"On Instagram, 50% of posts are generated by less than 3% of accounts."

"If you want to survive, don’t just build a network. You have to build a hive, and eventually a hivemind."

"Myspace’s rapid user growth precipitated an equally rapid decline. It’s a cautionary lesson that growth in the network doesn’t equate to growth in business value. Networks can’t just be neutral. They have to be instrumental."

"A network connects different people and gives them many points of contact for communication and transaction."

"The value of being connected isn’t in being networked. It’s having an opinion and taking action toward an outcome."

"The hive is a smarter, evolved network that is bigger than the sum of its parts. The hive:"

"Increases the frequency of interactions between nodes and creates more touch-points within the hive. It’s how the hive learns and makes informed decisions in response to a changing external environment."

"Decreases friction between nodes and creates a higher level of synchronicity between members of the hive. This produces stronger ties between individual members and allows the hive to act collectively."

"Though not obvious, the hive is becoming central to the way we think, behave and interact."

"The fluidity of ants allows them to thrive in almost any environment. They’ve colonized every continent except Antarctica, making up 15–25% of terrestrial animals on Earth."

"Tools like Google Apps for Work, Slack and Github are making us more like ant clusters. They increase the frequency of interaction within an organization."

"The high frequency of interaction gets everyone on the same page and working in sync:"

"The net result is a vastly smarter organization aligned around shared goals. With more interaction between workers and tools, a business can transform from solid to fluid depending on the needs of the hive."

"A swarm of bees on the move resembles the movement of neurons in the human brain. That’s how they’re able to colonize new nesting sites within hours of leaving their old one."

"This doesn’t happen through a centralized intelligence where the queen bee shouts down orders. Instead, it’s through the low-level communication of scout bees that reduces friction for the entire hive and allows for rapid and collective decision-making."

"Instead, scout bees — who represent 3% of the entire hive — are responsible for choosing the new hive."

"The decision-making process of bees reduces friction for how a massive collection of individual parts can evaluate a variety of inputs quickly and intelligently. Ultimately, 30 bees decide the fate for 10,000."

"With WeChat, we see the evolution of a consumer product through the three stages of want, need and utility to the hive. At each stage, WeChat focuses on reducing friction by providing infrastructure for users. On WeChat, all it takes is a critical mass of people adopting new behavior to turn it into a utility that benefits the whole hive."

"What drove WeChat’s growth wasn’t the launch of any one feature. It was the individual fruit vendors, taxi cabs, and mom-and-pop shops that WeChat made life easier for. In the long run, this might be the winning strategy."

"The hive isn’t created from access to new functionality. It’s how new functionality creates new economic opportunity."

"The function of the social network is to connect people and to grow the size of the network. What originally came about through increasing connections is now focused on delivering a better, more immediate experience."

"Facebook and Snap Inc. are both converging around how we communicate and share experience, and they’re doing it by building a family of brands."

"Rather than alienating people, Facebook and Snap Inc. today are moving toward a vision of the future around creating real, shared experiences that actually bring people together."

"Why are all these vastly different companies converging on the autonomous car? That’s because for these companies, it’s about platform and hive, not just about roads without drivers."

"The hive is what gives us a shot at collectively solving these seemingly impossible problems."

"By allowing cars to get from A to B more predictably, autonomous cars will reduce the number of cars on the road, and the number of deaths in car accidents, and even the amount of money for insurance."

"Hives colonize instinctively as they grow, which is why we’re seeing so many companies converge around the similar trends. But the sequence that they grow in matters. The next big companies will have to do more than just pick the right trends."