An interview with Eugene Wei about Elon Musk’s critical mistake with Twitter, the questionable prospects for Threads, and what Taylor Swift and other communal experiences say about the commoditization wrought by technology.
Threads and the Social/Communications Map
Understanding Threads and its threat to Twitter means understanding the current landscape of social media.
Facebook Political Problems
Facebook’s political problems stem directly from its size and drive for growth; they are societal issues, not antitrust ones.
Tech Epochs and the App Store Trap
Centralized control is useful at the beginning of an economy, but limits innovation in the long run. That is as true for China as it is for the App Store.
Clubhouse’s Inevitability
Clubhouse will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video.
Social Networking 2.0
Facebook and Twitter represent the v1 of Social Networking; it’s a bad copy of the analog world, whereas v2 is something unique to digital, and a lot more promising.
Tech Goes to Washington
Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified before a Senate committee: it provided evidence of how tech prefers power over decentralization, even if it means regulation
Trustworthy Networking
The problems Facebook are facing today are the result of running into the future without considering unintended consequences, much like Microsoft and the Internet. There are clear solutions for the ad problem, but the filter bubble issue is much more fraught.
The Super-Aggregators and the Russians
Facebook is in trouble — again — for Russian ads about the election; figuring out how to deal with them requires first understanding that Facebook, like Google, is a Super-Aggregator. It faces zero transaction costs in all parts of its business.
Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly
Facebook gave one of the worst keynotes in a long time: there was no vision, just the adoption of Snap’s. It’s the inevitable outcome of a monopoly.