Price-First or Thesis-First Research?

It was a mistake to let Twitter set up the incentives for our society. It's not good for the world when the one thing every prominent person knows how to do is fight each other on Twitter for likes and followers. It has converted society into a zero-sum status game played by elites with real consequences.

The default method of getting to where I want to on the web is search. By putting content behind a paywall it’s non-existent for the Google Bot, which is bad for driving traffic (potential customers) to your site and constructing an interlinked narrative. It’s also bad for generating any kind of virality. Because of those reasons almost all paid ne... See more

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more

If you’re lucky, perhaps something you post will temporarily spark a surge of engagement, but those same spectators, exhausted by the onslaught, will soon shift their weary attentions to the next recommended item flowing close behind. This relentless pace rewards passive consumption, not active interaction with individual creators. The winner-take-... See more