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

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

The other obvious problem with today’s internet is the economic structure. Chris Anderson wrote a famous essay called “The Long Tail” back in 2004 that predicted the internet would make media businesses less hit-driven and improve the economics for niche creative people. He was right in one sense: the internet created many more niche communities an... See more

My view is the root cause of a lot of these issues is a deep structural misalignment between the needs of their underlying corporate structure of companies like Twitter and the needs of the networks they operate. There are other ways to build these networks. Email is a good example, which runs on an open protocol called SMTP that isn’t owned by any... 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.

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

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.

he digital world gets subordinating prefixes like the “e” in email and ecommerce, the physical world is called the “real world,” and so on. You see this in how digital innovations like social media were dismissed as toys for so many years. It’s pretty obvious today that social media is driving global politics, business, and culture — but people did... See more

The other big factor for me is, when I start to get interested in a topic, I try to go talk to the smartest enthusiasts and smartest critics. Sometimes as you do this you discover the critics are really well informed and have strong arguments. Other times you discover the opposite. I specifically decided to devote my career to crypto/web3 a few yea... See more

First, I believe VR will be a major computing platform, as or more significant than the phone and PC were. Facebook should sell about 10 million Oculus Quests this year. The headset will continue to get smaller, lighter, higher res, more powerful, and with many more and better apps. This will drive exponential growth the same way it did with PCs an... See more

I don’t think anyone really likes these ads. The pro argument is that they subsidize free products. But where is this money coming from? Internet advertisers closely track the return on their ad spend. In aggregate, in the steady state, when an advertiser spends $1, they are getting back more than $1 from the targeted users. So the money is ultimat... See more