Social Media

Gotta say, it feels like we missed an opportunity to reinvent social. Can you tell them apart?

What we're seeing is an end of the race to the bottom.

What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet... See more

Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.

It will make all of us happier.

Scrolling through Twitter led to more scrolling and then a feeling of emptiness and guilt for wasting time when I finally managed to leave the app — scrolling through Sublime more often than not led me to putting away my phone, getting a breath of fresh air, and getting to work on that passion project I’d put aside years ago.

Facebook inflated its video metrics, a bunch of digital media executives carelessly pivoted to video in the hopes that they would become essential content suppliers to Mark Zuckerberg, and then he imperiously killed them all because he realized it was far easier to negotiate with an infinite supply of individual burned-out Instagram influencers.... 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

If you live in the same occidental bubble as me, you might have never heard of WeChat, QQ or VK. Those are immensely popular social networks. In China and Russia. WeChat alone is more or less the size of Instagram in terms of active users. The war in Ukraine also demonstrated that the most popular social network in that part of the world is... See more