spring storm met high tides in February 2020, half his office took a day trip to see the result. 

There is no universal definition of a flood; it’s just water that exceeds the boundaries we have drawn on maps and created through infrastructure.

---

📼 Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran

Blake Atwood’s book "Underground" chronicles how Iranians forged a vibrant, informal video distribution infrastructure when their government banned all home video technology in 1983.

This short interview surfaces the core theme and some interesting snippets from the book. A society reacting to tyranny, underground economies, roles of dealers and people’s memory - I find all these themes interesting and am excited to explore more. Here’s one snippet from the post:

Video dealers were at the heart of that project. They were gatekeepers and tastemakers. They decided what movies would ultimately be available for rent, and they put a great deal of effort into curating their selection in such a way that would resonate with their customers. Globally, the rise of videocassette technology opened up the possibility of choice that did not exist when people were confined to movie theaters and TV schedules. Videocassettes represented the ability to choose what you watched, but that was a process (and a technology) that needed to be mediated by some sort of expertise. Video dealers provided both the technical and creative knowledge to guide consumers through these choices. It would be easy to brush aside something like labels, but the story of Omid that you mentioned highlights how these details figured prominently into the experience of accessing, watching, and understanding cinema during this period.

That I discovered this post and the earlier one on tools of censorship in the same week is such a remarkable coincidence. 

🕳️ Always Look Down

In this short blog post, Matt Brown covers 15 pavement oddities that they spotted on their walks around London. From hidden rivers, street nipples, coal hole covers to random quotes and heritage, there are innumerable stories waiting to be heard. 

Source: Matt Brown’s post

Clearly, he is right in saying you should always look *down* in London.

These are my kind of experiences - finding something hidden in the plainsight - the ‘99% invisible’ things. I’ve not been to London, but I am looking forward to finding some of these when I go there. 

---

✨ Everything else

1. Deniz Sağdıç makes giant portraits using unusual supply materials (wastes in most cases). There are so many stunning examples in her Instagram feed. (via Dense Discovery)

2. Ant Hamlyn makes claustrophobic terrariums using acrylic panels. Bright Succulents, Cacti, and Plants seem attempting to break from these beautiful terrariums. (via Colossal)

3. Nooks and crannies of Amsterdam are a Canvas for Frankey’s street art (via Colossal). Too much of Amsterdam this week, I must say. If you like Frankey’s work, here is a NYT piece to know more about it. 

That's all for this week, folks! 

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If you liked this post, please hit the ❤️below to help spread the word!  Leave a comment or send a message with your feedback. It’s highly helpful & encouraging. 

Pritesh