Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed

Content-first and advertising-first will break down the dominant social networks over the long run.

With hindsight, I feel the reason Svpply never grew into anything substantial is because we misread the opportunity. Smallness was the steam that drove our engine and we opened the gasket.

The familiar social network pattern is to aspire to convert the whole world into a member.

We think there’s room for a different approach. A social netwo

... See more

It wasn’t that network effects and Metcalfe’s Law were wrong, it was just that they didn’t capture the reasons that someone might use a social network beyond pure utility, so Wei proposed a new framework for analyzing social networks’ strength that added social capital to the mix.