Twitter, unlike Facebook with its predominant two-way friending, is built on a graph assembled from one-way follows. In theory, this should reduce its exposure to graph design problems. However, it suffers from the same flaw that any interest graph has when built on a social graph. You may be interested in some of a person's interests but not their... See more

For all the debate over whether our current social networks are good for society, I prefer to focus on the potential we've yet to realize. We have the miracle of Wikipedia, yes, but aren't there more types of mass scale collaboration to be enabled?

Slack's public channels act as public squares within companies, exposing more employees to each other's thoughts. This can lead to an employee finding others who share what they thought were minority opinions, like reservations about specific company policies. We're only now seeing how many companies operated in relative peace in the past in large ... See more

Recently, Instagram announced it would start showing its users posts from accounts they don't follow. In many ways, this is as close to a concession as we'll see from Instagram to the superiority of TikTok's architecture for pure entertainment.

But just as there are reasons why these design patterns won out, we shouldn't let survivor bias blind us to their inherent tradeoffs. The next wave of social startups should learn from the weaknesses of some of these choices of our current social incumbents

But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone?

To take the most famous example, the root of Facebook's churn issues began when their graph burgeoned to encompass everyone in one's life. As noted above, just because we are friends with someone doesn't mean we want to see everything they post about in our News Feed. In the other direction, having many more people from all spheres of our lives fol... See more

I refer to this as the problem of graph design: When designing an app that shapes its user experience off of a social graph, how do you ensure the user ends up with the optimal graph to get the most value out of your product/service?

A secondary consideration is what type of interaction an application is building towards in the long run. Is is about one-to-one interactions or broadcasting to large audiences? What percentage of your users do you want creating as opposed to just consuming? Is your app best served by a graph of people who know each other in real life or by a graph... See more