Peter Hagen

One of my contrarian views is that I’m a big defender of gut-based decision making. Not in an “always trust your gut” kind of way, but I don’t think listening to your intuition means you’re “ignoring the data.” You’re just using data that can’t be articulated. It’s hard to get intuitive, experiential out of your head and into someone else’s. You... See more

First, Facebook views itself first-and-foremost as a social network, so it is disinclined to see that as a liability. Second, that view was reinforced by the way in which Facebook took on Snapchat. The point of The Audacity of Copying Well is that Facebook leveraged Instagram’s social network to halt Snapchat’s growth, which only reinforced that

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I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in... See more

Human lives in communities. We join them, we sometimes leave them. Social networks should only be an underlying infrastructure to support our communities. Social networks are not our communities. Social network dies. Communities migrate and flock to different destinations.

If you’ve read this far, then I’ll tell you the honest truth: we don’t actually know what we’re doing. Artificial intelligence is a vast and complex topic, and I’m very skeptical of anyone that claims they’ve got it all figured out. Indeed, Faraday felt the same way about electricity—he wasn’t even sure it was going to be of any import:

“I am busy

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“There was a long period of time where the right thing for [Isaac] Newton to do was to read more math textbooks, and talk to professors and practice problems ... that’s what our current models do,” said Altman, using an example a colleague had previously used.

But he added that Newton was never going to invent calculus by simply reading about... See more

social media will never be the impetus for real social change. He compared Twitter unfavorably to the civil rights movement. The Woolworth’s lunch counter protesters had strong social ties with each other; social media, on the other hand, breeds weak ties. Meaningful change comes from strong ties, very little is achieved through weak ones.

Code wins arguments. If we tested a feature and didn’t like it, we rebuilt it until we landed on the best version. For some surfaces, like the activity feed, we rewrote it three times before we finally landed on an implementation that felt good enough.