No, no one's claiming that anything is new. The fundamental rules of business do not change. What does change is that all this happens in a world of perpetual connectivity now and so some of the frictions go down, metrics become more trackable and the whole process becomes more controllable. So yes, some things do change.
Like the spirit of the blog. I'd love to see the following:
1. Common misconceptions about planning code
2. Real-life examples of how our pre-shipping hypotheses are often wrong
3. How to be smarter about optimizing post the initial feedback
One would expect that the bigger the network, the more value users derive from it.
However, as networks scale, the value for users may drop for several reasons:
Connection: New users joining the online community may lower the quality of interactions and increase noise/spam through unsolicited connection requests.
Content: The network may fail to manage the abundance of content created on it and may fail to scale the curation of content created and the personalization of the content served to users.
Clout: The network may get inadvertently biased towards early users and promote them over users who join later.
Reverse network effects often cause a large and thriving network to implode. As a network scales, it’s ability to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio is the leading indicator of its usefulness. Networks can, in fact, scale very well and prevent reverse network effects from setting in if they have:
Appropriate level of friction in network access and usage, that prevents abuse
A strong curation system that scales well with the size of the network
A highly relevant and personalized user experience
User-generated content is quite difficult to get going. One model is to fake it initially but getting users to do the work also requires some work structuring the right incentives and priming the content generation pipe. What do you guys think?