Sam Liebeskind

Examples of truth queries include “How do you know this is true?” “Where did you learn this?” and “Do you have an example?” These questions may alert other users to pay more attention to the accuracy of the false information and communicate that the information is not universally accepted. In a series of three studies, we showed participants Tweets... See more

This sounds spectacularly self-centered: that you can only quit a thing, or modify your usage of it, when it fails to serve you. But if we think of our phones and social media as addictive products, which they certainly are, then the classic addiction model makes sense: you only consider quitting when the negative impacts (the dead feeling of the... See more

I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.

How to de-risk building a social network The components that have the most engineering scope tend to be wholly reusable—such as the friendfinder & invite system. The fastest way to arrive at an app that resonates is to run rapid experiments by only changing the interaction model

When popularity is in the driver’s seat without other values that complement and constrain it, we risk falling into what author and neuroscientist Erik Hoel calls a “gossip trap.” In a gossip trap, raw social power takes precedence over other ways of organizing society, returning us to a world of tribes and clans where reputation management and... See more