Joey DeBruin

Web 3 will only get to a billion users by siphoning those users from the Web 2 side of the world—drinking their user milkshake, so to speak—and the only way to do that is via an attribution system that spans both.

Turns out no amount of fundraising, press, buzz, amazing employees, and/or cool tech guarantees you product market fit.

Why is Twitter—our global public square where tastes are made, people canceled, and heads of state threaten each other with nuclear hellfire—worth so little a billionaire can scrape together the cash to outright buy it? How is it possible that the upstream media source to everything bought or voted on is worth a pittance compared to Google or Faceb... See more

As you build newthing you will discover that building a newthing is a strange act where the harder you go about trying to do it, the harder it becomes. It will resist direct force and control. The more you relax and allow it to speak through you, however, the easier it will be.

Still, as Baszucki made clear, the goal is still actual social networking: surely that will always be better than interacting with an AI! Or will it? It seems to me that perhaps the most important constraint on the web — to actually interact with people as if they are, well, people — disappeared a long time ago.

My point in sharing all of this is that sometimes I feel like we get too caught up in the words, and forget to disregard them. Especially (in the context of this essay) as builders of new technology products.“How will I describe this to an investor, or at a dinner party with friends?”"What’s the one-liner that describes why this will be better?”“Wh... See more

On the other end of specificity, idea machines are less broad than paradigm shifts, which are widespread, headless, decentralized shifts in cultural norms and attitudes due to changes in systemic conditions. For example, web3 is a paradigm shift, but it’s too big and distributed to be an idea machine.

The divide between those who do and don’t own capital is an important driver of widening wealth inequality [50]. Forms of accessible co-ownership could be an antidote to chronic wage stagnation and anxieties about job-replacing automation.

I think the internet is more like land. In this metaphor:URLs ~= PlacesLinks ~= RoadsNetworks ~= City-states