My own sense of it is mostly that Cluetrain is attempting to describe and justify a new modality of relationships based on networks which are both many-to-many and bidirectional.

Ultimately ... this seems to me to reflect either a misunderstanding of how networks work, or a severe underappreciation of the feedback-at-scale problem.

The most notable coverage of the latter is James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State.

The "mass" models of manufacturing, merchandising, and media are all based on the agricultural notion of broad-casting (that is, literally, scattering seed over tilled ground) not only in the sowing sense, but in the harvesting sense. A farmer of staple crops doesn't have individual relationships with each plant, but tends to entire fields or orchards, and utilises maximally efficient methods of collecting in the crop as well.

In broadcast media, the harvest mechanism is advertising. It's interesting to note that even as broadcast media was developing, agriculture had been adopting more precise modes of planting and cultivating, with Jethro Tull's[1] seed drill being the archetype. Ad-tech's targeted advertising bears some relationship to this. For manufacturing, a key factor was the sales channel, itself often through large chain stores (Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Woolworths, A&P Markets, Safeway, Macy's, etc., in the US), which handled the interface with individual shoppers. Both manufacturers and merchandisers themselves relied heavily on advertising for branding. Interactions with customers were largely limited to sales, returns, and for some classes of goods, service (also frequently independently provisioned, though often through licensed or registered agents).

Cluetrain seemed to think somehow that there would be vast improvements in scale, capacity, and quality of direct communications between manufacturers, merchants, and service operators, on the one hand, and their customers on the other. In practice ... that doesn't seem to work, and one of the notable characteristics of Internet monopolies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, ...) is "that there's no way to reach anyone". The same information-technology lever which permits a small team of a few tens to thousands to serve millions to billions ... becomes a vast liability when those billions are upset or dissatisfied over something.

I've been having something of a back-and-forth with dang over HN's occasional role in this as customer-support-of-last-resort. My feeling is that this is a useful service and in fact something of an obligation given YC's role in creating the problem. Dang's argued that it goes against the fundamental ethos of HN in stimulating intellectual curiosity, largely on account of repetitive repetitious repetitiveness.[2] I can see that, in part. On the other hand, the underlying problem itself is definitely a hard one, and has evaded satisfactory resolution for decades. (Or longer.)

I've been mulling how these tensions might possibly be mediated in some way.

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Notes:

1. The agriculturalist, not the flute-heavy rock band named for him.

2. See a search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>