See Eugene Wei's original blogpost.

• "in many situations when people ascribe causal power to something other than culture, I’m immediately suspicious"
• Joseph Heingrich: WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)
• Cultural distance between US and China makes it challenging for companies in one to compete in the other
• WeChat only captured Chinese-Americans who use the app to communicate with people in China
• Uber China: mixed results
• TikTok (formerly Musical.ly) became the "most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination"
• culture can be abstracted by a ML algorithm
• TikTok was rumored to spend 10-100 millions a month on advertising
• 30-day retention of new users was sub 10% at first
• updated For You Page feed algorithm drastically increased returns on ad spend

• 50% of Bytedance engineers are focused on algorithms

• "to help a network break out from its early adopter group, you need both to bring lots of new people/subcultures into the app"
• app doesn't need an explicit follower graph
• "the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared to deal with culture wars. They are better off sorting people apart rather than mediating"
• "The usual path is organic. Users are encouraged to follow and friend each other to assemble their own graph one connection at a time"
• content format is not what differentiates a social network (facebook can copy it)
• purposes of networks: social capital / status (Soho house), entertainment (YouTube), utility (venmo)
• "The idea of using a social graph to build out an interest-based network has always been a sort of approximation"
• TikTok skips the social graph assembly + can adjust to your evolving taste near real time
• "social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale. The problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow"
• context collapse: think of what happened to Facebook when it’s users went from having their classmates as friends to hundreds and often thousands of people as friends, including coworkers, parents, and that random person they felt obligated to accept a friend request from.
• Snapchat’s struggles to differentiate between its utility (as a way to communicate among friends) and its entertainment function (as a place famous people broadcast content to their fans). In a controversial redesign, Snapchat cleaved the broadcast content from influencers into the righthand Discover tab, leaving your conversations with friends in the left Chat pane. Look, the redesign seemed to say, Kylie Jenner is not your friend.
• TikTok does not have a social graph. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high.
• Think of how many damn interest bubble UI’s you’ve had to sit through before you could start using some new social product: what subjects interest you? who are your favorite musicians? what types of movies do you enjoy? all in an attempt to carry them past the dead zone to the minimum viable graph size necessary to provide them with a healthy, robust feed.
• algorithms enables its builders to treat another market and culture as a complete black box.
• Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built on social graphs, and as such, they amplify the scale, ubiquity, and reach of our performative social burden