Part of the issue is the strong focus on distributing financial reward in exchange for participation. It’s a well established belief that reliance on extrinsic motivators, especially financial ones, are not enough. User's intrinsic motivation, and, specifically, perceived enjoyment, is a more explanatory variable of continued use.
When our goal is to understand something, we start getting curious: why does this work this way, and not that way? Why doesn't this do what I expected? Strange! These observations of strangeness, where pieces of the understanding puzzle don't fit, lead to exploring beyond what's known.
Like Amazon used books, PDD used fruit as a wedge to build what became one of the world’s largest ecommerce companies in five years. It went a step further than Tencent building games, or Facebook selling ads, and created an asset-light vertically integrated social gaming company. It built farmers, and eventually manufacturers, a business-in-a-box ... See more
"Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that invention in mind." You used that term stepping stones, the things that we combine. You gave the example of vacuum tubes and computers. People working on vacuum tubes weren't thinking about computers, and there's a million examples like this. So I just want to plant that idea out... See more