Welcome to the startupy newsletter, a laid back column about very serious ideas. Every week, we curate the hottest links from our universe and share them with you here.
Also, wait. What’s startupy? Startupy is where curious humans curate and interconnect the best of the Internet. We're on a mission to build a more human and nourishing Internet - we're currently in private beta.
If you're feeling the vibe, consider joining the membership to get unrestricted access to our collective intelligence engine and community.
MOOD
HOT LINKS IN OUR UNIVERSE
103 bits of advice I wish I had known by Kevin Kelly
It’s possible that a not-so smart person, who can communicate well, can do much better than a super smart person who can’t communicate well. That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.
🕺 Curated in Inspiration, Personal Development, Habits, Communication
Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors by Michael Mauboussin, Dan Callahan & Darius Majd
Most people prefer to maintain consistent beliefs over time, even when the facts reveal their beliefs to be wrong. But great investors do two things that most of us do not. They seek information or views that are different than their own and they update their beliefs when the evidence suggests they should. Neither task is easy.
🕺 Curated in Investing Wisdom
The Tinderization of the Internet by Sean Monahan
People want to use social media to meet other people—not to win the social analytics game. No one cares how many people you matched with on Tinder. No one cares how many followers you have on Twitter. Did you find love? Did you find sex? Did you find a friend? These are the questions that matter.
🕺 Curated in Future of Social Networks, Tech and Society
Shop Class as Soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work by Matthew Crawford
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on…. but the current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: “knowing that,” as opposed to “knowing how."
💃 Curated in The DIY Consumer, Happiness, Jobs of the Future & Knowledge Work
Intelligence killed genius by Alexey Guzey
Where did all geniuses go? They were killed by the the concept of intelligence. The first requirement to do genius-level work is to not be afraid to do things only geniuses can do. The concept of intelligence kills this feeling. However smart you are, there is someone who is smarter than you. And if there’s someone smarter than you are, it doesn’t make sense to work on the hardest possible problems and to try to change the world.
🕺 Curated in Psychology, Career Management and Coaching & Ambition
POPULAR RABBIT HOLES
9 connections → 2 content, 3 companies, 4 related topics
143 connections → 108 content mentions, 4 topics
80 connections → 40 content, 31 companies, 9 related topics
54 connections → 41 content, 7 companies, 6 related topic
19 connections → 6 content, 11 companies, 2 related topic
Top Author → Future of Social Networks, Future of Media & Writing
✨ CURATOR SPOTLIGHT
Writer and software developer, going down the community design 🐇 🕳️
Why is community design interesting?
We fail to realize the impact community design has on our interactions online. It shapes how we create and consume information, and in doing so, it shapes how we think and how we interact with other people.
Many communities take design for granted. They might have processes for interacting with members, channels for information, and types of information they like to see, but in many areas, design isn’t thought about at all. The structure of the platforms, incentives, size, information flow, and more impact what we see and what we do. Not enough people think about this for the communities they are a part of.
We should care about the design of our communities and work to make it better. There is lots to learn to design the best possible internet communities and help members flourish in them.
A podcast worth listening to?
Designing Digital Economies by Gabriel Leydon
In mobile gaming, every incentive is optimized. Gabriel Leydon is the co-founder and former CEO of Machine Zone, one of the biggest and most important mobile gaming companies. He understands how to create incentives to get people to spend more, get their friends to join, and stay playing the game. His Invest Like The Best podcast provides insights into this communities can learn to design better incentives of their own.
Things worth reading and watching?
The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes by Christopher Allen
The internet removes friction and restrictions. That has allowed communities to grow well beyond what they could in the real world. Dunbar’s number (the limit on social relations we can maintain) has been shattered. Communities need to be aware of this fact and design ways to deal with its consequences.
“Context is that which is scarce” by Tyler Cowen
An assumption many communities have is that everyone knows everything all the time. This isn’t true. Context is scarce. It is tough to build and constantly must be rebuilt. Many problems within a community are caused by a context failure. If communities aren’t designing more ways to build context, they will face more of these failures.
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility by Venkatesh Rao
The world is never as neat as we want it to be. We want everything to have its place, but it just doesn’t work like that. Powerful people (in a community’s case managers and moderators) force people, ideas, and behaviours into understandable units. They make them legible. The problem with making things legible is that a lot of information is lost in the process. When designing community spaces, we should be aware of what’s illegible and what was lost by making things legible. Sometimes, chaos is a good solution.
Projects worth following?
Foster has designed their community to incentivize writing and providing feedback. Most of my interactions with the community come through the comments from other members on my writing, which incentivizes me to write more. They’ve designed several tools to help these interactions. They are an excellent example of a community that has been designed towards a goal well.
A popular community platform at the moment is Discord. Discord, in many ways, is rigid in its structure. A way to implement many of the designs and incentives detailed above is through bots. Top.gg is the largest source of bots for Discord. If you don’t find something that fits your needs, it will at least inspire you.
Thank you so much for being here, and for letting us be a part of your week! If you liked this installment, please tap the little heart at the top of this email.
And if you regularly enjoy these dispatches and would like to support our work, consider joining the startupy membership