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Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored in the design space.

For example, today’s social networks are essentially governed by a single CEO.

But that CEO is a background figure. They aren’t leading the users to do anything. What if they did?
One example: could @elonmusk’s 30M followers somehow get us to Mars faster?

Tools for directed, collaborative work by really large groups on the internet are still in their infancy.
Some technologies for internet collaboration:

- operational transformation
- microtasks / MTurk / Scale AI
- conflict-free replicated data types
- blockchains and crypto
- the polymath project
- social networks & group messaging
- Wikipedia

See also:
Ways for groups to cooperate on the internet:

- money (crowdfunding)
- knowledge (crowdsourcing)
- labor (microtasks)
- attention (signal boosting)
- code (pull requests)
- security (proof-of-work)

That’s Kickstarter, Wikipedia, MTurk, Twitter, GitHub, Bitcoin respectively.
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Crypto teaches people how prices actually work.

If you buy one gallon of milk, price is a constant.

But if you want to buy 1000 gallons, you first empty out the cheapest store A at price X. Then store B is emptied out at price (X+dx). Prices rise as you buy more.

Same for BTC.
Crypto exchanges teach people:

1) precisely how supply or demand shocks change prices by adding new [price, quantity] pairs
2) how markets truly are emergent phenomena, outside the control of any one actor
3) how many business concepts change once you treat prices as variables
Another analogy: order books and the Overton Window.

With enough money, you can move the current price to a new price.

With enough votes, you can move the current policy to a new policy.

In both cases, this amount can be quantified.
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Thesis: large tech companies are private property

Antithesis: any entity with billions of users and not much competition becomes quasi-public, needs antitrust

Synthesis: adversarial process repels future founders. Instead, could a state pay market price to acquire the company?
The main issue with this line of thinking is that even if an antitrust case costs the state billions, buying Google would be a trillion dollars.

That’s larger than the 2008 bailout and ~30% of USG’s 2018 revenue.

Veiled force is still cheaper for the state than money.
China does do something like this, though. Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent are members of the Communist Party.

Their companies are both honored at official party galas (carrot) and are quasi-nationalized in many ways (stick).
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Theory: if you actually wanted to collectively advance a goal, the UX wouldn’t look like Twitter.

You’d define a numerical goal and judge all actions of the team against that goal.

It’s the difference between a team’s score vs individual player stats.
Some examples of collective goals:

- Kickstarter fundraising meter
- Capture the flag in video games
- Number of registered voters
- Percentage of code covered by tests

Stock prices aren’t great because each individual can’t deterministically affect the price.
If you could get the right numerical goal, with a hard-to-fake proof of work and the appropriate bounties — you could incentivize thousands of people to work towards a common goal.

Can we build a digital bridge overnight? Or the equivalent?
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Related threads

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D’Arcy Coolican
@DCoolican
1/ If I were starting another company today I’d probably build something around social networks.

I think we’re at an inflection point with the legacy platforms, but still lots of open space for upstarts to figure out what’s next.

Rationale for why and thoughts on how 👇
2/ ...but first, please note that none of the following should be taken as investment advice. see a16z.com/disclosures for more info. OK, back to the thread...
3/ Social connection is a core human need. It’s universal and not going anywhere. Essential needs are the best use cases to be building into. This is the #1 reason why this space is so full of opportunity.
Read 16 tweets
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Hasu
@hasufl
Money (not finance) is the most important field in the world today and will be for at least 20 years.

Why? 99% of history is written in 1% of the time. We are in the early phases of another 1% where the medium-term future will be written (what Neil Howe calls "The 4th Turning".)
Money is ripe for a paradigm shift, but the direction of that shift is still undecided. There are currently forces pulling into several directions, with the extreme ends being hyper-control of money (MMT) and removal of all control of money (Bitcoin.)
While in most of history local governments have issued money, many private producers will be able to compete in the future. Networks like Bitcoin are constructed from the ground up to resist, while private firms like Facebook are effectively sovereign to nation-states.
Read 14 tweets
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Nathaniel Whittemore
@nlw
Long Reads Sunday 49.

We’ve got funding DAOs. We’ve got large scale decentralized social networks with expensive URLs. We’ve got regulatory battles.

And, because it’s heating back up, we’ve got this frickin guy 👇

Strap in kids, it’s long reads time!
2/ It’s been a min since we had a big crypto-powered product launch to discuss, so let’s start w/ Voice - a new social media platform build on EOS promising to offer control of data, no bots, and rewards for content creation. @bradydale with the overview
3/ The announcement was met with some…skepticism, exemplified by @Shaughnessy119, who brought up the question of comparative centralization.
Read 36 tweets
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dr. wikipedia eve louise calrissian-brown the 9th
@eveewing
I heard "opportunity hoarding" poorly defined and discussed on NPR's @hereandnow today and it bummed me out. and it was mislabeled as a psychological concept; it's a sociological one. [same error repeated here in the text for the show] wbur.org/hereandnow/201…
opportunity hoarding was referred to as "rare" (it's not) and the example that was given was of parents in elite schools trying to sabotage other kids by telling counselors terrible things about them to try to keep them out of colleges. (which, !??!!?!)
The term "opportunity hoarding" was coined 20 years ago by Charles Tilly in his book Durable Inequality. It's an elegant term, because it pretty much is self-explanatory: it describes when one social group disproportionately accumulates and guards access to opportunity.
Read 15 tweets
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Wendi Muse
@MuseWendi
ok, SO the haddad roda viva interview
a little background first: roda viva is a brazilian roundtable interview program that's been around for many years. they assemble a panel of interviewers and one guest, per episode. they are well-known for interviewing political figures+
before the 1st round of voting,& even before the VP choices were announced, they interviewed all the presidential candidates - save Lula, who was imprisoned by then. Bolsonaro was the last candidate to agree to an interview (after lots of roasting by the public & his opponents)+
at the time of these earlier interviews, lula was still the main presidential candidate for PT. haddad had not yet been designated as VP (which they did for a little bit on a provisional basis), not as the main presidential candidate (which is the case now)+
Read 112 tweets

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