Social Media

Lots of consumer platforms — everything from Instagram to Youtube to Twitch — didn’t start out as ways for people to make money. They were initially about fun, status, connection and/or fame. They initially started as social networks, but as each grew their users realized they could build income off of them, which changed the trajectory of the... See more

Social as a model works when people have about as much to offer as they want to receive along a given axis. But no trait is distributed uniformly; there are are outliers in the nice-to-look-at, nice-to-listen-to, nice-to-read, nice-to-get-stock-tips from axes, there's a population that can offer a respectable performance with these traits, and... See more

Human lives in communities. We join them, we sometimes leave them. Social networks should only be an underlying infrastructure to support our communities. Social networks are not our communities. Social network dies. Communities migrate and flock to different destinations.

Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making... See more

Twitter is not a Silicon Valley giant. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are tremendously attractive to the average person; Twitter never was and never will be. But it loomed large in the lives of journalists and was over-represented in activist circles as well. Images, videos, and stories about unrest, protests, riots, and police crackdowns reached... See more

With billions of people using the major social platforms, and the people who remember a pre-social-media web increasing in age while decreasing as cultural force on the internet, we’re rapidly losing fluency in what the internet could look like. We’ve almost forgotten that links are powerful, and that restraining links through artificial scarcity... See more

Most people stop at consumption. This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case forever and ever, Amen. This makes sense, as it requires the least amount of effort. But the evolution of algorithmic and hyperpersonal content makes moving beyond consumption even more challenging. If I already enjoy the content I’m being served, why... See more