Social vs. Science Experiments

So the question is, how do you get to that scale? There are a million networks that died out before they ever achieved that scale.

But I guess I’m a little blurry on the details. Friends With Benefits has a manifesto where they describe themselves as an organization of “creators, rebels, artists, thinkers, and doers.” That sounds great! (I would like to be all those things, though maybe I wouldn’t say it out loud if I was.) And there’s an admirable statement of principles that... See more

The tools will no doubt get better at pulling relevant quotes. But I’m less confident they’ll ever solve the perennial mysteries of taste and discernment. Many great artists have put out what they thought was their best work, only to see it flop. And vice versa—what they thought was average ended up going viral. Every time you release a work of art

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To me, the key learning from the YouTube story is the journey that every networked product has to take. When they started out, they needed very little organization, but as the network grew, more and more structure was applied—first by editors, moderators, and users—and then by data and algorithms. The earliest iterations weren’t sophisticated, just

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