Homebrew VC Hunter Walk Talks Twitter, TikTok, and Tech in the Time of Biden

The mistake of the 1.0 platforms was to optimize for engagement—likes, clicks, and shares. This was a successful short-term growth strategy, but at the long-term cost of sustainability. For engagement includes not only joy but rage, not only mirth but sadness. Incentivizing these things creates hellishness, driving people to disengage, to become di... See more

This is not to just be a “things were better in the old days” rant. But I do think in the era of growth teams running wild with machine learning algorithms, we accelerated distribution incentives to drive engagement before we really knew what incentives were being created in the internet economy. And now the larger social networks are grappling wit... See more

There is the argument (that I regularly advocate) that pushing out the moderation to the ends of the network (i.e., giving more controls to the end users) is better, but that also has some complications in that it puts the burden on end users, and they have neither the time nor inclination to continually tweak their own settings. No matter wh

... See more

In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrialized farms with lit... See more