Media apps ("social" or otherwise) can only *effectively* compete in 1, and must fight every other player in that particular arena for a finite pool of attention.
Here's a theory that I think helps explain:
- How Instagram won the first attention war
- Why there will never be another mixed-format feed
- Why TikTok is so dominant
- Why Clubhouse has a huge advantage over Spaces
- How Spaces can still win, but why Fleets can't
🧵...
Media apps ("social" or otherwise) can only *effectively* compete in 1, and must fight every other player in that particular arena for a finite pool of attention.
Often we can look but not listen, other times we can listen but not look. And sometimes we can give our phones 100% of our sensory attention.
The best creators will invest in whatever platform offers the most attention to harvest into social capital.
If you can look but not listen, photos win.
If you can listen but not look, audio is the only format.
With no constraints, video wins.
IG quickly became the most engaging place on our phones. Until the 2nd war began.
TikTok executed perfectly. You can't even use it without sound-on.
Clubhouse is quickly building a supply of quality audio creators and becoming the most engaging option when you can only listen but not look.
They could carve out a modest (compared to IG) niche simply because text as a format selected for a very different type of successful creator.
There are so many ways Twitter could make better use of that real estate. On that note:
Listen-only is our default resting mode so push is especially powerful in this war.
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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
If everyone was holding bitcoin on the old x86 in their parents basement, we would be finding a price bottom. The problem is the risk is all pooled at a few brokerages and a network of rotten exchanges with counter party risk that makes AIG circa 2008 look like a good credit.
— Greg Wester (@gwestr) November 25, 2018
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
