Sixian

The moment when the fiction changes the reality, when the story you are telling has real effects. You might not have begun with yourself in mind, but at this moment you come into sudden, astonishing contact with your “I.”I wanted to provide points of realization akin to what I experienced in the roleplay, and which I also experienced while writing:... See more

One of the primary anxieties of the digital age is that an online life is a kind of half-life; that time spent on the internet is wasted time rather than lived time. Temporality and rhythmicity is the most popular way to differentiate between the live and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, even if it is not the most accurate

The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal... See more

On the other hand, networks with profiles that allow for more anonymity often grow more easily at the beginning because of the lower commitment required. Long term, however, we’ve seen them burn out and produce less value on average.

"I think people hunger to do something useful with their time in our age of uselessness, time uselessly spent, but also something ennobling with their time. This can’t quite be quantified. There’s no utilitarian value to it the way that there is with usefulness. But I deeply believe that people want to be good, that, more than that, we want to be... See more

Many Founders have a fantasy that data will be an ongoing insight engine — that as they collect more and more data, they will get more and more insights that will give their startup an ongoing advantage.

For products seeking virality, also having a network effects approach to the product is useful because it makes it easier to create viral language hooks using words like “share”, “get”, and “see” that aren’t as easy to build into non-network effects products.