Josh

Merry Christmas Eve.

While preparing for holiday festivities yesterday I listened to over 100 recordings of my favorite traditional Christmas carol: God Rest You Merry Gentlemen.

Here's a thread of the top 7. I award extra points for creativity, fullness of sound, and house party appropriateness.

What’s unique about product-led communities is that they orient around a product or service that helps people achieve a valuable future outcome. These future outcomes can be individual (better health, professional advancement, cultivation of skills or hobbies, or overcoming a struggle, such as an illness, divorce, loss of a loved one, etc.);... See more

“I know this” is a life on pause. “I don’t know this” is where the future lies.

In that earlier era, when we still drank from garden hoses, losing a job sucked, but it mostly didn’t take your community with it. In this new era, losing a job means getting gutted. Not only do you lose your paycheck, but you lose access to all the people and places where you used to have your non-work-but-actually-at-work fun.

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.