The second wave of social is about having people be more conscious about building a graph that best matches the needs of what they want to get from that graph. Initially, importing from your contact/address book made sense. But now we can say that was a mistake. You don't need to follow all people you know on all services.

We'll look back at social graphs and say that it is a mistake to use the social graph to approximate an interest graph. The people you now don't necessarily reflect your interests.

TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is... See more

But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph?

In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will... See more