<story><title>And you will know us by the company we keep</title><url>https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/9/29/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-company-we-keep</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mooreds</author><text>Like always, Eugene blows my mind.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have a lot to add in commentary, but almost every time I read one of his essays, I learn something.&lt;p&gt;Here are some particularly insightful snippets from the article.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns.&lt;p&gt;YES! I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to make unfollowing easy (daily, present someone on a social network and if you swiped right, unfollow them). But it&amp;#x27;d be even better if the network did it; they have the data, after all.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  Twitter favors pure play Twitter accounts that focus on one niche.&lt;p&gt;This so much. And it&amp;#x27;s one of the reasons I struggle with Twitter.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; First, [TikTok] runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users.&lt;p&gt;LOL.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph.&lt;p&gt;Note that the entire article is built around the concept that western social media companies have used the social graph as a proxy for the content graph, to their detriment.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members.&lt;p&gt;Shout it from the rooftops!&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; [On linkedin:] It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a lot of money to traverse it.&lt;p&gt;A friend calls LinkedIn &amp;quot;a rolodex that someone else keeps up to date&amp;quot;. I don&amp;#x27;t think we&amp;#x27;ve seen the peak of LI&amp;#x27;s value. Such a smart acquisition by MS.</text></comment>
<story><title>And you will know us by the company we keep</title><url>https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/9/29/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-company-we-keep</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>strogonoff</author><text>&amp;gt; Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue.&lt;p&gt;I’m surprised this is only mentioned in passing, as it most certainly relates to the problem of “over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature”.&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase, perhaps the single most important influence on users’ behavior in social media is platforms’ existential requirement to generate ad revenue from it?&lt;p&gt;The author mostly misses this factor in favor of overthinking what technically is its consequences. Seems blindingly obvious that such a business model would shape everything from high-level design to implementation to strategy—all that causes social media dynamics to be what they are.</text></comment>