Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
creators generate cultural capital (i.e cool), fans generate social capital (network of relationships), and mops generate liquid capital (i.e money that subsidizes the scene). But too many mops causes problems, mainly because they free-ride off the geeks and offer little to the community. David Chapman explains:
“However, as mop numbers grow, they b... See more
Erik Torenberg • How Communities Die
Hal Varian, by the way, is the person who designed the Google ad auction. And it turned out he was only partially right about “information managers”. We call them influencers. But it was aggregators like Google that did the bulk of the heavy lifting. Computers can scale in ways that people can’t.
Gordon Brander • LLMs and information post-scarcity
What happens when readers subscribe to too many Substacks? What happens when the Substacks they subscribe to feel stale? The pressure is there and inevitable to create systems that sort, filter, and promote content... In reality, I don’t think people actually want “full control” over what they read, because that’s too much work. What people a... See more
Nathan Baschez • Substack’s Ideology
Curators are API’s that exist between people and all the knowledge of the world.
An API is an “application programming interface” that allows two apps to communicate, sending data between someone requesting something and a database full of data.
A curator exists in the space between people who want to know more about a topic and the massive amounts
... See moreSomewhat to my surprise, I found an answer waiting.I want to follow people who are interesting to me, in a way that’s simple, expressive, and predictable.
Robin Sloan • Specifying Spring '83
The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic&... See more
Robin Sloan • The Lost Thread
As Jeremy Keith enjoys pointing out, Medium is Ev’s blog and offers RSS feeds and reverse-chronological listings for each guest author.
Baldur Bjarnason • The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was
The internet is still so young that it’s still momentous to see a social network of some scale and lifespan suddenly lose its vitality. The regime change to Elon and his brain trust and the drastic changes they’ve made constitute a natural experiment we don’t see often. Usually, social networks are killed off by something exogenous, usually another... See more
How to Blow Up a Timeline
small networks or algo-driven big ones