The Ledger
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why aren't all 41 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
Web3 Does Not Exist and Cannot Support Instagram Today
“And in fact, web three doesn't exist yet. And it would not be possible to build Instagram on a blockchain today.”
Evans: Instagram is probably Meta's most valuable asset
“And yet you look back five and 10 years later, Instagram is probably the single most valuable part of Facebook. It's probably more valuable than the blue app or certainly more valuable than WhatsApp.”
Evans: Data portability mandates inherently conflict with user privacy regulations
“As a conflict between interoperability and privacy, because if you say, you know, you can say, make it easy to explain. You know, the competition regulator says, make it easy to export data, and the privacy regulator says, make it hard to export data, because …”
Evans: Building social competitors requires network data, defeating individual data portability
“If you wanted to make an Instagram competitor, I would like to see everything that you've posted and everything that you'd like, and I also want to see everyone you follow and everything they like, because that's what Instagram uses to give me recommendations.…”
Evans: Spinning off Instagram or YouTube will not make competing easier
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube.…”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram due to graph mechanics
“I would actually argue that Instagram is about people you choose to follow, and mostly people you know, whereas TikTok is about people you don't know. It's a completely different graph, and it's a recommendation-based graph, not a people you've met-based graph…”
Evans: Breaking up Instagram or YouTube would not reduce harmful content
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition proble…”
Evans: Commodity DTC sellers cannot profit because Instagram ad spend replaces rent
“Instead of spending all of your money on rent, you spend all your money on Instagram, unless you have some other way of getting, unless you have some other way of getting to people. But if you're just selling a commodity product, you know, in a commodity Chann…”
Evans: Meta AI in Instagram search failed due to mismatched user intent
“Meta tried to put their app as like a blue circle, put the, but the AI thing is a blue circle inside all their apps and it just didn't work. No one knew what it was. And it was like, they're floating in the search window, but that's not why you use search and …”
Evans: Engagement signal graphs matter more than raw content
“If you're trying to build a competitor to Instagram, I wouldn't want Tony Karen Brown's posts. What I want is who's liked Tony Karen's posts, Tony's posts, and what else did they like? And who liked their posts, and who else liked that? There's like these sort…”
Evans: TikTok fundamentally competes with YouTube, not Instagram or Facebook.
“I think there's a sort of it's almost like an incorrect analysis, which was, I'm trying to think of the right word, which is like, we kind of went down the line of thinking that TikTok competed with Instagram and Facebook, as opposed to thinking that it compet…”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram
“Is TikTok competing with YouTube or Instagram? And it still puzzles me, like everyone always puts it on the chart with Instagram, and I'm like, no, no, no, I think this is YouTube.”
Evans: Internet interoperability exists only at low infrastructure layers, not applications
“And the thing about, talking about this with the internet, like the internet is completely interoperable, At the lower levels of the stack with IP and HTTP and SSL and so on. But once you're in the browser, like if you're building Amazon, you don't need to wor…”
Evans: Metaverse interoperability is like connecting Tinder to LinkedIn
“I mean, it's like, but it's like saying you can connect your Tinder with your LinkedIn, with your Instagram. They're not the same thing.”
Retail, advertising, and shipping have collapsed into one capital allocation decision
“In the sense that sort of they become the same, they become aspects of the same problem where they used to be separate parts of the company. So, I mean, the way I always phrase this is that in the past, you couldn't say, should we open stores in that state or …”
Evans: Most platform data is relational graph data, not individual property
“Most of what Instagram knows about you isn't your data. It's who liked you and what else they liked and who liked those people and what else are the things those posted and which of your pictures they saw and didn't like or didn't press like on and what other …”
Evans: Breaking up Big Tech does not make competition easier
“If Instagram's a separate company, that doesn't make it easier to build an Instagram competitor. If YouTube's a separate company, it's not easier to build a search engine or build a competing video sharing site.”
Evans: Substack will support thousands of writers, not millions like Instagram
“I also feel like how many people can write that much once a week? How big is that going to be? I feel like that's thousands of writers, not millions of writers, whereas Instagram is millions, can be millions of creators.”
Evans: Artisanal products cannot sell effectively on Amazon
“If you're like a Japanese ceramic, selling Japanese ceramics, you're on Instagram, or you're on Shopify, but you can't sell that on Amazon. You would never sell that on Amazon. It doesn't work. You can't communicate, or, you know, it doesn't work in any way.”
Evans: Facebook would engage in the same practices without Instagram or WhatsApp
“Supposing WhatsApp didn't happen, supposing Instagram hadn't happened, supposing they'd happened and failed, supposing they'd happened, gotten bought by Fox, rolled into MySpace and killed. And so Facebook was the only thing. And Facebook would be doing all th…”
Evans: FTC knew Instagram was a competitive threat when approving acquisition
“The FTC basically knew everything that they knew, know, that they know now. They knew that these were competitive. They knew that Facebook must see them as competitive threats. Nothing's actually changed, except that the FTC has just changed their mind. And I …”
Evans: Image-sharing networks are fundamentally easier to build than conversation apps
“Images are in this seem, you know, like a much easier thing to do than conversation. Like I'm going to share some cool pictures. That's a lot easier than getting discussion and insight and stuff going.”
Visual Instagram social graphs do not map well to text-based platforms
“And so whether it's that or whether you were following all of your friends, that doesn't necessarily matter very well. To the kind of text that you might want to see, because it, you know, when you follow people in a text-based format, you might want to get pe…”
Evans: The tech industry largely ignores TikTok compared to Twitter or YouTube.
“Everyone uses YouTube, and everyone sort of knows that TikTok is this big thing, but the sort of tech conversation in general doesn't talk about what's happening on TikTok. I don't think in the way that it talks about Instagram or YouTube or Twitter. And that'…”
Cowan-Brown: Users passively consume long TikTok sessions rather than quickly checking for updates.
“I don't, Check TikTok, I consume it, and I watch it. I don't check TikTok the way you would check Instagram or Twitter, where you open up the app, you have a look, you check if anything's changed, and then you leave. Whereas I think what's happening on TikTok …”
Evans: UX and platform shifts create discontinuities that produce breakout companies
“Just shifting the UX and the platform is often kind of a discontinuity that creates new companies. And so you have that when you go to cloud, you get Salesforce. When you go to mobile, you get not just Instagram, but also Snapchat, and then TikTok”
Evans: UK regulator's initial assessment of Instagram was very myopic
“Sort of famously the UK regulator looked at Instagram and said, well, they don't have ads, so that's not part of Facebook's Market, market, which was clearly like a very, very myopic way of thinking about how the market worked.”
Evans: Retail budgets for rent, marketing, and shipping have merged into one
“In the past as a retailer or brand, you've had all these different budgets. So there was rent and there was shipping and there was advertising and marketing and pricing and returns and so on. And now these are all one budget. Do I put, do we put the money into…”
Evans: TikTok, Shein, and Instagram users act as a giant Mechanical Turk
“And what you have in TikTok and what you have in Shein is you've got enough people looking at it that you've actually got that feedback loop. So basically the Shein user base or the TikTok user base is almost like a giant mechanical turk. Telling the system wh…”
Evans: YouTube and Instagram formats are easier to monetize than Twitter
“The challenge, of course, is YouTube and Instagram have forms of media that are much easier to monetize, and much easier to think, how would you create something rich and engaging that you could monetize, whether it's e-commerce, or advertising, or something e…”
Evans: Instagram Combines Friend and Interest Graphs, Unlike Snapchat
“Instagram, Snap is basically your friends, whereas Instagram is sort of a mix of your friends and your interest graph, so celebrities, designers, architects, whatever it is you're interested in.”
Evans: Twitter and Instagram Subsumed Traditional Blogging
“Twitter sort of, you know, blog posts, I think a lot of blogging kind of got subsumed by Instagram and Twitter.”
Evans: Instagram and Twitter prevent audience portability by owning the network
“Obviously if I moved from Instagram to some new tool, none of the people who followed me in Instagram will see me in this new place. And that's part of that is that the Instagram app or, you know, the Twitter app or whatever is based on creation and consumptio…”
Evans: Algorithmic feeds like Instagram function as user-curated niche magazines
“It's a curated, but it's a magazine. It's like saying, I bought World of Interiors, and there was nothing about Ukraine in it. Well, no, there wasn't. It's World of Interiors. I mean, there's probably. There's probably something in the editorial, but that's wh…”
Evans: Social Data Portability Fails Because Relational Network Effects Cannot Be Exported
“I could export my data, but most of my data is who's liked my pictures and who else they liked and who else follows them and who follows them. And A, I don't own this, but more to the point, if I am Like, go to a new network. Like, there's nothing in that new …”
Evans: Shein only exists because of TikTok and Instagram
“It's also, of course, Shein only exists because TikTok and Instagram came first.”
Evans: Instagram unbundled glossy magazines more than any other platform
“Instagram has unbundled glossy magazines. More than anything else, it's Instagram that undermined the business model of glossy magazines, and it launched at the same time as the iPad, and they pulled all the money into iPad editions, and that was not, that was…”
Evans: Stories revolutionized the content unit, unlike TikTok's wrapper model
“Whereas a story is like a new type of content that you can create that could then be presented inside Snapchat, or then of course copied and presented inside Instagram. And then of course inside every fucking thing. So I think LinkedIn does have stories. There…”
Evans: Social media platforms killed mainstream blogging in the early 2010s
“I feel like Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter between them sort of killed mainstream blogging.
In the 2000 and the early teens.”
Evans: Big internet platforms operate as Mechanical Turks powered by human biases
“You should think of any big internet platform as basically a Mechanical Turk. So PageRank is a Mechanical Turk. Because PageRank, the whole point of PageRank is instead of trying to work out what that webpage is, Probably should have said this earlier. Instead…”