Dear Alt-Twitter Designers: It’s about the network!
A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Pat... See more
Eugene Wei • Status as a Service
It’s important to focus on this tiny slice of users so that messaging, product functionality, and business model are all aligned to serve them. Without this group, the atomic network will collapse—a social network can’t exist without its content creators, and a marketplace can’t exist without its sellers.
Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
First, I start with the principal dilemma, which I call “Anti-Network Effects.” It’s a myth that network effects are all powerful and positive forces—quite the opposite. Small, sub-scale networks naturally want to self-destruct, because when people show up to a product and none of their friends or coworkers are using it, they will naturally leave.
Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
Challengers like Meta’s Threads don’t seem like drop-in replacements for Twitter — especially since Threads head Adam Mosseri keeps saying his team will not “encourage” news on the platform. That makes Threads a comparatively tamer experience than the chaos that drove Twitter to its height. “Threads is to Twitter as methadone is to heroin,” says Kl... See more
