And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep

Twitter, unlike Facebook with its predominant two-way friending, is built on a graph assembled from one-way follows. In theory, this should reduce its exposure to graph design problems. However, it suffers from the same flaw that any interest graph has when built on a social graph. You may be interested in some of a person's interests but not their... See more

Slack's public channels act as public squares within companies, exposing more employees to each other's thoughts. This can lead to an employee finding others who share what they thought were minority opinions, like reservations about specific company policies. We're only now seeing how many companies operated in relative peace in the past in large ... See more

For all the debate over whether our current social networks are good for society, I prefer to focus on the potential we've yet to realize. We have the miracle of Wikipedia, yes, but aren't there more types of mass scale collaboration to be enabled?

Who we follow has a disproportionate effect on the relevance and quality of what we see on much of Western social media because the apps were designed that way.

Messaging apps, in contrast, tend to allow users themselves to form the subgroups most relevant to them. Facebook Groups is a more flexible architecture than News Feed. Humans contain multitudes, and social apps should flex to their various communication privacy needs.

I refer to this as the problem of graph design: When designing an app that shapes its user experience off of a social graph, how do you ensure the user ends up with the optimal graph to get the most value out of your product/service?

The term "follow" is fitting. Who we follow can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. First you build your graph, then your graph builds you.

It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the profile photos and usernames, ... See more

A classic example, though I don't know if this still persists, is how Pinterest skewed heavily towards female users at launch, losing lots of potential male users in the process. This was a function of building their feed off of each user's social graph. Men would see a flood of pins from the females in their network as women were some of the stron... See more

But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone?