Words With Web 3’s King: An Interview With Chris Dixon

Historically, with really major tech breakthroughs, in the first few decades you get first-order effects. The first order effect of the automobile was getting you from one place to another faster. But the really profound things happened in the next phase from second-order effects: suburbs, commuting, highways, trucking, fast food and big box retail... See more

Advertising at its core is a market for attention. In any future version of the internet, I’d expect markets for attention to pop up. It’s a natural barter between one party with a surplus of attention and another party with a deficit. It particularly makes sense for direct response advertising. An auction for purchasing intent is a very good way t... See more

Facebook has on the order of 10,000 designers and engineers working on AR/VR. They are making a massive investment, and it appears to be working. The only other plausible contender right now is Apple. There are rumors they have a serious effort, but they are ultra secretive so we don’t really know. Google and Amazon don’t seem to be investing in AR... See more

Maybe the feeling that things are in decline is just a bias against new forms of media. Socrates thought writing destroyed the mind, and the novel as a literary form was originally considered vulgar. My suspicion is it’s just the age-old pattern of disliking new things.

I have mixed feelings about Facebook being the likely winner here. On the one hand, it’s the last founder-run of the big 5 tech companies, and I admire Zuck’s vision and aggression. On the other hand, Facebook has a history of creating closed systems that don’t interoperate, charge high take rates, arbitrarily change rules on developers, and other ... See more

The other major kind of advertising is brand advertising. The biggest brand advertisers sell the most generic products like cleaning supplies and processed food. They take commodity products and try to create brand loyalty through emotion-driven advertising. Hence the importance of running repetitive TV and internet ads.

For example, Bloomberg is a company that makes the bulk of its revenue renting computer terminals to banks and hedge funds, and, unsurprisingly, is probably the most negative on crypto. It would be as if Exxon owned a news company that covered clean energy.

Then there is the ugly side. People tend to be more civil the more intimate the media: video and audio over text, synchronous over asynchronous. They also tend to be more civil in smaller communities with shared interests and values. Twitter takes the least intimate medium — asynchronous short-form text — and smashes together thousands of unrelated... See more

Brand advertising is another story. Maybe it would be a good thing if cleaning supplies and food companies started competing on innovation instead of ads? I’ll leave that to others to decide. What I can say for sure is we don’t need ads to fund internet services — there are better ways now.