Things I'm thinking about
On threads, good days vs good lives, and a curated list of 250+ freelancers and agencies
Happy Sunday. This week’s issue is coming a days late. My son got knocked out by the flu, and between that, the grand shuffle of summer childcare, and lots of other work stuff, it’s a miracle I managed to think straight and get this out. Enjoy!
Things I’m thinking about:
I’m thinking about Threads - Meta’s recently launched Twitter clone:
Meta initially set a goal of attracting 500k monthly active users for Horizon Worlds in 2023 (Horizon Worlds is the VR game they developed as part of their Reality Labs division, which they’ve spent over $30B on). They recently revised that figure to 200,000. Meanwhile, Threads has nearly 100m signups in less than a week since it launched, and Threads is a product they started working on in January. The biggest takeaway is that followers, not money, are the currency of the Internet. The web 3 promise/theory that we can overcome the cold start problem by rewarding early adopters of new networks with tokens hasn’t worked in practice. Early adopters want status or utility. And they want convenience. This explains why none of the other Twitter clones have taken off — you have to build status from scratch, which takes time and work, and there’s no utility without the network. Porting the Instagram graph was a very smart way to overcome the cold start problem — it gave Threads a day one feeling of vitality, with almost no effort.
I’m not surprised Meta got a lot of people to try Threads — the timing was brilliant and there is literally zero friction to doing so. Getting people to stay will be harder.
Despite the interface being almost identical, Threads feels very different from Twitter. At least for me, there is almost zero overlap between the people I follow for their brain and the people I follow for their looks. There’s also very little overlap between the people that follow me for my thoughts and the people that follow me for my kids and vacation photos. All of this makes my default Threads newsfeed mostly irrelevant. Social networks aren’t just about the interface or the algorithm, they’re about the vibe, the people and the nature of the connections between them.
The small interface details are very revealing. For example, Threads hides how many accounts someone follows, but exposes the number of followers they have. This is the right move if you’re optimizing for the status of content creators and influencers. By hiding the ratio of followers/following from plain sight, they are more likely to follow other accounts, while still flaunting their number of followers.
I find the naïveté of people describing Threads as a friendly place a little puzzling. I’m pretty confident that’s just because of its size and novelty. There’s no easy way to run a social media site. Someone, somewhere will have to decide how to moderate content, and that will always be controversial.
I think Zuckerberg will be able to build another money making machine with Threads. But alas, this is not the feel good internet I was looking for. More endless scrolling, chipping away at my capacity for concentration. More people incentivized to churn out loads of content to please an algorithm. More user-friendly sameness. More pressure to share and engage. I’ll still be here, biting at the clickbait, but it won’t taste good. Which is the what’s interesting about Meta’s business: we continue to complain while it continues to print cash.
One of the misconceptions about AI is that it lessens the need for skill and expertise. I think the opposite is true: the more I use ChatGPT, the more I realize how valuable expertise is. Chatbots excel with specific prompts. If you ask it to challenge your brand positioning strategy, you'll get a generic answer. But if you ask it to challenge it from the perspective of Marty Cagan or April Dunford you’ll get a good answer. AI makes taste and good ideas even more important.
I’m thinking about this clip from Bill Hader on getting feedback on a creative project, prototype or draft. The gist: people will be right about what’s wrong, but wrong about how to fix it.
I’m thinking about how AI will change personal knowledge management. Is it the end of organizing? When you can query anything in natural language, why bother tagging things? I built a semantic search engine for all the good stuff I’ve read + highlighted, so I’ve experienced first hand the value of being able to query my knowledge base semantically. And it does render tagging mostly useless. But tagging is different from organizing. Organizing things in a way that is personal isn’t just a way to find things, it’s a way of making sense of things, of putting the right things near each other. I was reminded of why this is important when I came across this amazing little nugget:
One of the most widely referenced pieces of writing in my tech circle is this - a fabulous rant by the founder of Slack on how important it is to position Slack not as group chat software, but as organizational transformation. Sell the benefit, not the product. This is very common advice on product positioning, and it makes sense. But if you take that feedback too far, you end up with delusionally vague, jargon-packed statements, scrolling through a website for minutes without knowing what the hell it does or how it works. Benefit statements don’t communicate anything about the execution of the product – it’s very easy to say “maximize data”, “transform your cloud”, or “remember everything” when the product is absolute garbage. The more sophisticated the audience, the more the details matter. A professional photographer won’t be convinced with “take better pictures”. The right balance between product and benefit will depend on the context of the market and the audience.
I don’t remember where I screenshotted this, but it’s an interesting provocation:
An exchange with Vinod Khosla, where I contest the idea that your favorite artist will be a personal algorithm. IMO, this view completely misses the point on what it means to be human. Music is a promise that you aren’t listening alone. And it’s also a promise that you are listening to somebody else.
Annie Dillard, on the difference between good days and good lives is soo good.
“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.”
When I think of good days, I think of pasta and wine in Tuscany with good friends. I don’t think of difficult moments with my kids, pushing through a creative rut, being on the nth recruiting call because you have a nagging sense you haven’t landed on the right candidate. But a good life? A good life is a life of commitment.
Plus, a list of 250+ freelancers and agencies I’ve lovingly curated over the years —for a smaller group of paying subscribers.
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