And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep

The way China has built out its social infrastructure is, in at least this respect, more logical. WeChat owns the dominant social graph, and it acts as an underlying social infrastructure to the rest of the Chinese internet... Rather than duplicate the social graph of everyone, which WeChat owns, other apps can focus on what they do best, which mig... See more

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 l... See more

most Western social media apps must build a graph or die. This is because most of the most well-known Western social apps chose to interlace two things: the social graph and the content feed.

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.

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

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.

If people tend to add to their social graphs more than they prune them, the social graph you help your users design should be treated as a one-way decision. And as Bezos noted, one-way decisions should be treated with care.

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

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.