The ideal user experience for a network-based product is often a moving target, based on the density of the network.
If your app’s value improves with each additional user (e.g., from more content or more users interacting with you), then you should likely sacrifice the user experience until the network value reaches... See more
It’s ultimately a math question: are you more likely to find compelling content from the few hundred people in your social network, or from the millions of people posting on the service? The answer is obviously the latter, but that answer is only achievable if you have the means of discovering that compelling content, and, to be fair to both... See more
“When you look at the history of the internet,” says Jeremy Morris, associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “a lot of the early spaces for communities also became places where people would either trade or barter.”
We believe the future of social networking should be open, give users genuine control over their data and experience, and create accountability through transparency. That means building differently—not just better moderation policies, but a fundamentally different architecture that puts power back in users' hands.
A logical extension of personal computing is a belief that everyone ought to possess maximal personal rights and make all decisions on their own.
This view runs into scale problems. One-way broadcast is relatively easy to make perform well and the shape of the problem supports low-coordination meshes (BitTorrent). Likewise, small-group chat and... See more