Peter Hagen

There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.

It was when

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People are the most engaged in an activity when they feel like they are highly skilled at it, and are using that skill to confront a great challenge.

That sets down the most essential considerations for designing good gameplay:

1. It has to present a challenge that the player can meet.


2. The player has to be able to get good at it.

The second part is... See more

Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people. That niche may grow to the point of being huge, like Facebook and WhatsApp. But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one. Every single social network is only... See more

Very early, I had a teacher who told me, “You have to choose carefully what you want to say. You can’t just say everything is wrong. People won’t like it.” So, I praise a lot of people all the time. I say what is good. I could stand on stage and say, “You are all ignorant,” but I don’t. I say, “I don’t know either.” So, I think it’s best to avoid... See more

I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself.

Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.

If you don't... See more

Instagram - "the social aspect could be good...although I have no friends :("

The reason so much of the news media sucks is they aren’t writing for you. They’re writing for their sources in Washington, for the industries they cover, for rich people, and for fancy awards committees. Just take a look at the ads they run: for investment banks, defense contractors, oil companies. Unless you’re in the market for any of these... See more

In an interview with Forbes in January, D’Angelo argued that one of OpenAI’s strengths was its capped-profit business structure and nonprofit control. “There’s no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies,” D’Angelo said. “This is something that’s fundamentally different, and my hope is that we can do a lot more... See more