Sixian

These semi-pseudonymous networks have strong enough network effects to fend off the competition because they’ve given their users a persistent online identity to which they commit. As social creatures, people are emotionally invested in creating, building, and maintaining their reputations — even if that reputation is semi-virtual.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

Data network effects can be built and data can be used to create defensibility. So how do you actually do it? There are at least three broad approaches to using data to give your product an advantage.1. Data network effects2. Data scale3. Data embedding

When I first started writing essays, I couldn’t figure out where to put myself in the text. Trying to situate the “I,” which is necessarily attached to a body, has always felt like a trap. I didn’t want to succumb to that well-known female imperative of the confessional, “relatable” mode, where revealing your self is the basis for all your... See more

But at the grand narrative level, everybody is getting off the big turnpike, and there is not going to be a grand narrative slipstream for a while. But smaller scale narrative slipstreams — from family to city-scale — may still be viable.

There are two major types of models with whom we have different kinds of relationships. Mimetic desire works differently in each of the two situations. If the model stands at a great distance—not physically, but socially and existentially—then the model is an external mediator of desire. The model is external to the subject’s world. This means that... See more

In practice, most of the valuable insights you will glean from a scaled-up dataset in a particular domain will come early on. More data just confirms those insights. Further, the number of insights that will matter enough for customers to pay you or choose you over other providers is typically small. So data scale can give you these early 1-3 key... See more