Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…So good. …really good interview show. Recently, they had an episode with Eugene Wei. Eugene wrote this great blog post, Invisible Asymptotes. It’s an essay; it’s a half novel, and Eugene is super brilliant. There is five or six very interesting takeaways from this Invest Like the Best episode. My favorite of them is applying blockchain theory to social networks. If you think about what makes a blockchain works, there is proof of work and then there is reward for doing that work, and the reward is synonymously proof of work and has an intrinsic value thing and that propagates out over a network. I had never thought before to use that paradigm to apply it to a social network. When you do something like post on Instagram, you’re doing a proof of work, and you’re putting up that picture, that picture has value and you get likes and follows in exchange for doing that work. The people who are the most successful on that platform are the people who are able to work within the constraints of that social media to basically do the most interesting thing within those constraints. A successful social network happens when you are able to create a format that where that proof of work is extremely variable, so the breadth of skill is you can do really crappy things with it and you can also do amazing, wonderful things with it, and also the perception of the value of the proof of work is variable. Not everybody agrees that that is the best picture, and everybody can have a different interpretation of what high-quality is. A new social network can emerge when there is a tool set to do that proof of work, to make that profile, to do that image, whatever it is, and of course, Eugene says it much more eloquently, I’m only even trying to follow along because of my respect for you and you Eugene. Otherwise, you would have lost me at blockchain.…

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