Virality is in tension with community.
...ity is in tension with community. Social media needs to select for virality for business models. Social media is in tension with community.
Topic: business model
53 chunks · 43 episodes
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- business model appears in 53 chunks across 43 episodes, from 2023-10-30 to 2026-04-20.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 5/19/25 (2025-05-19), with 3 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with viable business, marginal cost, and vertical saas, while by chunk count it sits between Anthropic and compounding value; its yearly rank moved from #32 in 2023 to #17 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
The service you choose to converse with again will be, all else equal, the one that "got you" and told you you were smart / funny / attractive.
...sn't want it. Engagement is necessary for retention, which is necessary for the business model.
Most of the challenge of making software is tailoring it to work for specific people.
...nger a moat like it has been for decades. The foundation of the tech industry's business models.
Why is VC so powerful in Silicon valley?
...remely capital intensive, which means only businesses that have a safe, legible business model can get financing. Bits-based businesses have startup costs, but much less, relative to their possible scale. That's a great fit for venture investin...
Value arises from scarcity.
Value arises from scarcity. If you apply a business model from one distribution paradigm to another you're going to miss the point.[cn] It took a decade or more of the web to discover the social media busine...
Stable business models require that where the cost and the value accrues are aligned.
Stable business models require that where the cost and the value accrues are aligned. If they're disjoint then the user feels like they're getting cheated, or the business...
You can't fight incentives with culture.
... time scales, culture is downstream of incentives. Incentives are downstream of business model.
Every business model is misaligned with users in the limit.
Every business model is misaligned with users in the limit. But some are more misaligned with their users. Even subscriptions see the siren's call for marginal returns of...
AI must have a subscription to be user-aligned.
...all you need… a neverending force of gravity not just for training LLMs but for business models too.
Goodhart's law is what leads to business models being misaligned with consumers in the limit.
Goodhart's law is what leads to business models being misaligned with consumers in the limit. Companies are a swarm of employees making interdependent decisions whose ground truth is the business ...
The endstate of aggregator business models is retail media.
The endstate of aggregator business models is retail media. "Retail media" is ads within the aggregator's 1P UX. Step 1: capture all demand. Step 2: offer to steer that demand to advertisers,...
I want a new category of thing: Private Intelligence.
...gned with your interests. Not some veneer of privacy, but holistically[oe]: The business model. The technical architecture. The privacy model. Everyone should have a Private Intelligence that works only for them, and is entirely aligned with th...
In a world of agents there will be an arms race between users and providers.
...ying to block agents from using its service. Many services like Doordash have a business model that presumes not a dumb pipe of functionality but an aggregator model. They collect all of the user demand, and then can use that powerful position ...
I want cozy finance tools.
...s great, but shuttered after receiving no investment for a decade. There was no business model. The companies that might plausibly do cozy finance tools have an ulterior motive: some high-fee financial product.
Vertical saas gives us "operating systems" for businesses.
...ses. Why don't we have it for consumers? Vertical Saas is an extremely powerful business model. It turns out that if you can create an "operating system" for a given niche of business use cases, it can be extremely valuable. Within a given type...
A little piece of cozy software I want: a collaborative ELO ranking.
... coordinate your team to use on some arbitrary platform, and there's no obvious business model for someone to make one as a business. A piece of software that I wish existed but doesn't.
Aggregator is a great business model for the company that can pull it off.
Aggregator is a great business model for the company that can pull it off. It also is not necessarily great in the long run for everyone else. Users get more efficiency and scale at firs...
What would happen if we shattered apps into liquid software?
...the software into their constituent parts and let them flow, we'll break up the business models that hold apps together like glue. That glue doesn't just trap the app, it has trapped us.
The last era of software was based around zero marginal costs.
...marginal costs. In a world of zero marginal cost, there are only three consumer business models[adz]. Hardware. Charge a premium on the hardware, and lock people into your ecosystem. Media. Proprietary copyrighted content the user can't get any...
One of the tragedies of centralization is that as more of your data is in one place, the owner of that place gets less and less of an incentive to do anything about it.
... but the aggregator is only motivated to build software if it aligns with their business model: creates more engagement with their services. This is a fundamental divorce of value and incentive. This stagnation is one of the primary problems of...