sari

iMessage and WhatsApp could be formidable for small-group audio channels. It’s easy to imagine Instagram or YouTube enabling creators to launch paywalled audio rooms. But the leading contender, in my mind, is Discord.

Long time horizons change our incentives, usually in good ways. This is one of the core findings of game theory: people treat each other better when they intend to interact repeatedly in the future.

When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.

In this case, traditional employment is becoming unbundled and people are choosing to bundle back up with each other. We’re doing it from a place of increased individual empowerment, with more flexibility and optionality baked in.