In the inaugural* episode of Closing the Loop. Kevin interrogates Eugene about why he felt TikTok was important enough to inflict three (THREE) essays on us about it Closing the Loop is a video series by Eugene Wei and Kevin Kwok. It's a testament to the lengths people will go to avoid finishing writing their blog posts *doesn't inaugural make this sound very legitimate and like there will be many more Follow us on Twitter. Though I'm honestly very confused how you found this if *not* from already following us on twitter. https://twitter.com/eugenewei/ https://twitter.com/kevinakwok/ Follow Closing the Loop: This is it. You're already here. Just take a look a look around. We've been too lazy to make accounts on anything else. So this is all you got. Referenced in the video: Eugene's posts on TikTok https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/2/15/american-idle https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algorithm https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat Posts from before Eugene's blog was a TikTok fan page. Simp. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes Newsletter of funny TikTok's. Yo dawg I heard you l liked TikToks so I put some TikToks in your email so you can TikTok while you respond-to-professional-inquiries https://list-manage.us19.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=9cd4750b22daeff3875dca348&id=206e50c293 Instagram account showing how basic we all are in taking the same photos https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat/ TikToks referenced https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgsurPg9Ckw https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeVq3rk5/ https://www.tiktok.com/@420doggface208/video/6876424179084709126 Bill Gurley's blog https://abovethecrowd.com/ Simon Rothman's twitter https://twitter.com/simonrothman Paper on the internet's impact on dating https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_How_Couples_Meet_Working_Paper.pdf Show Notes: 14:14 Graph Design and the Limits of Social Graphs 24:44 Unconstraining Emergent Creativity 33:21 Decentralization, Creators, and Platforms 45:41 The Power of the Internet and China 50:12 Social Platforms 1:04:56 Algorithmic Design, Tinder, and Platform Governance 1:20:30 Last Thoughts

It feels almost insensitive to focus on anything else right now, like bringing up celebrity gossip at a funeral. ​ This is that emergency episode that falls outside the overarching narrative continuity of our lives. ​ Living in a house where adults are screaming at each other in the next room from dusk until dawn chips away at the membrane of one’s inner peace. ​ More and more of the information is simply adding to the fog of war, and some shoddy graphs of all sorts of really varied data sets and cohorts aren’t helping. ​ For all the chaos on Twitter, some of the smarter voices there still strike me as the most sensible ones.

People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one's time is so detached from the event of spending one's time. Most time we spend isn't like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback. ​ We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit. ​ Twitter the product/app has hit its invisible asymptote. Twitter the protocol still has untapped potential. ​ The most obvious path to this is Groups, which can subdivide large graphs into ones more unified in purpose or ideology. Google+ was onto something with Circles, but since they hadn't actually achieved any scale they were solving a problem they didn't have yet. ​ In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge. ​ Seduction is a gift, and most people in technology vastly overestimate how much of customer happiness is solvable by data-driven algorithms while underestimating the ROI of seduction. ​ just because a given person's product intuition might hit on the right moment at the right point in history to create a smash hit, it's rare that a single person's frame will move in lock step with that of the world. How many creatives are relevant for a lifetime? ​ Pattern recognition is the default operation mode of much of Silicon Valley and other fields, but it is almost always, by its very nature, backwards-looking. One can hardly blame most people for resorting to it because it's a way of minimizing blame ​ In my experience, the most successful people I know are much more conscious of their own personal asymptotes at a much earlier age than others. They ruthlessly and expediently flush them out. One successful person I know determined in grade school that she'd never be a world-class tennis player or pianist. Another mentioned to me how, in their freshman year of college, they realized they'd never be the best mathematician in their own dorm, let alone in the world. Another knew a year into a job that he wouldn't be the best programmer at his company and so he switched over into management; he rose to become CEO. By discovering their own limitations early, they are also quicker to discover vectors on which they're personally unbounded.

Facebook News Feed simultaneously increased the efficiency of distribution of new posts and pitted all such posts against each other in what was effectively a single giant attention arena, complete with live updating scoreboards on each post. It was as if the panopticon inverted itself overnight, as if a giant spotlight turned on and suddenly all of us performing on Facebook for approval realized we were all in the same auditorium, on one large, connected infinite stage, singing karaoke to the same audience at the same time. ​ As humans, we intuitively understand that some galling percentage of our happiness with our own status is relative. What matters is less our absolute status than how are we doing compared to those around us. By taking the scope of our status competitions virtual, we scaled them up in a way that we weren't entirely prepared for. Is it any surprise that seeing other people signaling so hard about how wonderful their lives are decreases our happiness? ​ Facebook, with its explicit attachment to the real world graph and its enforcement of a single public identity, is just a poor structural fit for the more complex social capital requirements of the young. ​ Every network has some ceiling on its ultimate number of contributors, and it is often a direct function of its proof of work. ​ This season, the color of the moment might be saffron. Why? Because someone cooler than me said so. Tech tends to prioritize growth at all costs given the non-rival, zero marginal cost qualities of digital information. In a world of abundance, that makes sense. However, technology still has much to learn from industries like fashion about how to proactively manage scarcity, which is important when goods are rivalrous. Since many types of status are relative, it is, by definition, rivalrous. There is some equivalent of crop rotation theory which applies to social networks, but it's not part of the standard tech playbook yet. ​ but if I have anything to offer on that front, it’s this: if you want control of your own happiness, don’t tie it to someone else’s scoreboard.

NY experts, what are some good public work spaces in Manhattan with WiFi where I can hunker down between meetings to jam this week? Between Midtown and Wall St?— Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) July 8, 2019

“it makes more sense to me to analyze social media platforms in terms of "social capital" than things like "dopamine hits," but they often end up being treated as the same thing https://t.co/ryHo7OGAGr”

The reason I've found conversation more valuable than reading recently (inspired by my chats with @kevinakwok, to name one) is that reading is a uni-directional and often brittle bundle of information flow. Conversation adapts in real-time.— Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) April 17, 2018

The distaste for telephony is especially acute among Millennials, who have come of age in a world of AIM and texting, then gchat and iMessage, but it’s hardly limited to young people. When  asked , people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are presumptuous and intrusive, especi

One of my unpopular beliefs is that many meetings in companies should have more cc's, not fewer as is the common complaint everywhere I've been. We underestimate how much observational knowledge transfer occurs.