product partnerships at New_Public; previously community & growth @ Geneva
The most important features for a product are usually the ones that were built first. Once you get past a certain level of functionality, a lot of the new functionality on the roadmap often targets just a subset of users (e.g. power users) or supports use cases that are adjacent to the core use cases. So it’s a safer bet that you’ll drive more... See more
The platform also gives participants a sample of comments to agree or disagree with. Unlike other platforms, users cannot reply to other users’ comments, making it difficult to engage in trolling. The process of looking at a range of comments made by others for upvoting and downvoting exposes people to others’ opinions, which has been shown to... See more
Many people have long wondered why the Grateful Dead succeeded in creating a world of Deadheads. It turns out that’s because the people who allocated tickets understood familiar strangers. If you bought a ticket for a Grateful Dead show in Miami, they kept a record of who you were seated near. Then, if you bought a ticket for the Nashville show,... See more
We’ve said this a hundred times before, but it’s always worth repeating: the world’s biggest news organisations aren’t reflecting the world. They are reflecting what’s dramatic, rare, and cheap enough to turn into a story. If you’re after an accurate picture of what’s getting worse, or what’s improving, you’ll need to look somewhere other than the... See more
Zooming out: great communities, in the traditional sense, required limited options so people would remain dependent: no specialists or external trade (to ensure we all collectively worked together), and no diversity or weird ideas (to ensure a homogenous group with a focus on tradition). We had far worse medical treatment, underwent excruciating manual labor, and didn’t necessarily share the same interests with others, but because we were dependent on each other, the bonds were strong. Now the options are virtually limitless, and we’re seeing our social bonds decay as a result.
We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is... See more