Original link: https://pt.plus/08-20-23-local-maximum/
This week’s topic is Local Maximum.
The topic comes from Eugene Wei and Ben Thompson’s long conversation An Interview with Eugene Wei About Twitter, Threads, and Taylor Swift . This conversation is really long, and I only read the parts of Twitter/X and Threads that are more interesting. Among them, Wei said:
Twitter is such a bizarre local maximum of a social media product, and he within that is even more of a local maximum as a uber power user, but when you step back and look at it in a relative sense compared to other social media services, Twitter is relatively small. That’s kind of the paradox of Twitter, both its strength and its weakness.
Twitter is such a weird local max for a social media product, and he (Elon Musk) is more of a local max as a power user in it, but when you take a step back, in a relative sense compared to other social media services Back then, Twitter was relatively small. This is the Twitter paradox, with its strengths and its weaknesses.
This paragraph is placed at the very beginning, and I believe it will be difficult for many readers to understand. Local maximum, or local optimal solution, is a somewhat embarrassing state. If you leave this state to seek a larger space, you may lose the advantages you already have locally. It will be mentioned later that Twitter has almost reached a local optimal solution in the public discussion market, but from the overall perspective of social media, this part does not allow Twitter to obtain sufficient growth and profit margins.
Wei’s understanding of social capital is deep. In the dialogue, he raised a key concept, that is, disagreeability. Let me explain further: views and interests are different, the former keeps differences while the latter seeks common ground, and there is always an upper limit for people’s acceptance of different opinions. If this upper limit is exceeded, negative social capital will be generated.
He preached:
I distinguish between two types of social capital. One is when you find people that share interests with you, like you both like Taylor Swift, you both like the Milwaukee Bucks. Those types of things where you have shared passions, I think of that as positive social capital.
There’s also negative social capital. Negative social capital is bonding over things you dislike. So if you’re conservatives, you dislike the woke people, and if you’re liberals, you dislike the alt-right, and I think the thing about negative social capital is the Internet vastly increased the volume of that. Every day on Twitter, you would go to the trending topics, someone was getting canceled over something, and you’re like, “Oh, yeah.” You would go look and you ‘re like, “Oh, of course, that’s an idiotic thing to say,” and it feels good to participate in the mob. It was a daily cancellation, it was like going to the town square and seeing who the king was hanging that day.
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