Sixian

Whereas the garden is integrative, the Stream is self-assertive. It’s persuasion, it’s argument, it’s advocacy. It’s personal and personalized and immediate. It’s invigorating. And as we may see in a minute it’s also profoundly unsuited to some of the uses we put it to.

Network effects are about adding value and defensibility to your product. A network effect is when every customer of your product adds incremental value to all the other customers of your product so that it becomes difficult for customers to find any alternative product which gives them as much value.

For EGMs, the biggest area of difficulty is that you have 3 different types of stakeholders on the demand side who dictate product adoption, and come with different types of needs, incentives, and acquisition strategies:

God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm. In playing god games, we replay the systems that have failed us, in shrunken-down, simplified form. The repetition of these systems at miniature scale sustains the notion that they are natural, the infinite complexity and incalculable possibility that characterizes human society... See more

..unlike specialization, strong opinions don’t narrow down your options or grind against your identity as a generalist. Strong opinions allow for divergent, generative futures.

In the Western world and the big markets, we've come back a little bit full circle to say, "Hey, we'd like you to consume music at the price points you were comfortable with," and this is nominal. We haven't gotten into real yet, but for that price we're not going to give you a vastly better experience.

But what Joan is calling for is this notion that the more you get close to how human beings are relating and how human beings are understanding, the harder it is to replace all of that with a fancy algorithm. And one thing about librarians is they know their local context and they understand the different constituencies that are involved. All of... See more

In the early days of the internet, the Web’s surface was relatively smooth and its “gravitational force” was weak. You could random walk without getting sucked into any black holes. During the 2010s, social media platforms “dug into the Web surface, dragging activities down their slopes … As a result of this magnetic-like attraction, caused by the... See more

Diverse places for learning exist in every community, and corner of the internet, but the connective tissue making that learning legible does not.