Brian Sholis

A thoughtful essay about how our online identities—even when our default mode is misdirection or obfuscation—are visible to the platforms we use, and by extension to capitalism and its prerogatives.

- "Review drift happens whenever the context of review differs from the context of use. … If the context of review is typically short-term, then companies are incentivized to optimize for short-term satisfaction, even at the cost of long-term quality."

- "if there is some kind of systematic, structural feature that encourages the same kind of review drift across a whole reviewing community, then we create a clearer system for companies to target. And this can happen when a whole body of reviews gets filtered through a particular portal — like Instagram or YouTube — which homogenizes the patterns... See more

- “… a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area.”

* “The 10 Club is a group of 10 people you want to work with later in life, and every member should be kind, ambitious, and generous.”

- "But to listen is to act; of that, there’s no doubt. It takes effort and doesn’t happen by default."

* "I find that people often believe they have a writing technique problem, when, actually, what they have is a sincerity problem."