the most important new social networks of the last few years have been notable for not really being social networks at all.

I’m referring to the TikTok-ization of user-generated content: the reason why TikTok was such a blindspot for Facebook is that, unlike Snapchat, it doesn’t depend on network effects, but rather abundance.

The second wave of social is about having people be more conscious about building a graph that best matches the needs of what they want to get from that graph. Initially, importing from your contact/address book made sense. But now we can say that was a mistake. You don't need to follow all people you know on all services.

But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph?

If you’re building a technology platform, making it “social” really means figuring out what the nodes, edges, and jumping functions should be. One way to do this is to work backwards. What should the experience feel like at scale? Do users care about what other people are doing on the network, or do they really care about other types of objects, li... See more