Highlights §
- How lovely. This process will inevitably continue until the site becomes as terrible as all the big social media sites, transforming into places of witch hunts, derision, barely formulated thoughts, snuff videos, clickbait, and occupied with all your favorite anime avatars threatening to kill you. For a new social media website, going from “omg it’s so great we’re inviting another 5,000 people!” to “we will beat you with hammers” takes about two weeks. (View Highlight)
- To be sure, I like Substack’s Notes a lot more than Twitter right now. But I’m pretty sure that’s just because of its size. An analogy to cryptocurrency is helpful here: Bitcoin is too slow and decentralized to confirm transactions fast, and everyone complains about it, and so people create new alternative currencies with supposedly superior architectures. At first things go great, because no one is using the new blockchain and transactions confirm fast. But then, eventually, the new chain starts getting actually used, and transactions begin to slow to a crawl, and everyone realizes that they can’t outrun the problem that decentralized currencies are inevitably very slow, and that Bitcoin might be close to as good as it gets anyways. This is because there is an irreducible flaw—that decentralization is slow—that no design can fully get around. You’re limited by your materials. (View Highlight)
- rid of what I like to call the “semantic nadir,” which is what you’ll inevitably experience if your tweet ever goes viral, wherein eventually someone will take your tweet in literally the worst possible way (there’s some classic examples of this, as generally if you say “I love cheesecake” it won’t be long before someone reaches to “Oh, so you hate regular cake”—that’s the semantic nadir (View Highlight)