Make the Internet Fun Again

The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and—sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is

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Today it feels like we’re living through another important cultural shift—the decline of Twitter—and a new generation of networks is experimenting with new structures to try and capitalize on it. If we want to understand what’s next, it helps to ask: what caused the culture shift? What new structures would be better? And what will it feel like to u... See more

Now, if your platform is in good health, with a vibrant, creative user base, and your recommendation algorithms do a good job of quickly assessing your users’ preferences, then it might work out for you. But if your user base is slowly atrophying due to the network decay I described above, or if your algorithms are pretty mediocre at understanding ... See more

In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrialized farms with lit... See more