Joey DeBruin

I expect that effective altruism will always be an example of what I’ve called “club” communities elsewhere: high retention of existing members, but limited acquisition of new members, like a hobbyist club. EA will continue to grow, but it will never become the dominant narrative because it’s so morally opinionated. I don’t think that’s a problem,... See more

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).

That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation

Whoever last touched the user gets the credit. This is part of what underwrites Google’s trillion-dollar market cap: the ability to claim that everyone who bought something via a Google search bought that thing because of Google.

The reality is that there have been successful ARPA programs all over the spectrum. JCR Licklider “just” spelled out an extraordinary vision, found people who were aligned with it, and gave them resources. Only a few years later, Lawrence Roberts ran the ARPAnet program almost like a CEO: giving different people and groups parts of a broader... See more

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to entry are essentially aggregating supply (i.e. buyers of leads or businesses willing to pay for new customers) so there is little in the way of defensibility. The other downside is that they are very... See more

Let’s say Farcaster, or other Web 3 social media like it, wants to run ads for the free version of the product. Rather than going out and building an entire ads system (as Facebook and every other social media publisher had to), they can use the composability and permissionlessness of Web 3 to spin up monetization quickly. Assuming an attribution... See more

There may be good reason to be optimistic about non-'scientists' taking part in science....Innocentive creates prizes to incentivise a distributed global network to solve specific problems for organisations who can't solve those problems in-house. Problems can be highly technical (see image below), and span across many domains. I will reuse... See more