Ian Vanagas

Jeff Jordan – who’s been involved in everything from eBay to OpenTable to Airbnb – said off the cuff “the secret to everything I’ve done, and it’s not a secret, is economic empowerment. It is building things that help people make money.”

LLMs are mid. It does a good job at getting the average and this is useful in many areas where this is tough. When you want "good", LLMs let you down. We underestimate the impact doing things to a "mid" level will have on the world.

DOOM was extremely humane software. It let you play with your friends, even in the shareware version. And along with the game itself, id released tools which allowed anyone to easily modify the game’s levels and assets, and then share them for others to use. This created a thriving ecosystem that exists to this day.

The “____” is the rallying cry. This is the part that makes people aspire to join the movement when the economy is still nascent.

Communities should think hard about their onboarding process for new and returning users. They should understand what information is shared and needed to engage with the community, and what path those users are going on. They should think about how to summarize context to be more consumable for both new and returning users.