The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Wei: Facebook's Friending Push Caused Long-Term News Feed Context Collapse
“If you think about Facebook encouraging people to follow everyone under the sun, That had huge downstream consequences for them in the, you know, types of context collapse that they're still struggling to deal with newsfeed.”
Wei: Social Graph Design Is an Irreversible Decision for Startups
“And the problem for social startups is that if you have people build a very particular social graph, and you build your feed off of it, and you build notifications off of that graph, most people tend to not want to unfollow people down the road, so this is kin…”
Eugene Wei: Primary mechanism of network growth is status game creation
“Status as a service posits, there are two things that explain a lot of this. One is that humans are just hardwired to seek status, or as you would call it, status, which sounds more classy. The second is that humans... Will tend to gravitate towards the most e…”
Eugene Wei: Twitter tweetstorms are the optimal status tactic for VCs
“Now I feel like the new meta for investors is to build a personal brand on Twitter. And the way you do that is the tweet storms. That's a classic example of a optimal status seeking tactic within Twitter that has been adopted by the universe of players.”
Wei: Social capital is as predictable as financial capital
“I find social capital very compelling to study because I don't think we study social capital with as much rigor as maybe financial capital, but in many ways, it's just as predictable a medium.”
Eugene Wei: Amazon adopted six-page memos to curb charismatic PowerPoint presenters
“The reason Amazon moved to the six-page memo process was in part because they felt like PowerPoint and the prevalence of PowerPoint in meetings gave too much power to charismatic speakers.”
Wei: Disrupt incumbents by directly inverting their primary core strength
“The way that you want to attack an incumbent is typically by going after their biggest strength and doing something that's the reverse of it because they derive most of their power and revenue from their biggest strength. It's also the thing that they're most …”
Eugene Wei: Social media feeds scaled status games to unprecedented levels
“The feed and these algorithms and social media as a concept, essentially, the one thing they have done is they've elevated the status game to just a scale we've never had in human history.”
Eugene Wei: Decision-making mediums dictate outcomes and must match decision type
“I've come to think that the process or medium you choose to make a decision actually can affect what decision you make, and so it's really important, in my opinion, to choose the right process and medium for the decision. And different processes lead to differ…”
Wei: Large keynotes are the best method for cultural product embedding
“These huge keynotes are probably the best way to embed our products in the culture, and we need to spend a lot of time crafting our keynotes to be pitch perfect.”
Wei: All Western Social Networks Eventually Adopt Algorithmic Feeds
“And so all of Western social media eventually puts an algorithm over the feet to try to correct for errors. They're trying to restore high signal to noise.”
Eugene Wei: The Feed Is Social Media's Most Consequential Architectural Choice
“The idea of the feed is probably the single most consequential architectural decision that we have in social media.”
Eugene Wei: Network growth generalizes to 'come for X, stay for network'
“So you know that saying, come for the Tool, stay for the network. I think Chris Dixon formulated it about network products, including social networks. I tend to think that there's a generalizable form of that, which doesn't have to be tool. It's just come for …”
Eugene Wei: Video games lead all media formats in building the metaverse
“They're probably the furthest along in building out what we think of as like something that feels like a metaverse, you know, people interacting simultaneously in shared spaces.”
Wei: Intuition Is Data-Driven Knowledge Accumulated Over Time
“I think that in fact, our intuitions are informed by massive streams of data accumulated over many years of living in the world. We just don't have a way to describe what that is.”
Wei: Bezos encoded strategic messages to make them stick with employees
“Jeff realized, hey, I actually have to encode my messages and deliver them in a way which makes them memorable, and so I saw him evolve his way of communicating to the company in order to sort of really, like, harden his messages, to make them almost viral, to…”
Wei: An Amazon recruiter hired him after saving his unqualified cover letter
“I wrote a super long cover letter. This is the era before companies had computers just screening resumes, and I wrote this really long, impassioned cover letter, and a recruiter read it and said, well, he's obviously not qualified for this job, but this cover …”