Sam Liebeskind
@samliebeskind
product partnerships at New_Public; previously community & growth @ Geneva
Sam Liebeskind
While I was thinking through the cringe matrix, I thought a lot about celebrities. Given one of their main purposes as public figures is to both establish and violate social norms, thus providing us with both guidance and gossip, they’re always operating with a high cringe risk.
Role of celebrities is to establish & push norms, to be the focus of public debate & discussion. In social media world, everyone kinda is this.
I should note that blitzscaling is not the only approach we’re seeing right now. The other (and I would argue wiser) approach to managing dense network formation is through invitation-based mechanisms. Heighten the desire, the FOMO, make participating feel special. Actively nurture the network. When done well, this can get people to go deeper in... See more
danah boyd • Dear Alt-Twitter Designers: It’s about the network!
Incentives for productive speech: A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy.
A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such... See more
A scholarly culture that reads and discusses enduringly great works incentivizes the production of such... See more
Ari Schulman • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
Social Platform Trust & Safety
reputation / karma systems
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
The key difference is that sequential models maintain a dynamic representation of your current state. As you move through your feed, clicking on posts, subscribing to publications, engaging with notes, the model updates its understanding of where you are. It’s not just updating a long-term profile of your tastes. It’s tracking the momentum and... See more
Mike Cohen • How the Substack feed is learning to understand your reading journey
We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as
normal technology
. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common... See more
normal technology
. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common... See more
Arvind Narayanan • AI as Normal Technology
The Evaporative Cooling Effect - The Evaporative Cooling Effect is a term I learned from an excellent essay by Eliezer Yudowsky that describes a particular phenomena of group dynamics. It occurs when the most high value contributors to a community realize that the community is no longer serving their needs any more and so therefore, leave. When that happens, it drops the general quality of the community down such that the next most high value contributors now find the community underwhelming. Each layer of disappearances slowly reduces the average quality of the group until such a point that you reach the people who are so unskilled-and-unaware of it that they’re unable to tell that they’re part of a mediocre group.
