All about social networks

I think a lot about the way visibility is mediated by digital communication. On apps, the only way to be seen is to speak. Silence is a meaningful form of communication, but it’s not one that social media apps have any patience for

On day one, they define a political institution as “a socially created constraint on human action.” That definition has always stuck with me. This means that we can make them and remake them. But it also means that whatever institution we create, people are going to use those institutions strategically to try to achieve whatever ends they're trying... See more

One option a company with a useful network has (whether it’s an email platform or a social network) is to curate what they feature. They’ve built an asset and that asset goes up in value when it attracts thoughtful users.

The other option is to believe that ‘open’ is the answer, the more open the better. As we learned when we launched Squidoo a

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Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor for theorycels like me. Building product forces a different... See more