Sixian

The Hidden Price Ceiling of Specializing Good specializing is hard, because if you don’t do it well, you can end up trapping yourself. By creating a narrow positioning or specialization you make yourself more legible and understandable - you’re essentially optimizing for well-defined work. And well-defined work is less senior, less well paid and le... See more

Oral histories, like publications, bind people. After a conversation, all parties maintain ownership of what transpired, and they continue to hold ties to one another.

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have)... See more

For the company:The labor/ creator lets themselves be tracked, measured, and optimized, and the company gets to keep a copy of that data to run its business and maintain the relationship with the laborer for the long term. This is giving up some privacy for the laborer.

Being in the formation need not actually be better than going off solo. It must only seem that way. Weaker classes must view exit as a worse option, whether or not it is actually worse... You don’t need TINA (There Is No Alternative), you only need belief in TINA.

Critically the world has ended many times to make room for whiteness – the world-performing imperative that enlists bodies of all kinds to perpetuate secure arrivals and safety. Even more critically, there isn’t one world – one dominant already-made world. The world has never been coherent or okay for many of us. And endings are plentiful – often h... See more

...we learned how much less important viral effects are to long-term value creation than defensibilies like network effects.While viral effects are a useful attribute of products to reduce the expense of acquiring new users, network effects remain the key driver of value creation for startups in the digital age by keeping people using them.

In every industry there’s typically some kind of received wisdom that sounds like good rational advice but simply doesn’t hold up when faced with reality. The trick is to look for advice that is “not even wrong” - advice that is correct in a certain sense but fundamentally unhelpful when applied to reality.