Dear Alt-Twitter Designers: It’s about the network!
If you’re building a technology platform, making it “social” really means figuring out what the nodes, edges, and jumping functions should be. One way to do this is to work backwards. What should the experience feel like at scale? Do users care about what other people are doing on the network, or do they really care about other types of objects, li... See more
Matthew Hartman • Complexity in Social Networks
Context collapse is meant to be managed carefully, so that there’s enough discovery to hold the network together, but not in such a way that it alienates or overwhelms users.
Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
The perils of designing for scale
“We are in the midst of a major social transformation — moving many of our day-to-day activities from physical places to information-based places that we experience on our phones and computers. The central question here is: How can we design these information environments so they serve our social needs in the long ... See more
“We are in the midst of a major social transformation — moving many of our day-to-day activities from physical places to information-based places that we experience on our phones and computers. The central question here is: How can we design these information environments so they serve our social needs in the long ... See more
Caio Braga • The aesthetics of our new fictions
Homebrew VC Hunter Walk Talks Twitter, TikTok, and Tech in the Time of Biden
Alex Kantrowitzonezero.medium.com
As I describe in “Eternal September,” there’s an unfortunate downside in reaching a more mainstream audience: more and more people jump in, and what makes the early community special often gets diluted.
Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
This is not to just be a “things were better in the old days” rant. But I do think in the era of growth teams running wild with machine learning algorithms, we accelerated distribution incentives to drive engagement before we really knew what incentives were being created in the internet economy. And now the larger social networks are grappling wit... See more