Communities = human search engines?

As long as communities have mechanisms for weeding out weak contributions, then large self-selecting communities of people in constant communication have a higher probability of matching the best people to the right tasks.

Community helps you: capture intel; we learn from our customers what they want and what they are doing; receive feature requests; learn what potential features are getting buzz before building them; users learn from each other; nowadays we even end up hiring folks through these communities.

Andy Bromberg: The wisdom of crowds is giving way to the “wisdom of communities.” In a world of ever-greater complexity, no one person can possibly make sense of all the signals and all the noise — from a single, static vantage point. A networked group is required to adapt to this new world... People are no longer being polled in isolation but rath... See more

In the past, trust was purely social (think the caveman days). Then it switched to trusted institutions (banks, governments, companies) which was a step up, but we still had to rely on the other parties goodwill, or their incentive to behave in the right way.
The problem today is that institutions have become the sole gatekeepers of trust. We are st

... See more

The open community of the internet is somewhere where you can find other people who are interested in those same things as you and who want to learn about those same things as you in a way that was not really possible before, without there being a substantial amount of transaction costs involved.

For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?”.

The evidence is ev... See more

Instead, good communities like this are decentralized networks of many micro-communities, where there are a few superconnectors that form the fast, efficient “backbone” interconnect of the larger community.