Sixian

God games — made specifically to be abstract, simplified, and ambiguous — invite this sort of loss as a kind of mastery.

"Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them." If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once. And if you can find any... See more

Using real names increases user engagement which causes networks to grow in size, density, and activity — all of which builds a stronger network effect in your company. The more active and committed the nodes on the network, the more powerful the network effects.

We often think making things for the web is a process of simplifying—the hub, the dashboard, the control panel are all dreams of technology that coalesces, but things have a tendency to diverge into a multiplicity of options. We pile on more tools and technology, each one increasingly nuanced and minor in its critical differences. Clearly,... See more

Now streaming is still the most important digital channel by far, but you're starting to see these new things emerge. So for an artist, there is a lot more complexity to distributing your product now.  

We live and listen, he writes, “in the afterlife of data,” no longer believing in the communicative precision that the digital promised us, but continuing to live as though we do: “Nobody knows what a ’97 percent match’ in the context of a dating app really means — and no reasonable person would take that ranking as indicating that a successful... See more

Great positioning, if you can pull it off, can lead to ambiguous work.

Similarly, I wonder whether the creator economy, as it matures, will resemble less of its original promise (a way for people to do the things they love), in favor of a “creator industrial complex.” Part of the problem is that creativity comes in fits and starts, and can’t always be tamed into a predictable routine. If you’re obligated to create... See more