Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Oh Ben. Twitter did have photos for a while. It was called Instagram. Well yeah, that API got turned off fast. As they’re looking around at Snap, hey, someone has discovered this new stories mechanic. My goodness, that is suddenly obvious that that is what the future is. It now feels old to do anything else. It’s like when you got a Retina iPhone for the first time, and you’re just holding your non-Retina iPhone and you’re like, this is instantly a piece of crap. I’m not ever going to touch this disgusting thing again. I think when someone invents a new interaction paradigm, it’s one of these things where you have to adopt it, because otherwise people are just going to flee. Of course, your business depends on you adopting it because you can’t let someone use this new discovered mechanic that’s perfectly timed for this moment in history, with these set of cultural acceptances, and this new set of technologies to go rebuild the network somewhere else. So I think the thing that they discover is either through buying or through copying a mechanic, we need to protect our network by bringing these interactions into our family of apps either by, as Ben Thompson would put it, the audacity of copying well, or of course by buying them. Yes. Copying well or buying well.…

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