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

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.

To take the most famous example, the root of Facebook's churn issues began when their graph burgeoned to encompass everyone in one's life. As noted above, just because we are friends with someone doesn't mean we want to see everything they post about in our News Feed. In the other direction, having many more people from all spheres of our lives fol... 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

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

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 matt... See more

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

Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue. The lifeblood of their income statement is traffic to the feed. This means feed relevance is paramount. Anywhere one's social graph drifts from one's interests, boring content invades the feed. The signal to noise ratio shifts the wrong direction. Instead of pruning and tuning ... 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

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.