Musings on cross-pollination v0
tbt, briefly skimmed this
Have not written in some time, and stumbled upon this thing I wrote while at Backdrop some (many) moons ago (PS a very belated congrats to Rapha & on the acquisition!)
Without further preamble, here is an essay that quite quickly devolves into a random assortment of notes :)
Musings on cross-pollination
I spent a lot of my time at Backdrop thinking about how social knowledge graphs intersect with space and age.
I’ve never been into video games, but I am fascinated by the world-building that goes into the making of a great one. There’s just something about the richness of the elements; the stories that colour why and where people belong; the ways that lore is shown, not told…you’re invited to take part in the plot, as if you’ve been a main character all along.
I took a couple courses on map-making in college (as clunky as it is, ArcGIS will always hold a special place in my heart!) And to me, maps are worlds just waiting to happen. There are so many stories to be told, and so many ways to tell those stories, on a map. Toggle between Google Maps’ various layers and you’ll find an array of “Choose-Your-Own” Adventures, whether that adventure is biking, driving, or avoiding a safety hazard (adventure is a debatable term here).
AllTrails, Strava, Corners’ new “Spots in Common” feature: all ways of navigating new quests through friends (and friends of friends) and keeping a social record of all the routes you’ve plotted—and when. My siblings have an Awesome Maps poster showcasing all the best kitesurfing destinations worldwide (all of which they plan to hit!) There are those scratch-off maps you can buy to hang on your walls as you traverse new continents; Pokemon Go is essentially a virtual scene blanketed over our IRL landscape—and at the imminent intersection of it all, Mirage is building an augmented layer atop our physical realities.
And not to mention: how maps act as historians, resurfacing patterns over place and period.
Journeys of erosion and deforestation; trails of globalisation and diversification: a bird’s eye view into the ways in which environmental catastrophes and human nature disturb and destroy the spaces we occupy. Maps have catalysed discovery; plotting the clusters of cholera outbreaks across London’s Soho district helped John Snow identify the source of contamination for the virus’ spread (not that Jon Snow). Even plotting the cartography of a single item can be so powerful: I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole WWII-plane-with-the-red-bullet-holes meme where the dearth of hits to plane engines were actually the places most significantly impacted by enemy shots.
I recently heard this analogy: two architects behind a newly constructed college campus forget to add pathways to their final blueprint. After the school’s first year, they’re able to follow the tracks where the grass is most worn down, paving paths in places where they know students will use them the most.
And I guess that’s what product beta testing is about, too: you’re looking for shared pain points in the mean user journey, in order to solve for (or pave) the Path Most Travelled. And it’s also part of the value of building in public: you get to validate your pathways with more people— many of whom have experience plotting their own routes to similar problems, and are eager to give newer navigators the best tips and tricks to building well—to building for the many.
It just makes me wonder: what might we be missing by solving for the mean?
(atomic networking).
A well-worn pathway reminds me of red bullets on a military plane: glaring trail markers that help us make sense of existing terrain—
https://twitter.com/johnny_makes/status/1646241434427695104?s=20
Especially when we think about building a social-knowledge graph: youtube’s rabbithole algorithm, the dangers of living in an echo chamber…even building in public is an echo chamber, it’s just a larger cave
Tiktok does a pretty good job - it’s just that the data that web2 social networks are using to track the closeness of relationships is 2 dimensional: objective data vs subjective data.
What is the balance between optimising for existing user behaviours while building to change habits and incentives?
What paths do we need to create that might be huge unlocks for an entirely new target user segment - one that you wouldn’t have known to define/seek without?
But when i think about our product (in this case, a social knowledge graph) as a world, it makes me feel like we shouldn’t be optimising for the most productive path: you could be incentivizing a stroll down side quests, too.
Makes me think about beta testing too, well what if we gave more credence to the insights at the margins?
That approach feels like it falls privy to the same trap of reddotplane.jpg - optimizing for a known uncertainty; not creating space for unknown unknowns
So if we’re talking about applying that to product testing: what if instead of taking feedback at the mean of all your users, what if you were to spend more time investigating the insights at the margins - the anomalies?
And where can we best find those people?
I guess that’s also a core value of beta testing a product: having users step on the same sore spots, until you can patch them up
It some ways, that takes the guesswork out of human design: to not have to predict functionality, but rather retroactively optimise it, when you have clear evidence of what your end-users are asking for
Beta testing is that too
Maybe the least worn down path in beta testing is that one person out of 200 who voiced anomalous piece of feedback: maybe that’s the feedback that’s worth listening to
No prediction of human behaviour; there’s evidence that the path is wanted
: a newly constructed college forgot to add pathways between the buildings on their campus; observing where the grass was most worn down after a year gave them the trail markers to plot.
IN this analogy: we share the same memes because we visit the same parts of campus: the same clubs, the same major, the same study group. Well-trodden path shows us what we have in common.
Also: I can be sure you know the meme I’m referencing because I can hazard a relative guess as to how close we are in digital space — or at least, what parts of us are closer together.
In the same way we code switch between friendships we’ve made at different stages (and different places) in our lives, we adapt our social identities as we enter new worlds online: we share different lores with different social circles across different social networks.
I don’t have a 3D perspective of you (that requires that we have an IRL relationship, too) but it’sI have a vague sense of where distinct pieces of our personalities overlap, and the connections—both people and information—we likely have in common.
Google chrome journey
We cosplay different parts of ourselves within the spaces we take up online.
And we ourselves cosplay differently depending on our character arc in that specific lore.
have different parts and play different roles depending on the worlds we occupy: how I present myself on my private Instagram is not the same as what I share with my web3, work-related orbit on Twitter. And I can’t even remember who I was on Facebook anymore, let alone the friends I used to see on Snapchat.
I missed the Myspace craze, but that’s another long lost home that I hear spoken of with such nostalgia...on Bluesky, MyspaceTom is still @myspacetom—which, side note, is so curious to think about—how this meme has lived on, even though the lore of Myspace itself has not.
Makes sense that worlds are getting more and more niche - because people are becoming more nuanced, as we find different identities we want to try on.
We need to gamify the side quests - incentivize habits that help us widen the scope of our connected social circles
Time is the contour of the social-knowledge graph; just like how time contours the terrain of our physical world. So much information is being created all the time, and attention is a scarce resource —
Space is subjective, and time is relative
Twitter has that social graph thing - but that’s objective connection (like linkedin) not subjective connection data
I don’t think the best connections come out of the nth degrees of separation between people anymore: I think it’s a combination of returning to shared, lost lore at the same time and sharing a verifiable social trail.
What role we play in the plot is also different in each “world”
Maps are basically different types of ways you can plot your adventures, as you traverse the world. But what about the worldwide web? (sorry to be cringey)
Digital footprint: where are all the places we’ve walked? (Chrome Journeys, etc whatever). But just like maps of the physical world: the spaces we take up online are impacted by human nature: you simply cannot separate the social from the space.
The amount of times I’ve re-found a website, and it feels like home, or looking through my archived bookmarks as a way to explore old towns. Saving things on readwise in the same way your iphone hands you daily memories.
2 things:
Get people to the right connections faster
Get people to the right connections with an (actionable) catalyst for conversation
Connecting two people who wouldn’t otherwise have met — at a time when it is most mutually beneficial to everyone. The amount of partnerships I’ve tried to cajole managers into letting me lead, where my only basis for wanting to collaborate is that A) I like them and our vibes are aligned and B) I can vaguely make the case that there’s some kind of intangible overlap between our two projects, at this time.