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There are also some more fundamental reasons this is happening now—lest we give sole credit to Gen Z for pushing brands in a particular direction.

On Twitch and Substack, top creators have thousands of fans and make hundreds of thousands every month. But the vast majority of creators stream to an empty room or write for a few readers. It’s very hard for creators without an existing audience elsewhere (e.g., on Twitter) to grow organically on the platform.

Social Money is a branded digital token that individual artists and creators can issue to their online communities. It allows creators to own, control, and coordinate the value that they create across media platforms. It’s kind of like a personal loyalty rewards program, but with added benefits (and risks) for both creators and consumers.

Even as the cost of tuition increased, the value of university went unquestioned. Colleges bundled education and signaling. Students who thrived in boring classes signaled traits to employers, like conscientiousness, intelligence and conformity. Now, due to the proliferation of information on the internet and the rise of affordable and effective al... See more

Think: Podcasts are based on RSS feed technology (which was pre-Facebook, YouTube, and a whole bunch of other things we take for granted)

Early at Instagram, I noticed a lot of value was placed on simplicity. One way that manifested was through a strong aversion to creating new surfaces. When you build a new surface, you force users to expand their mental model of your product. These new surfaces will also require additional entry points to help users find them. When you have a smal

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The keynote of [Edison’s] work is commercial utility. He asks himself when a new idea is suggested, ‘Will this be valuable from the industrial point of view?

Creators still use the big platforms for discovery because they offer the best opportunity to get in front of people and find new potential fans. The difference is that they’re no longer reliant on the platforms for monetization, which ultimately puts them in better alignment. By decoupling the content they make in order to get top of funnel traffi... See more

When we lived in small tight-knit communities, the looking glass self helped us to become the people our loved ones needed us to be.