Lillian Sheng

“An earlier generation would find it astonishing that, without payment or even much outcry, our networks of family, friends, and associates have been recruited via social media to help sell us things. Now, however, most of us carry devices on our bodies that constantly find ways to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention”

3. Bringing the point-of-sale to the consumer

The process has two significant competitive advantages. The first is that it significantly reduces the cost of incubating a new livestreamer relative to the MCN production model. The second is that it solves the conflicts of interests between livestreamers and MCN companies to a certain extent. The relationship between livestreamers and their ... See more

This customization made possible by our “always-online society” can also have negative effects: people have become more prone to becoming anxious when either physical or virtually disconnected from others and it puts us all in a state of mutual surveillance. So, on the one hand, there is the feeling of always wanting to be connected to somebody, an... See more

What New Twitter Should Build The Open It Up camp argues that Twitter should go back to the way things were: open up the API and the microservices.

There is also the question of whether ownership actually crowds out intrinsic incentives to use a product, causing users to engage with products in a more mercenary, transactional (and likely temporary) way.

The immediate challenge was building liquidity as quickly as possible—in other words, overcoming the perennial “cold start problem” of jumpstarting a new marketplace. In the fall of 2021, many NFT collections took weeks to reach secondary marketplaces, and in the meantime, users had no way of telling if the listings they came across were reliable o... See more