stacks are eating the world

social media use really calls for something closer to a driver's license than terms of service... most apparent bad behavior here is more incompetence than malice, like not knowing how to change lanes or take turns at a 4-way stop..

trump's history on twitter is something closer to a crazy car chase on LA streets than bad driving (with the cops MIA, but media helicopters in pursuit), but almost all unpleasantness around here is just poor driving skills

not that I'm advocating for a licensing regime... that would be a terrible thing. Do not need a social media DMV. But the underlying principles (as tested for eg. in the written and road tests) are pretty good.

Written test would test things like "safe following distance" (reply-guying = tailgating?)

Road test would actually expose you to routine provocations. Like, "make a left turn" = "deal with this concern troll"

As in the driving test, where an awkward, unnatural, and unintuitive bit, the parallel parking test, is the toughest bit, there would be some such awkward maneuver you'd have to learn (hmmm... what's the parallel parking equivalent on twitter?)

There are only 3 real challenges to free speech at the tech level a) the need for CDNs at scale b) distortions of net neutrality c) nation-state firewalls.

All other claims are about social governance on private sites, where applying free speech doctrine is a stretch at best

Baseline free speech has expanded modestly since 1776 or whatever your reference point is.

About 20% beyond core case of government-critical speech in formally public spaces and media I'd say.

You can (for example) have more kinds of conversations in a bar without getting punched or kicked out by other patrons or management. You can teach more things in colleges than 100 years ago.

That's a genuine de facto increase in practical, informal free speech/expression.

But online free "speech" is, as @reneed has pointed out, not an expansion of free speech at all, but an expansion of reach. It is like the secondary freedom of the press to print as many copies as they can afford, not primary freedom to say what they want

If a newspaper wants to print more copies it has buy more printing equipment and front more upfront costs. Reach for a paper publication is not "free", but a function of desired circulation, which in turn is a function of demand prediction etc. But that logic is obscured online.

following a discussion at @yak_collective this morning, I came up with this chart to capture a hypothesis I have that the difficulty of creating communities scales exponentially with the the "depth" of what you're trying to do

thanks @grigorimilov for leading the discussion that sparked this.

The way to read the graph is: each line is a time history of difficulty. It starts dotted, goes through a criticality inflection point, and then crests in difficulty before coming down to a stable plateau.

The inflection points have different names depending on context, but are all topologically similar. They are the make or break moment when a network-effect either kicks in, or fails to. "Product-market fit" in the case of market is the best known such point.

Level 1 is a basic social community, such as a FB group, meetup etc. There are millions of successful ones, and 100s of millions of failures. The "fit point" is what I call a meme-mind fit, when some social object catalyzes a sustainable long-term conversation of growing richness

Almost everything I've helped instigate is Level 1. My contributions to the social-object soup have been things like the vocabulary around sociopaths/clueless/losers, legibility, 2x2s etc.

As a “lifelong” technician, I am finding that bitcoin lends itself well to technical analysis. Here is my take on the recent price action. (THREAD)

Elliott Wave Theory: Looking at the chart pattern since the recent high of 64,870, I can't help but notice that a textbook 5-wave decline may be unfolding. According to EWT, primary trends move in 5 waves and corrections are 3 waves. /2

The typical progression is that wave 1 is generally dismissed as noise, then wave 2 is a sharp and deep retracement of wave 1 (at least 62% but sometimes 75% or more), which creates the false comfort that it was indeed just a minor correction. /3

Then wave 3 comes & that's the big one. It's called the recognition wave & is typically the longest & most impulsive wave (usually 1.618x wave 1). /4

After the wave 3 low, the 4th wave is often a triangle or "zigzag" (a triangle pattern that retraces much less of wave 3 than wave 2 did of wave 1). A rule of thumb is 38%. Finally we get wave 5, which is often equal to wave 1, but often also less (0.618x). /5

1 - Over the years I've learnt a lot of new things that I wish I knew when I first started so I want to make this thread for all the new traders out there who wants to turn their trading into a profitable career 🔥

Will be adding to this thread over time.

17 - Because trading is a game of numbers and probabilities, whenever you see a setup that fits your trading rules and aligns with your edge, you NEED to take the opportunity!

Don't pick and choose, just religiously follow your plan and rules!

1/20 Stablecoin Tweetstorm- I have a fairly unique perspective on stablecoins... I was an "unofficial advisor" to the launch of USDT (Tether) Some of my best friends were CEO/CTO/Founders, etc. I didn't invest at the time (which was a lucky move) as the company sold

2/20 for a loss to Bitfinex within two years of creation. It had very little usage, banking issues, and really no clear path to growth (that is until one of the largest exchanges on earth began using it) So with this short background let me share a bit of my thoughts on

3/20 this category and why I think it is so important... (Full Disclosure: after all these years I finally found a stablecoin project that I thought was worth investing in and i will be shilling it later in this thread:-)

4/20 The community knows all about how important stablecoins are to the overall health and usage of the entire crypto marketplace. With an overall market cap of in excess of $1 Trillion the crypto market is large and growing... No category of crypto is growing faster than

5/20 Stablecoins: With a total category value of just over $33B and over $10B per day in trade volume it is no longer just a "niche" Stablecoins are a major category and I predict this category will increase in value faster then the overall crypto market. (My bet is $100B