"I’d like Amazon to build a true social network around books and readers. I’ve tried Goodreads, and then later I tried it again. That’s not the answer. The site is a bit of a confusing ghost town, and it seems oriented around finding a book to read, which the Amazon site and other resources already do a good enough job solving."

"The reading social network I want is around discussing ideas in the text itself. I want the ability to see the notes and highlights of my friends on books we’ve both purchased, and I want the ability to respond to their notes, or at least to like them. I want them to see my public highlights and notes, and I want them to be able to respond to those."

"I would love the ability to follow certain notable folks and see their public notes and highlights."

"What if every time a person was mentioned in a book, they’d receive a notification, like a notification that they’d been tagged in a Facebook photo? At a basic level, we’d have a lot more crowd-sourcing of fact-checking, but at a higher level the book becomes an opening to a dialogue."

"now authors would be constantly revisiting their own books to participate in a dialogue with their readers. Books would go from two dimensional to having a z-axis composed of an infinite number of onion paper layers available to scribble on."

"Such a platform transforms the purchase of a book into the beginning of a lifelong relationship and dialogue around its ideas. A copyrighted text become not just paywalled content, a locked fortress, but an open platform for contextual conversation. Over time, each book would become richer and richer, a living tome."

"I envision that my home feed could include highlights and notes from other readers I was following, and again, if I didn’t own the book they were referencing I’d see a truncated excerpt with a buy button to unlock the whole text."

"Understanding how the algorithm achieves its accuracy matters even if you’re not interested in TikTok or the short video space because more and more, companies in all industries will be running up against a competitor whose advantage centers around a machine learning algorithm."

"most experts in the field doubt that TikTok has made some hitherto unknown advance in machine learning recommendations algorithms."

"recall that the effectiveness of a machine learning algorithm isn’t a function of the algorithm alone but of the algorithm after trained on some dataset."

"the magic of the design of TikTok: it is a closed loop of feedback which inspires and enables the creation and viewing of videos on which its algorithm can be trained."

"when considering how to design an app, you have to consider how best to help an algorithm “see.” To serve your users best, first serve the algorithm."

"algorithm-friendly design"

"Everything you do from the moment the video begins playing is signal as to your sentiment towards that video."

"Before the video is even sent down to your phone by the FYP algorithm, some human on TikTok’s operations team has already watched the video and added lots of relevant tags or labels."

"Some of TikTok’s camera filters are designed to track human faces or hands or gestures so vision AI is often invoked even earlier, at the point of creation."

"The default UI of our largest social networks today is the infinite vertically scrolling feed (I could have easily used a screenshot of Facebook above, for example). Instead of serving you one story at a time, these apps display multiple items on screen at once. As you scroll up and past many stories, the algorithm can’t “see” which story your eyes rest on."

"judging sentiment is a challenge."

"By relying on a long scrolling feed with mostly explicit positive feedback mechanisms, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have made a tradeoff in favor of lower friction scanning for users at the expense of a more accurate read on negative signal."

"content derived from a social graph can drift away from a user’s true interests because of the mismatch between your own interests and those of people you know."

"if the algorithm isn’t ""seeing"" signals of a user’s growing disinterest, if only positive engagement is visible, some amount of divergence is unavoidable."

"Algorithm-friendly design need not be user-hostile. It simply takes a different approach as to how to best serve the user’s interests."

"The goal of any design is not to minimize friction, it’s to help the user achieve some end. Reducing friction is often consistent with that end, but not always."

"In this software era, true competitive advantages, or moats, are increasingly illusory. Most software features or UI designs can be copied easily by an incumbent or competitor overnight. All you will have done is test the impact of the design for them."

"the actual magic is how every element of TikTok's design and processes connect with each other to create a dataset with which the algorithm trains itself into peak performance."

"All that’s needed is an understanding of how the flywheel works and a commitment to keep every element and process in it functioning."

"the most important piece of technology Bytedance introduced to TikTok: the updated For You Page feed algorithm."

"while you can’t listen to your customers exclusively, paying attention to them is a dependable way to build a solid SaaS business, and even in the consumer space it provides useful signal."

"in the reverse direction, America has been almost as impenetrable to Chinese companies because of what might be thought of as America’s cultural firewall."

"a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted."

"allowing watermarked videos to easily be downloaded and distributed via other networks like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, helped them achieve hockey-stick inflection among their target market."

"Bytedance did two things in particular to jumpstart TikTok’s growth."

"First, it opened up its wallet and started spending on user acquisition in the U.S."

"Rumors abounded that the 30-day retention of all those new users poured into the top of its funnel was sub 10%. They seemed to be lighting ad dollars on fire."

"after they plugged Musical.ly, now TikTok, into Bytedance’s back-end algorithm, they doubled the time spent in the app."

"To help a network break out from its early adopter group, you need both to bring lots of new people/subcultures into the app—that’s where the massive marketing spend helps—but also ways to help these disparate groups to 1) find each other quickly and 2) branch off into their own spaces."

"the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph."

"TikTok’s algorithm sorts its users into dozens and dozens of subcultures"

"Think of how most other social networks have scaled. The usual path is organic. Users are encouraged to follow and friend each other to assemble their own graph one connection at a time. The challenge with that is that it’s almost always a really slow build, and you have to provide some reason for people to hang around and build that graph, often encapsulated by the aphorism “come for the tool, stay for the network.” Today, it’s not as easy to build the “tool” part when so much of that landscape has already been mined and when scaled networks have learned to copy any tool achieving any level of traction."

"Recall the three purposes which I used to distinguish among networks in Status as a Service: social capital (status), entertainment, and utility."

"TikTok is less a pure social network, the type focused on social capital, than an entertainment network. I don’t socialize with people on TikTok, I barely know any of them."

"what matters here is realizing that another way to describe an entertainment network is as an interest network."

"The idea of using a social graph to build out an interest-based network has always been a sort of approximation, a hack."

"It worked in college for Facebook because a bunch of hormonal college students are really interested in each other."

"The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale. Take a social network like Twitter: the one-way follow graph structure is well-suited to interest graph construction, but the problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow."

"TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all."

"It is passive personalization, learning through consumption."

"TikTok came along and bypassed all of that. In a two-sided entertainment marketplace, they provide creators on one side with unmatched video creation tools coupled with potential super-scaled distribution, and viewers on the other side with an endless stream of entertainment that gets more personalized with time."

"TikTok has figured out the hardest piece, the algorithm. With it, a massive team made up mostly by people who’ve never left China, and many who never will, grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets they’d never experienced firsthand."

"The harder version of the question is why the first chicken came and stayed when no other chickens were around, and why the others followed."

"wrote Chris Dixon, in perhaps the most memorable maxim for how this works."

"What ties many of these explanations together is social capital theory, and how we analyze social networks should include a study of a social network's accumulation of social capital assets and the nature and structure of its status games."

"The other axis is, for a lack of a more precise term, the social capital axis, or the status axis. Can I use the social network to accumulate social capital? What forms? How is it measured? And how do I earn that status?"

"those which compete on the social capital axis are often more mysterious than pure utilities."

"there was a thought that new social networks would be built on some new modality of communications. That's a piece of it, but it's not the complete picture"

"status games of adults are already well covered by the existing media, from literature to film."

"Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle."

"Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you."

"The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms."

"More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily:"

"It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning."

"As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn't be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it."

"By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy."

"To succeed at carving out unique space in the market, social networks offer their own unique form of status token, earned through some distinctive proof of work."

"The star is the filter, not the user, and so it didn't really make sense to follow any one person over any other person."

"It was a utility that failed at becoming a Status as a Service business."

"a new Status as a Service business must devise some proof of work that depends on some actual skill to differentiate among users."

"The second tenet is that people seek out the most efficient path to maximize their social capital."

"heavy social media users are hyper aware of differing status ROI among the apps they use."

"Some features can increase the reach of content on any network. A reshare option like the retweet button is a massive accelerant of virality on apps where the social graph determines what makes it into the feed."

"a social network should continue to prioritize distribution for the best content, whatever the definition of quality, regardless of the vintage of user producing it."

"Distribution is king, even when, or especially when it allocates social capital."

"By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it."

"If you can't change the proof of work competition as a challenger, copy and throttle is an effective strategy for the incumbent."

"The problem with copying Snapchat is that, well, the reason young people left Facebook for Snapchat was in large part because their parents had invaded Facebook."

"You can take the monkey out of the status-seeking game, but you can't take the status-seeking out of the monkey."

"As humans, we intuitively understand that some galling percentage of our happiness with our own status is relative. What matters is less our absolute status than how are we doing compared to those around us."

"Some businesses work best at scale, and if you believe that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, putting a bound on how much they can earn is a challenging business model, as dark as that may be."

"While we're all status-seeking monkeys, young people tend to be the tip of the spear when it comes to catapulting new Status as a Service businesses, and may always will be."

"Young people are generally social capital poor unless they've lucked into a fat inheritance."

"the fastest and most efficient path to gaining social capital, while they wait to level up enough to win at more grown-up games like office politics, is to ply their trade on social media"

"First utility, then social capital"

"This is the well-known “come for the tool, stay for the network”"

"Whether you believe in the 1/9/90 rule of social networks or not, it’s directionally true that any network has value to people besides its creators. In fact, for almost every network, the number of lurkers far exceeds the number of active participants. Life may not be a spectator sport, but a lot of social media is."

"If you want to know why Musical.ly stopped growing and sold to Bytedance, why Douyin will hit a ceiling of users in China (if it hasn’t already), or what the cap of active users is for any social network, first ask yourself how many people have the skill and interest to compete in that arena."

"You'll hear it again and again, the easiest way to empathize with your users is to be the canonical user yourself."

"But the solution also doesn’t lie in ignoring that humans are wired to pursue social capital. In fact, overlooking this fundamental aspect of human nature arguably landed us here, at the end of this first age of social network goliaths, wondering where it all went haywire."

"what is striking is the assumption that these are fundamentally positive outcomes."

"People are status-seeking monkeys"

"People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital"

"most of the social media networks we study generate much more social capital than actual financial capital, especially in their early stages"

"TikTok has a strong form of this type of network effect. They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content."

"TikTok abstracted a lot of formerly complex video editing processes into effects and filters that even an amateur can use"

"""It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of little fortune, must be in want of more social capital."""

"People are status-seeking monkeys* People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital"

"I begin with these two observations of human nature because few would dispute them, yet I seldom see social networks, some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the history of the world, analyzed on the dimension of status or social capital."

"It’s in part a measurement issue. Numbers lend an air of legitimacy and credibility. We have longstanding ways to denominate and measure financial capital and its flows."

"We have no such methods for measuring the values and movement of social capital, at least not with anywhere near the accuracy or precision."

"There would be some annual presentation called the State of Social akin to Meeker's Internet Trends Report, or perhaps it would be a fifty page sub-section of her annual report."

"It's not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can't be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans."

"Social capital has much to say about why social networks lose heat, stall out, and sometimes disappear altogether."

"greater scrutiny. Not o"

"In the past few years, much progress has been made analyzing Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses."

"This post is a deep dive into what I refer to as Status as a Service (StaaS) businesses."

"One of the fundamental lessons of successful social networks is that they must first appeal to people when they have few users."

"Typically this is done through some form of single-user utility."

"This is the classic cold start problem of social. The answer to the traditional chicken-and-egg question is actually answerable: what comes first is a single chicken, and then another chicken, and then another chicken, and so on. The harder version of the question is why the first chicken came and stayed when no other chickens were around, and why the others followed."

"The second fundamental lessons is that social networks must have strong network effects so that as more and more users come aboard, the network enters a positive flywheel of growth,"

"The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n^2)"

"dig deeper and many many questions remain. Why do some large social networks suddenly fade away, or lose out to new tiny networks?"

"Facebook's clones of other social network features fail, while some succeed, like Instagram Stories?"

"Utility vs. Social Capital Framework"

"Utility doesn't require much explanation, though we often use the term very loosely and categorize too many things as utility when they aren't that useful (we generally confuse circuses for bread and not the reverse"

"There are several different paths to success for social networks, but those which compete on the social capital axis are often more mysterious than pure utilities."

"When modeling how successful social networks create a status game worth playing, a useful metaphor is one of the trendiest technologies: cryptocurrency."

"If you've ever joined one of these social networks early enough, you know that, on a relative basis, getting ahead of others in terms of social capital (followers, likes, etc.) is easier in the early days."

"Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work."

"What Favstar and Favrd did was surface really great tweets and rank them on a scoreboard, and that, to me, launched the performative revolution in Twitter."

"It added needed feedback to the feedback loop, birthing a new type of comedian, the master of the 140 character or less punchline"

"This gave Twitter its own proof of work, and over time the overall quality of tweets improved as that feedback loop spun and tightened."

"Thirst for status is potential energy. It is the lifeblood of a Status as a Service business."

"Stories, by putting the onus on the viewer to pull that content, allows everyone to publish away guilt-free, without regard for the craft that regular posts demand in the ever escalating game that is life publishing."

"Without that element of skill, no framework for a status game or skill-based network existed."

"Layer that on top of the broader social status game of stalking attractive members of the other sex that animates much of college life and Facebook was a service that tapped into reserves of some of the most heated social capital competitions in the world."

"Instagram, despite not having any official reshare option, allows near unlimited hashtag spamming, and that allows for more deterministic, self-generated distribution."

"TikTok is an interesting new player in social media because its default feed, For You, relies on a machine learning algorithm to determine what each user sees; the feed of content from by creators you follow, in contrast, is hidden one pane over."

"This development is interesting for another reason: graph-based social capital allocation mechanisms can suffer from runaway winner-take-all effects."

"some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they've earned it through the quality of their posts."

"One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game."

"One of the striking things about Silicon Valley as a region versus East Coast power corridors like Manhattan is its dearth of old money."

"I'd rather the most productive new work be rewarded consistently by the marketplace than a bunch of stagnant quasi-monopolies hang on to wealth as they reach bloated scales that aren't conducive to innovation."

"The same way many social networks track keystone metrics like time to X followers, they should track the ROI on posts for new users."

"Whatever the mechanisms, social networks must devote a lot of resources to market making between content and the right audience for that content so that users feel sufficient return on their work."

"Most of these near clones have and will fail."

"The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists."

"Usually when such displacement occurs, though, it does so along the other dimension of pure utility."

"The first mover advantage is also such that the leader with the dominant graph and the social capital of most value can look at any new features that fast followers launch and pull a reverse copy, grafting them into their more extensive and dominant incumbent graph."

"the network's the thing; that is, the composition of the graph once a social network reaches scale is its most unique quality."

"I would update that today to say that it’s the unique combination of a feature and a specific graph that is any network’s most critical competitive advantage."

"Copying some network's feature often isn’t sufficient if you can’t also copy its graph, but if you can apply the feature to some unique graph that you earned some other way, it can be a defensible advantage."

"As I've written before, I think the Stories format is a genuine innovation on the social modesty problem of social networks."

"Stories is inherently about lowering the publishing hurdle for users and about a new method of storytelling, and any multi-sided network seeing declining growth will try grafting it on their own network at some point just to see if it solves supply-side social modesty."

"In the annals of tech, and perhaps the world, the event that created the greatest social capital boom in history was the launch of Facebook's News Feed."

"By merging all updates from all the accounts you followed into a single continuous surface and having that serve as the default screen, Facebook News Feed simultaneously increased the efficiency of distribution of new posts and pitted all such posts against each other in what was effectively a single giant attention arena, complete with live updating scoreboards on each post."

"The tighter the feedback loop, the quicker the adaptation"

"As people start following more and more accounts on a social network, they reach a point where the number of candidate stories exceeds their capacity to see them all. Even before that point, the sheer signal-to-noise ratio may decline to the point that it affects engagement. Almost any network that hits this inflection point turns to the same solution: an algorithmic feed."

"let's be honest, the incentives to lower interest rates on social capital in all these networks, given their goals and those of their investors, were just too great. If one company hadn’t flooded the market with status, others would have filled the void many times over."

"One is that older people tend to have built up more stores of social capital."

"For them, the fastest and most efficient path to gaining social capital, while they wait to level up enough to win at more grown-up games like office politics, is to ply their trade on social media"

"Secondly, because of their previously accumulated social capital, adults tend to have more efficient means of accumulating even more status than playing around online."

"Lastly, young people have a surplus of something which most adults always complain they have too little of: time."

"Incidentally, teens and twenty-somethings, more so than the middle-aged and elderly, tend to juggle more identities."

"In the end, I think most social networks, if they've made this journey, need to make a return to utility to be truly durable."

"The holy grail for social networks is to generate so much social capital and utility that it ends up in that desirable upper right quadrant of the 2x2 matrix. Most social networks will offer some mix of both, but none more so than WeChat."

"Every network has some ceiling on its ultimate number of contributors, and it is often a direct function of its proof of work."

"This isn’t to say that proof of work is bad. In fact, coming up with a constraint that unlocks the creativity of so many people is exactly how Status as a Service businesses achieve product-market fit."

"what the cap of active users is for any social network, first ask yourself how many people have the skill and interest to compete in that arena."

"To understand the inherent fragility in Status as a Service businesses, we need to understand the volatility of status."

"One of the common traps is the winner's curse for social media. If a social network achieves enough success, it grows to a size that requires the imposition of an algorithmic feed in order to maintain high signal-to-noise for most of its users."

"The problem, of course, is that this now diminishes the distribution of any single post from any single user."

"I think network effects are great, but in a sense they’re a little overrated. The problem with network effects is they unwind just as fast."

"But in another sense, it’s a very weak position to be in. Because if it cracks, you just unravel"

"I always worry when a company thinks the answer is just network effects. How durable are they?"

"Many types of social capital have qualities which render them fragile. Status relies on coordinated consensus to define the scarcity that determines its value."

"A variant of this type of status devaluation cascade can be triggered when a particular group joins up. This is because the stability of a status lattice depends just as much on the composition of the network as its total size."

"As a footnote, Snapchat is also playing on the entertainment axis with its Discover pane."

"Almost all social networks of some scale will play with some mix of social capital, utility, and entertainment, but each chooses how much to emphasize each dimension."

"The danger of having a proof of work burden that doesn't change is that eventually, everyone who wants to mine for that social currency will have done so, and most of it will be depleted. At that point, the amount of status-driven potential energy left in the social network flattens. If, at that inflection, the service hasn't made headway in adding a lot of utility, the network can go stale."

"as is often the case, a company’s strengths and weaknesses stem from the same quality in their nature."

"Perhaps the easiest way to spot social capital is to look at places where people trade it for financial capital."

"Local scoring of social capital at the atomic level usually exists in the form of likes of some sort, one of the universal primitives of just about every social network."

"Likes correlate more strongly with your activity volume and serve as a source of continual short-term social capital injections, even if each like is, in the long-run, less valuable than a follower or a friend."

"Meaning is derived from context and prior knowledge."

"Meaning emerges when a message reaches a life-form or a machine with the ability to process information; it is not carried in the blots of ink, sound waves, beams of light, or electric pulses that transmit information."

"In manifestations of order we see intent, in intent we interpret meaning, and in meaning we find comfort."

"It is the growth of information that unifies the emergence of life with the growth of economies, and the emergence of complexity with the origins of wealth."

"It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous."

"one critical design mistake keeps rearing its head in many of the social media Testflights sent my way. I've mentioned it in various passing conversations online before. I refer to this as the problem of graph design:"

"When designing an app that shapes its user experience off of a social graph, how do you ensure the user ends up with the optimal graph to get the most value out of your product/service?"

"The social media version of is over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature and under-attributing it to the social context the app places them in."

"Perhaps the single most important contextual influence in social media is one's social graph. Who they follow and who follows them."

"most of the most well-known Western social apps chose to interlace two things: the social graph and the content feed."

"But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?"

"Focusing just on entertainment, the problem with building a content feed off of a person's social graph is that, to be blunt, we don't always find the people we know to be that entertaining."

"Who we follow has a disproportionate effect on the relevance and quality of what we see on much of Western social media because the apps were designed that way."

"In the other direction, having many more people from all spheres of our lives follow us created a massive context collapse."

"To put it even stronger, graph design problems are particularly dangerous to social companies because they fall into that class of mistakes that are difficult to reverse."

"Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation."

"Graph design problems are one-way mistakes in large part because users make them so. Most social media users don't unfollow people after following them. Much of this comes down to social conformity."

"Many social apps, because of how they're configured, undergo phase shifts as the graph scales."

"But beyond some scale, negative network effects creep in. And if you don't change how you handle it, before you know it, you find yourself pronouncing that you're taking a break from social media for your mental health."

"Social graphs are path dependent."

"A classic example, though I don't know if this still persists, is how Pinterest skewed heavily towards female users at launch, losing lots of potential male users in the process. This was a function of building their feed off of each user's social graph."

"This created a reflexive loop in which Pinterest was perceived as a female-centric social app, which chased off some male users, thus becoming self-fulfilling stereotype. An alternate content selection heuristic for the feed could have corrected for this skew."

"In conflating the social graph and the interest graph, we've introduced a content matching problem that needn't exist."

"It's very clear in those products that each person should follow their own interests."

"The way China has built out its social infrastructure is, in at least this respect, more logical. WeChat owns the dominant social graph, and it acts as an underlying social infrastructure to the rest of the Chinese internet"

"Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue. The lifeblood of their income statement is traffic to the feed. This means feed relevance is paramount."

"Instead of pruning and tuning their social graphs to fix their feeds, most users do the next easiest thing: they churn."

"The iOS contact book is now the only ""open-source"" social graph that a new app can work from to jumpstart their own. In The Network's the Thing, I argued that the network itself provides the lion's share of the value for a social network, that arguments about what types of content to allow in feeds, how those were formatted, were of much less importance."

"Instagram famously got a nice head start on building out their own social graph by siphoning off of Twitter's."

"Another way apps really influence the shape of their social graph is with suggested follow lists."

"In the other direction, it's also important to help a users acquire the right types of followers."

"Besides being one-way mistakes, graph design errors are also pernicious because the tend to manifest only after an app has achieved some level of product-market fit. By that point, not only is it difficult to undo the social graph that has crystallized, to do so would violate the expectations of the users who've embraced the app as it is. It's a double bind, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't."

"Apps that achieve some level of product-market fit, even if it's a local maximum, require real courage to revert."

"Instead of fixing the root problem of the graph design, however, most apps opt instead to patch the problem."

"The most popular method is to switch to an algorithmic, rather than chronological, feed."

"Until they acknowledge that the root problem lies in sourcing stories for News Feed from their monolithic social graph, they'll never truly solve their churn."

"Ironically, shifting to the News Feed itself was perhaps their previous boldest decision"

"However, it suffers from the same flaw that any interest graph has when built on a social graph."

"One can imagine alternative social architectures that wouldn't require users to create multiple accounts to implement these tactics. But in this world where each social media account can only be associated with one identity, users are locked into a single graph per account."

"One clever way an app might help solve the graph design problem is by removing the burden of unfollowing accounts that no longer interest users."

"Another possible solution to the graph design problem is to decouple a users content feed from their social graph."

"TikTok doesn't need you to follow any accounts to construct a relevant feed for you. Instead, it does two things."

"First, it tries to understand what interests you by observing how you react to everything it shows you."

"Secondly, TikTok runs every candidate video through a two-stage screening process."

"First, it runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man"

"Secondly, it then uses its algorithm to decide whether that video would interest each user based on their taste profile."

"Recently, Instagram announced it would start showing its users posts from accounts they don't follow."

"In this piece focused on graph design, what matters is that things like content pickers explicitly veer away from the social graph."

"A secondary consideration is what type of interaction an application is building towards in the long run."

"The next generation of social product teams can and should be more proactive about thinking through what type of social graph will offer the best user experience in the long run."

"Unlike some types of design, graph design doesn't lend itself easily to prototyping."

"But whereas traditional complex adaptive systems are so complex that predictions are futile, social networks are different in two ways. One is that human nature is consistent. The second is that we have numerous super scaled social networks to study."

"If the trunk of the app is a content feed, does that feed have to draw exclusively from stories posted by accounts followed by the user?"

"Is a feed even the right architecture for healthy interactions among your users?"

"On the other hand, any app with a default public graph structure plays into the innate human impulse to judge."

"Plenty of research shows that humans tend to oscillate at the same frequency as the people they spend the most time with."

"The social media version of this is that we can predict how any user will behave on an app by the people they follow, the people who follow them, and the ""space"" they're forced to interact with those people in, be it a Facebook News Feed or Twitter Timeline or other architecture."

"The fundamental attribution error predicts we'll think they're terrible by nature when they may just be responding to their environment and incentives."

"While I've discussed graph design largely defensively here—how to avoid mistakes in graph design—the positive view is to use graph design offensively."

"In a world where finding someone online is a commodityOne sign that it is a commodity is that messaging apps, while massive, are for the most part lousy businesses that generate little in revenue. That's the financial profile you'd expect of a commodity business., the niftier trick is connecting to the right people in the right context."

"How do you craft a unique graph whose very structure encodes valuable, and more importantly, unique intelligence?"

"Every other week or so, I am introduced to someone amazing, or an account I've never heard of before that blows me away. That social networks themselves aren't facilitating these introductions leaves me less sad than hopeful."

"We'll also look back over that decade, see how many more amazing people we finally met at the right time and the right context, and realize that indeed, the real treasure was the friends we made along the way."

"Or perhaps tap from one to the next, like Robin Sloan’s tap essay (I wish there a way to export this piece into a form like that, if someone built that already let me know)."

"By network effects of creativity, I mean that every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative."

"But TikTok has a strong form of this type of network effect. They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content. In their app, they have a wealth of features that make it dead simple to grab any element from another TikTok and incorporate it into a new TikTok."

"TikTok’s Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and allow for emergent creativity."

"It only takes a handful of innovators to unleash a meme tsunami."

"Until TikTok came along, there wasn't an easy way to do reaction videos to other videos and have them make sense unless the original video had so much distribution that it was common knowledge."

"Social networks, and entertainment networks like TikTok, have completed the work of democratizing reactions. Yes, there's no reason you need to react to everything. But it's human nature. This is the social contract of the social media era. If you dare to shout your opinion or publish your work to the masses, the masses can choose to shout back."

"Gossip litigates and fleshes out the boundaries of acceptable behavior within groups. Whereas gossip used to be contained, social networks now give it global distribution. This is one reason of many we've seen in-group and out-group boundaries drawn in bolder weight in this era."

"What feature better epitomizes the remix, react culture of the internet? Paul Ford once wrote that ""Why Wasn't I Consulted?"" is the fundamental question of the web. By then, social networks were well on their way to taking over from the web, and in the process, installing the plumbing by which the masses could finally directly opine to the masses, who could, in return, directly consult back."

"But also, isn't this how innovation happens? We stand on the shoulder of giants and all that? Good artists copy, great artists steal?"

"And people always underestimate the market side of product-market fit. When something fails, people tend to blame the product, but we should blame the market more often. The pull of the market is usually as important, if not more so, than the push from a product."

"Most of the best ideas in tech first appeared in science fiction books in the 1960s, and many of those are still waiting for their time to come. This is why rejecting companies that are trying something that's been tried before is so dangerous. It's lazy pattern-matching."

"I do like Jeff Bezos' principle on when he decides to finally give up on an idea: ""When the last smart person in the room gives up on the idea."""

"But it also implies that you should bring some ideas back when a new smart person, or maybe a naive overconfident one, enters the room and champions the idea."

"The toughest job for any creative is the cold start."

"The internet writ large has always been fertile ground for the accelerated breeding of memes (cue toothless old prospector: ""Back in my day sonny boy we had to spread memes via email chain letters""). But the TikTok app is perhaps the most evolved meme ecosystem to date."

"People will litigate Instagram copying Snapchat's Stories feature until the end of time, but the fact is that format wasn't ever going to be some defensible moat. Ephemerality is a clever new dimension on which to vary social media, but it's easily copiable."

"This is why TikTok's network effects of creativity matter. To clone TikTok, you can't just copy any single feature. It's all of that, and not just the features, but how users deploy them and how the resultant videos interact with each other on the FYP feed."

"It's replicating all the feedback loops that are built into TikTok's ecosystem, all of which are interconnected. Maybe you can copy some of the atoms, but the magic lives at the molecular level."

"Building a flywheel, though, often requires connecting a series of features at once."

"We end up at loggerheads on the V of MVP (minimum viable product), V having always been contextually determined."

"But, I'd counter: 1) often, testing a flywheel by definition means you have to build multiple features that work together 2) the returns of achieving a flywheel are often so high as to be worth the risk and 3) if you don't achieve any flywheels you are, as investor updates are so fond of saying, default dead."

"Once we all live in the metaverse, this type of infinite replication and remixability will be something we take for granted, but even now, we're starting to see an early version of it on TikTok. This type of native remixability feels like it will be table stakes in future creative networks."

"The Discover Page features hashtags. By the very act of featuring a hashtag, they signal to creators that if they create using that hashtag, they will get the distribution boost of that hashtag being featured on the Discover Page."

"TikTok is a mix of a centrally planned economy and a free market, much like many multiplayer video games where the game publisher manages the price and availability of various assets like weapons and armor while the players put them to use in the virtual economy."

"Because the most popular memes get super-distribution via the FYP algorithm, you can assume common knowledge of the meme among your viewers and just cut to the punchline."

"A book Jeff had us read, one which he said should serve as an inspiration for how we'd design AWS, was Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand. It's a book about programming artificial life, but the core principle that Jeff wanted us to take from it was the idea that complex things like life forms are built from very simple building blocks or primitives."

"The key implication for AWS from the book was about how to design the first AWS primitives. Jeff urged us to include only what was necessary and nothing more."

"The reason to design your primitives with the utmost elegance is to maximize combinatorial optionality."

"This is one of the most elegant things about TikTok's design. It includes a ton of primitives, and they are almost all ones you can combine or link."

"Be careful of taking this idea of building primitives too far. In many ways, choosing what level of abstraction to stake your ground on is one of the most important questions any company must answer."

"The answer is contextual. Abstract at too high a level and someone can come in beneath you, with something like AWS. In some ways this is a form of disruption."

"Build at too low a level, however, and often someone will abstract at a level above you and siphon all the value of that market above your product."

"One of the most revolutionary aspects of TikTok is how effortless it makes it to sample or interpolate any other TikTok video."

"One of the most common weaknesses among managers and leaders is the illusion of transparency, though it is a problem for most people. It is the tendency to overestimate how much people know what you're thinking."

"TikTok is the modern MTV because (1) it increases consumption of music tracks that go viral on its platform as sounds and (2) any number of songs will forever summon the accompanying meme and visual choreography from my memory."

"The Kardashian-Jenner clan are the clear predecessors who ran this type of crossover mindshare grab, but they're family."

"This new generation of influencers often aren't related, their common bond is just that they're young and famous in the age of social media and so they already all live together in a virtual universe held together by the gravity of popularity."

"Conversely, when I'm the test audience for a little-seen video (a dead giveaway is it has almost no likes yet), I tend to be merciless in skipping ahead if it doesn't hold my attention after a few seconds."

"This creates a ruthless rich-get-richer dynamic, but that's by design. Bytedance as a company has built its products around pitiless algorithms enforcing a high Gini coefficient economy of entertainment."

"It's a marketplace in which the supply side—the TikTok videos from creators—can be shown to an unlimited number of viewers. Much of the content is evergreen, so there is almost no end to the leverage TikTok can get off any single good video."

"TikTok is the second form of entertainment that brings DFW's fictional entertainment to mind. In hindsight, it seems obvious that a personalized feed of video, tailored to your tastes, would be the addictive end state of entertainment."

"TikTok is personalized, yet through its algorithm it creates shared stories of real scale. Some of these shared stories occur on the creative side in duets and trims that connect creators to each other literally and metaphorically."

"The term binge-watching typically refers to watching multiple episodes of a series in one sitting, but perhaps the act of watching dozens of TikTok videos in a row is the purest form of this type of entertainment gluttony."

"Other types of social media like Instagram and Twitter are also series of really compact units of media. When I scroll Twitter or Instagram, I often feel like an elephant, standing there placidly, as various people toss individual packing peanuts at my forehead (let’s call these people the peanut gallery?)."

"Twitter started showing users tweets that people they followed had liked, even from people that user didn't follow themselves. This does occasionally show me tweets of interest, but what it also does is increase, on an absolute basis, the number of tweets I have no interest in and have to scroll past."

"Likewise, the TikTok FYP algorithm, trained on its dataset, is remarkably accurate and efficient at matching videos with those who will find them entertaining (and, just as importantly, at suppressing the distribution of videos to those who won’t find them entertaining)."

"In a unique sort of chicken and egg problem, the very types of video that TikTok’s algorithm needed to train on weren’t easy to create without the app’s camera tools and filters, licensed music clips, etc."

"This, then, is the magic of the design of TikTok: it is a closed loop of feedback which inspires and enables the creation and viewing of videos on which its algorithm can be trained."

"For its algorithm to become as effective as it has, TikTok became its own source of training data."

"There’s a reason this user-centric design model has been so dominant for so long, especially in consumer tech. First, it works."

"Furthermore, we live in the era of massive network effects, where tech giants who apply Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory and acquire a massive base of users can exert unbelievable leverage on the markets they participate in."

"More and more, when considering how to design an app, you have to consider how best to help an algorithm “see.” To serve your users best, first serve the algorithm."

"It is an exemplar of what I call algorithm-friendly design"

"Ultimately, a design that helps an algorithm see is still doing so in service of providing the user with the best possible experience."

"If you tap the bottom right spinning LP icon and watch more videos with that same soundtrack, that is additional signal as to your tastes. Often the music cue is synonymous with a meme, and now TikTok has another axis on which to recommend videos for you."

"Rather than force people to do so within the TikTok app, they make it dead simple to download videos or share them through those external channels."

"On the other hand, maybe you wouldn’t mind reading one tweet at a time if they were better targeted, and maybe they would be better targeted if Twitter knew more about which types of tweets really interest you. And maybe Twitter would know more about what really interested you if you had to give explicit and implicit positive or negative signals on every tweet."

"It’s the content that’s boring or causes mild displeasure that is the slow killer. In my previous post, I noted that content derived from a social graph can drift away from a user’s true interests because of the mismatch between your own interests and those of people you know. The switch from a chronological to algorithmic feed is often the default defensive move against such drift."

"But if the algorithm isn’t ""seeing"" signals of a user’s growing disinterest, if only positive engagement is visible, some amount of divergence is unavoidable. You might see that a user is slowly losing interest, not liking as many items, not opening your app as often, but precisely which stories are driving them away may be unclear. By the time they're starting to exhibit those signs of churn, it's often too late to reverse the bleeding."

"Pagination may insert some level of friction to the user, but in doing so, it may provide the algorithm with cleaner signal that safeguards the quality of the feed in the long run."

"I sometimes think about adopting some or all of these strategies myself, but for Twitter, the necessity of these is itself a failure of the service. If the algorithm were smarter about what interested you, it should take care of muting topics or blocking people on your behalf, without you having to do that work yourself."

"Not only does TikTok capture very clean signals of sentiment from its users, it also gathers a tremendous volume of them per session. Videos on TikTok are so short that even in a brief session, TikTok can gather a lot of feedback on your tastes."

"By the way, TikTok isn’t the only app with an interface that is optimized for the task of matching, with an interface that shows you one entity at a time so as to be more clear on how you feel."

"In this software era, true competitive advantages, or moats, are increasingly illusory."

"what makes TikTok work is the entire positive feedback loop connecting creators, videos, and viewers via the FYP algorithm."

"But the actual magic is how every element of TikTok's design and processes connect with each other to create a dataset with which the algorithm trains itself into peak performance. No single step in that loop is beyond the capabilities of any of the many U.S. suitors. All that’s needed is an understanding of how the flywheel works and a commitment to keep every element and process in it functioning."

"The exploit versus explore conundrum is sort of a classic of algorithmic design, usually mentioned in relation to the multi-armed bandit problem."

"I often describe myself as a cultural determinist, more as a way to differentiate myself from people with other dominant worldviews, though I am not a strict adherent."

"My default hypothesis was that what I call the veil of cultural ignorance was too impenetrable a barrier. That companies from non-WEIRD countries (Joseph Henrich shorthand for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) would struggle to ship into WEIRD cultures."

"How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?"

"It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted."

"Outside of DJI in dronesI'd argue one reason DJI had success in America was that drone control interfaces borrow heavily from standard flight control interfaces and are not culturally specific. Thus DJI could lean on its hardware prowess which was formidable., I can’t think of any Chinese app making real inroads in the U.S. prior to Musical.ly."

"Alex and Louis listened to Musical.ly’s early adopters. The app made feedback channels easy to find, and the American teenage girls using the app every day were more than willing to speak up about what they wanted to ease their video creation."

"Still, Musical.ly ran into its invisible asymptote eventually. There are only so many teenage girls in the U.S. When they saturated that market, usage and growth flatlined."

"Ultimately, the ROI on that spend would turn the corner, but only because of the second element of their assault on the US market, the most important piece of technology Bytedance introduced to TikTok: the updated For You Page feed algorithm."

"Bytedance has an absurd proportion of their software engineers focused on their algorithms, more than half at last check."

"An exploit algorithm will give you more of what you like, while an explore algorithm tries to broaden your exposure to more than just what you’ve shown you like."

"That’s where the one-two combination of Bytedance’s enormous marketing spend and the power of TikTok’s algorithm came to the rescue."

"In the two sided entertainment network that is TikTok, the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph."

"For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars."

"Twitter employees speak often about wanting to improve public discourse, but they’d be much better off (and society, too) keeping the Slytherins and Gryffindors apart until they have some real substantive ideas to solve the problem of low trust conversation."

"Within a larger social network, even subcultures need some minimum viable scale, and though Bytedance paid dearly to fill the top of the funnel, its algorithm eventually helped assemble many subcultures surpassing that minimum viable scale."

"Users are encouraged to follow and friend each other to assemble their own graph one connection at a time. The challenge with that is that it’s almost always a really slow build, and you have to provide some reason for people to hang around and build that graph, often encapsulated by the aphorism “come for the tool, stay for the network.”"

"Yes, a new content format might create a new proof of work, as I wrote about in Status as a Service, but just as critical is building the right structures to distribute such content to the right audience to close the social feedback loop."

"but what matters here is realizing that another way to describe an entertainment network is as an interest network."

"It is trying to figure out what hundreds of millions of viewers around the world are interested in."

"The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale."

"Twitter: the one-way follow graph structure is well-suited to interest graph construction, but the problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow."

"Think of Snapchat’s struggles to differentiate between its utility— as a way to communicate among friends—and its entertainment function as a place famous people broadcast content to their fans."

"TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is passive personalization, learning through consumption. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high."

"I like to say that “when you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.”"

"Facebook has struggled with its transition to utility, which would’ve offered it a path towards becoming more of a societal operating system the way WeChat is in China."

"Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default."

"The shame of it is that Twitter had a head start on an interest graph, largely through the work of its users, who gave signal on what they cared about through the graphs they assembled."

"Of all the tech companies that could purchase TikTok, maybe Twitter is the one that least deserves it."

"Another problem for TikTok is that a lot of other use cases are being jammed into what was designed to be a portrait mode lip synch video app."

"Given how many of those companies rely on intuiting user interests to sell them things or to show them ads, a company like TikTok which found a shortcut to assembling such an interest graph should raise all sorts of alarm bells."

"I could cycle through my long list of nits, but ultimately they are all easily solvable with the right product vision and execution. TikTok has figured out the hardest piece, the algorithm."

"My theory on this is that older folks did not grow up with front facing cameras on smartphones and thus experience an uncomfortable body alienation from seeing themselves in photographs akin to how most people hate hearing their own voices the way other people hear them."

"After early emoticons came the age of emoji, and now the GIF has shouldered its way into the conversation. Each successive communications trend brings a more efficient carrier of emotion, per byte, than text, and compression matters in this clipped conversational age."

"I am of that generation for whom selfies are not second nature but instead a second language."

"just as important, and perhaps less well studied, is that unhappy point later in the S-curve, when you hit a shoulder and experience a flattening of growth."

"For me, in strategic planning, the question in building my forecast was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote:"

"a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path."

"Amazon's invisible asymptote"

"Fortunately for Amazon, and perhaps critical to much of its growth over the years, perhaps the single most important asymptote was one we identified very early on."

"You don't even need to rewind to that time to remember what that factor is because I suspect it's the same asymptote governing e-commerce and many other related businesses today."

"Shipping fees."

"It may sound banal, even self-evident, but understanding that was, I'm convinced, so critical to much of how we unlocked growth at Amazon over the years."

"People don't just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree."

"People didn't care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one's time is so detached from the event of spending one's time."

"That brings us to Amazon Prime."

"Solving people's distaste for paying shipping fees became a multi-year effort at Amazon."

"Our next crack at this was Super Saver Shipping: if you placed an order of $25 or more of qualified items, which included mostly products in stock at Amazon, you'd receive free standard shipping."

"To his credit, Jeff decided to forego testing and just go for it."

"The more you sell, the more you lose is not and has never been a sustainable business model"

"Prime is a type of scale moat for Amazon because it isn't easy for other retailers to match from a sheer economic and logistical standpoint."

"Invisible asymptotes are...invisible"

"Some of the limits to their growth are easier to spot than others."

"For others, though, it takes a bit more product insight, and some might say intuition, to see the ceiling before you bump into it."

"One popular early school of thought on Twitter, a common pattern with most social networks, is that more users need to experience what the power users or early adopters are experiencing and they'll turn into active users."

"In the case of Twitter, I think the theory is wrong. Given the current configuration of the product, I don't think any more meaningful user growth is possible, and tweaking the product as it is now won't unlock any more growth."

"Sometimes, the product-market fit with early adopters is only that. The product won't go mainstream because other people don't want or need that product."

"In these cases, the key to unlocking growth is usually customer segmentation, creating different products for different users."

"Mistaking one type of business for the other can be a deadly mistake because the strategies for addressing them are so different."

"A common symptom of this mistake is not seeing the shoulder in the S-curve coming at all, not understanding the nature of your product-market unfit."

"I believe the core experience of Twitter has reached most everyone in the world who likes it."

"For fans, most of whom are infovores, the nature of product-market fit is, as with many of our tech products today, one of addiction."

"Because the chunks of text are short, if one tweet is of no interest, you can quickly scan and scroll to another with little effort."

"The ideal tweet (which I mean one that will receive maximum positive feedback) combines some number of the following attributes:"

"Is pithy. Sounds like a fortune cookie. The character limit encourages this type of compression."

"Is slightly surprising. This can be a contrarian idea or just a cliche encoded in a semi-novel way."

"Rewards some set of readers' priors, injecting a pleasing dose of confirmation bias directly into the bloodstream."

"Blasts someone that some set of people dislike intensely. This is closely related to the previous point."

"Is composed by someone famous, preferably someone a lot of people like but don't consider to be a full-time Tweeter, like Chrissy Teigen or Kanye West."

"Is on a topic that most people think they understand or on which they have an opinion."

"The naturally random sort order of ideas that comes from the structure of Twitter, one which pings the pleasure centers of the current heavy user cohort when they find an interesting tweet, is utterly perplexing to those who don't get the service."

"Falling into the trap of thinking other users will be like you is especially pernicious because the people building the product are usually among that early adopter cohort."

"But if they're working on a product that requires customer segmentation, being in the early adopter cohort means one's instincts will keep guiding you towards the wrong North star and the company will just keep bumping into the invisible asymptote without any idea why."

"it doesn't change the fact that this core Twitter product isn't for all the people who left the club long ago, soon after they walked in and realized it was just a bunch of nerds who'd ordered La Croix bottle service and were sitting around talking about Bitcoin and stoicism and transcendental meditation."

"Twitter the product/app has hit its invisible asymptote. Twitter the protocol still has untapped potential."

"Snapchat is another example of a company that's hit a shoulder in its growth curve."

"Unlike Twitter, though, I suspect its invisible asymptote is less an issue of its feature set and more one of a generational divide."

"The stronger the initial product market fit, the more vociferously your early adopters will protest when you make any changes."

"Like a band that is accused of selling out, there is an inevitable sense that a certain sharpness of flavor, of choice, has seeped out as more and more people join up and as a service loosens up and accommodates more more use cases."

"Another form of diseconomy of scale is behind the flight to Snapchat among the young, as outlined earlier."

"Another diseconomy of scale is the increasing returns to trolling."

"All of this is to say I suspect many of Facebook's more fruitful vectors for rekindling their value for socializing lie in breaking up the surface area of their service. News Feed is so monolithic a surface as to be subject to all the diseconomies of scale of social networking, even as it makes it such an attractive advertising landscape."

"One of the advantages to Instagram is that it came about when Facebook was broadening its acceptable media types from text to photos and video."

"One is that it's harder to troll or be insufferable in photos than it is in text."

"Photos tend to soften the edge of boasts and provocations."

"More people are more skilled at being hurtful in text than photos."

"As with other social networks that grow, Instagram broadened its formats early on to head off several format-based asymptotes. Non-square photos and videos with gradually lengthening time limits have broadened the use cases and, more importantly, removed some level of production friction."

"One might lobby this accusation at all social networks, but the visual nature of Instagram absorbs the signaling function of social media in the most elegant and unified way."

"Rather than pursue long-form narrative, it may be that a more on-brand way to tackle the challenge of lengthening usage of the app is better stringing together of existing content, similar to how Snapchat can aggregate content from one location into a feed of sorts."

"In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion."

"However, I suspect we've moved into an age where the upper bound on vanity fatigue has shifted much higher in a way that an older generation might find unseemly."

"A last possible asymptote relates to my general sense that massive networks like Facebook and Instagram will, at some point, require more structured interactions and content units (for example, a list is a structured content unit, as is a check-in) to continue scaling."

"Doing so always imposes some additional friction on the content creator, but the benefit is breaking one monolithic feed into more distinct units, allowing users the ability to shift gears mentally by seeing and anticipating the structure, much like how a magazine is organized."

"Amazon's next invisible asymptote?"

"On that same topic of shipping, the next natural barrier is shipping speed."

"Amazon has already been working on this problem for over a decade, building out a higher density network of smaller distribution centers over its previous strategy of fewer, gargantuan distribution hubs."

"Another asymptote may be that while Amazon is great at being the site of first resort to fulfill customer demands for products, it is less capable when it comes to generating desire ex nihilo, the kind of persuasion typically associated more with a tech company like Apple or any number of luxury retailers."

"At Amazon we referred to the dominant style of shopping on the service as spear-fishing. People come in, type a search for the thing they want, and 1-click it."

"Amazon's logistical and customer service supremacy is a devastatingly powerful advantage because it directly precedes and follows the act of payment in the shopping value chain, allowing it to capture almost all the financial return of commodity retail."

"How to identify your invisible asymptotes"

"One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers."

"True, it's often difficult for customers to articulate what they want. But what's missed is that they're often much better at pinpointing what they don't want or like."

"We speak often of the economics concept of the demand curve, but in product there is another form of demand curve, and that is the contour of the customers' demands of your product or service."

"the arc of customer demands is long, but it bends ever upwards. It's the job of each company, especially its product team, to continue to be in tune with the topology of this ""demand curve."""

"Even absent external feedback, it's possible to train yourself to spot the limits to your product. One approach I've taken when talking to companies who are trying to achieve initial or new product-market fit is to ask them why every person in the world doesn't use their product or service."

"If you ask yourself that, you'll come up with all sorts of clear answers, and if you keep walking that road you'll find the borders of your TAM taking on greater and greater definition."

"In many ways, a product intuition that is consistently accurate across time is, like Steve Jobs, a unicorn. It's so rare an ability that to lean entirely on it is far more dangerous and high risk than blending it with a whole suite of more accessible strategies."

"The MacBook Pro, with its flawed keyboard and bizarre Touch Bar (I'm still using the old 13"" MacBook Pro with the old keyboard, hoping beyond hope that Apple will come to its senses before it becomes obsolete)."

"Live by intuition, die by it. It's not surprising that Snapchat, another company that lives by the product intuition of one person, stumbled with a recent redesign. That a company's strengths are its weaknesses is simply the result of tight adherence to methodology."

"just because a given person's product intuition might hit on the right moment at the right point in history to create a smash hit, it's rare that a single person's frame will move in lock step with that of the world. How many creatives are relevant for a lifetime?"

"This is one reason sustained competitive advantage is so difficult."

"In the long run, endogenous variance in the quality of product leadership in a company always seems to be in the negative direction. But perhaps we are too focused on management quality and not focused enough on exogenous factors."

"One of my favorite Ben Thompson posts is ""What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong"" in which he built on Christensen's theory of disruption to note that low end disruption can be avoided if you can differentiate on user experience."

"It is difficult and perhaps even impossible to over-serve on that axis. Tesla came into the electric car market with a car that was way more expensive than internal combustion engine cars (this definitely wasn't low-end disruption), had shorter range, and required really slow charging at a time when very few public chargers existed yet."

"However, Tesla got an interesting foothold because on another axis it really delivered. Yes, the range allowed for more commuting without having to charge twice a day, but more importantly, for the wealthy, it was a way to signal one's environmental consciousness in a package that was much, much sexier than the Prius, the previous electric car of choice of celebrities in LA."

"It will be hard for Tesla to continue to rely on that in the long run as the most critical dimension of user experience will likely evolve, but it's a good reminder that ""user experience"" is broad enough to encompass many things, some less measurable than others."

"Amazon's mission to the be the world's most customer-centric company is inherently a long-term strategy because it is a one with an infinite time scale and no asymptote to its slope."

"By discovering their own limitations early, they are also quicker to discover vectors on which they're personally unbounded. Product development will always be a multi-dimensional problem, often frustratingly so, but the value of reducing that dimensionality often costs so little that it should be more widely employed."

"to even create a 6 second video of any interest requires some clever editing to produce a coherent narrative."

"People confuse arbitrary limits on social networks—Twitter's 140 character limit, Instagram's square aspect ratio and limited filters, to take two prominent examples—with their core asset, which is the network itself."

"Sure, the limits can affect the nature of the content shared, but Instagram is above else a pure and easy way to share visual content with other people and get their feedback. That they started allowing videos and now differing aspect ratios doesn't change the core value of the network, which is the graph."

"This is yet another example of users generating useful innovation on top of Twitter when it should be coming from within the company."

"One of the wonderful things about Twitter is that conversations between specific users can be read by other users."

"Meaningful conversation always has to migrate off of Twitter to some other platform, for no reason other than a stubborn allegiance to an arbitrary limit which made sense in the SMS age but now is a defect."

"In fact, if I hit reply to someone's Tweet, do we even need to insert that person's username at the front of the Tweet?"

"Vine is perhaps the only network whose chief content-creation limit seems intrinsically part of the network, and that's because video is one type of content which can't be scanned, in which each additional second of content imposes a linear attention cost of one second on the viewer."

"A Vine video joke has its own distinct pace, it's like a two line riddle, often a 4.5 second setup with a 1.5 second punchline (at least that's the pacing in most Vines in my home feed)."

"This 6-second limit still constrains the size of Vine's userbase, and they may be okay with that. I think that's fine."

"Look at how Snapchat has evolved to see another company realizing that its power is not the initial constraint but the network."

"Snapchat still imposes a 10 second limit on video length. But now you can string many videos together into My Story. This was brilliant on their part; it allows viewers to skip any boring clip with one tap, but it allows the creator to tell longer stories simply by shooting multiple snaps in sequence."

"Those who claim ephemerality is the key to Snapchat's success might panic at such a change, but all it demonstrates is that they realize they now have users for whom ephemerality isn't the main draw of the service."

"They haven't confused an arbitrary early limit for being the root of their success, and they understand the underlying power of their platform."

"Perhaps more than any other social network, Facebook has long recognized that their chief asset is their graph."

"That they recognized this and had the courage of their convictions from such an early stage is not to be discounted. Plenty of companies live in fear of their early adopters, who often react negatively at any change."

"Twitter's chief strength is that it's an elegant public messaging protocol that allows anyone to write something quickly and easily, and for anyone in the world to see that writing."

"Twitter, more than any other company, needs to stop listening to its earliest users and recognize that deep down, its core strength is not the 140 character limit per Tweet, nor is it the strict reverse chronological timeline, or many other things its earliest users treat as gospel."

"If Twitter realizes that, then they'll realize that making that information marketplace much more efficient is the most critical way to realize the full potential of what is a world-changing concept."

"I honestly don't think they'd abandon the service if Twitter raised the 140 character limit, or allowed for following of topics, or any number of other changes suggested here, because I think the power of the network is the network itself, but if the company has any such trepidations, it's not a big deal to leave Twitter Classic in place."

"The company has a huge engineering and product team, it's easy to park that experience in maintenance mode."

"When social networks come into their own, when they realize their power is not in any one feature but in the network itself, they make changes like this that seem heretical. They aren't. Instead, these are fantastic developmental milestones, indicative of a network achieving self-awareness."

"A feature is trivial to copy. A network, on the other hand, is like a series of atoms that have bonded into a molecule. Not so easy to split."

"Software may be eating the world, but I posit that networks are going to eat an outsized share because they capitalize disproportionately on the internet."