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?

LinkedIn may be the social app Silicon Valley product people like to grouse about the most, but while many of the complaints are valid, its sizable market cap is testament to the value of its graph. It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a... 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

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.

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

Whose job is it to consider the problem of graph design? And when? To take one example, growth team strategies should be informed by your graph design. Growth shouldn't be treated as a rogue team whose only job is to extend the graph in every possible direction. They need to know what both good and harmful graph growth looks like so they can craft... See more

A secondary consideration is what type of interaction an application is building towards in the long run. Is is about one-to-one interactions or broadcasting to large audiences? What percentage of your users do you want creating as opposed to just consuming? Is your app best served by a graph of people who know each other in real life or by a graph... See more

The effectiveness of this approach varies widely. Why does a playlist generated off a single song on Spotify work so well and yet its podcast recommendations feel generic? Why, after spending years and millions of dollars on research, including the fabled Netflix prize, do Netflix's recommendations still feel generic, and why doesn't it really... See more

Recently, Instagram announced it would start showing its users posts from accounts they don't follow. In many ways, this is as close to a concession as we'll see from Instagram to the superiority of TikTok's architecture for pure entertainment.