Social Capital in Silicon Valley
[Knowing the patterns as well as how you fit into them: 'I would like to join the group and I have something to offer'.]
[The opaqueness of each group members social status makes the ecosystem of social capital antifragile: if the fog clears and makes everyone's real ranking visible, groups fracture into those with less and those with more.]
"Building political viewpoints into the platform" versus "Using the desire for apolitics to further adoption". In this context, not taking a political stance can ultimately serve your political interests because moderation and censorship ultimately social not technical.
Technology is not neutral. The model is more neutral than the implementation. Politics is in the details.
Pinduoduo and Vertically Integrated Social Commerce
[Game-like mechanics such as: a leaderboard ranking who saved the most money; colorful images and discounts hidden throughout the app.]
[Suppliers were fined ten times the value of any counterfeit goods they attempted to sell.]
[Pooling demand allowed suppliers to pass savings onto customers, which fed into the growth engine of 'more savings, more fun'.]
[They started selling products over a livestream as a way to build trust amongst skeptics, and gave discounts for inviting friends to watch.]
[Style is an alternative ideal to beauty that can be achieved at any age and with any physical circumstances. It's a personal aesthetic that you have complete control over.]
[Day thinking affords testing hypotheses and determining if they are true. Night thinking affords open exploration without an objective. Hunting versus fishing.]
[Having a hypothesis can blind you to what doesn't conform to your expectations.]
Taylor Swift, iOS, and the Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution is Vanishing
[Transitioning from scarcity to abundance will likely change distributions from normal to bifurcated.]
Homesteading the Twittersphere
[Status and capital in a gift economy is determined by what you give away.]
[As opposed to an exchange economy where there are transactions that try to match a precise value, the returns on imprecise contributions can far outweigh their 'real' value.]
Q&A with Sönke Ahrens on How to Take Smart Notes
[Think of the notes as a dialogue partner where they answer each other as opposed to as a collection that must be sorted and organized.]
[Painters design a course for the eye to move through using lines that are implied in the visual content.]
[Distinctions between foreground and background can go beyond spatial position and include things like color, level of detail, whitespace.]
[Think Vitamin uses visual prominence to create a hierarchy for your eye to move through, starting with the title/logo, followed by navigation, then the most recent post, followed by other posts.]
[Bleeding off the edge makes something appear larger and thus more in the foreground.]
[The most dominant element is like a magnet but also like an anchor that the eye repeatedly returns to while exploring other parts of the composition.]
[Geometric relationships between canvas and content help keep the viewers eye on the composition.]
[It took Gutenberg 16 years to perfect the technology for creating printed books.]
[When selecting a typeface, consider its origin and intentions as well as how the mediums influenced its forms.]
Let's talk about the type of political party we want....
[Radicals are always in the fight because progress is infinite and the mainstreaming of their idea will direct them to the next injustice.]
How To Hack The Epistemic Crisis, with Audrey Tang
[Create memes that outpace disinformation.]
[Humor over rumor exploits the fact that you cannot feel anger and outrage at the same time as fun.]
[Takedowns promote outrage. Attributing misinformation changes the framing so that people to continue to share but with different intent.]
Learn to enjoy and expect being surprised.
Collective intelligence with Alexandra Elbakyan
[Ancient religions had gods of information (such as Hermes, Thoth, of Nabu) and in the Bible, the Word of God is a proxy for the information which creates the world.
Half-assing it with everything you've got
[To save your energy by directing perfectionism not at unachievable or insignificant things but at the process, which you can control and apply to other things even if the current project fails.]
[Working hard to be lazy is about succeeding without wasting motion.]
[A creative project that designs a system probably needs to start as a cathedral to coordinate everything, and eventually transition to a bazaar when the foundations are secure so that the details can be perfected.]
[One way for someone to grade themselves is to provide three ways they succeeded and three ways they failed.]
[A name that means something is a commitment to a specific explanation, whereas a meaningless name commits to nothing.]
[Procrastinate and come back when it's easy.]
[Teaching it is more important than fixing it, which is more important than making it useful.]
[It's designed to achieve decentralization, not to be born with it.]
[A young network requires central governance so that it acts as a unit.]
The Poisoned Chalice of Hashtag Activism
[Twitter can be considered the opposite of a public square because it is the platform of a private company with the power to evict, censor, obscure as they see fit.]
A desperate activist tweets. An aspiring activist uses Facebook. A fledgling organizer uses email. An established organizer has phone numbers. A successful organizer is offered addresses.
Platform Decay, Decentralized Marketplaces, and Urbit
[Ad-supported web dominates because banks failed to make micropayments and other 'real money' infrastructure accessible.]
[As centralized marketplaces secure most of the vendor marketshare, the long-tail loses prominence to paid 'premium' placement because the deal has a greater impact on earnings - the vendors become competition.]
[Ad sales incentivize the 'sharing' or 'renting' economy because people are less likely to return after buying to own.]
[When search results make it difficult to buy a hammer, it causes the culture of 'building things' to suffer.]
[The test of any tool is its ability to shape the world.]
[Calm commerce follows naturally from calm computing.]
