All about social networks
shit you should read if you are building or care about how social networks are evolving
sari and
All about social networks
A thousand-plus years ago our ancestors's need for safety and context sparked the rise of cities, guilds, and universities. Our current needs as internet-liberated individuals are sparking a similar burst of organizational experiments, including the maturation of Reddit boards, Discord channels, WhatsApp and Telegram groups, and newer and... See more
I worry about people being able to trust the kinds of material that they see online as emanating from human beings, and what it means to spend most of your day in an environment in which you’re never sure whether you’re surrounded by people or bots.
Elan Ullendorff • Have you tried unplugging and plugging yourself back in again?
But the problems of the speech platforms are not ones of bad actors at the fringes. Rather, they are baked into the incentive structures of the platforms themselves, through the kinds of speech they reward and penalize. The platforms are rotten to the core, inducing us all to become noxious versions of ourselves.
Jon Askonas • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
Working in technology means one thing above all else: chasing scale. There is a reason why much of the tech world is obsessed with growth. Free from physical constraints, digital systems can scale to an incomprehensible size. The appeal of conquering the engineering, design and business challenges of mega-scale is strong, the rewards immense. But
... See moremany “social network” products/platforms think they’re just tech, but really they’re socio-technical systems, and part of the reason they break “at scale” is bc while the software might scale, other systems like safety & moderation don’t necessarily scale as easily. A single player (e.g) calculator app is tech/software only, social platforms are more than that.
