75 chunks · 54 episodes
...t of the challenge going off road is there are no roads. So you have no default schelling point to cohere around as a team. Everyone pulls by default in a random direction, averaging to mush. That means that as a team going off-road together, yo...
The schelling point for an ecosystem is often just as important as the protocol. Git is the protocol; GitHub is the schelling point. The schelling point is where people ...
...t spending all of our time debating which Vite config to use." There's power in schelling points that everyone can agree are reasonable and good enough and stop spending time debating.
Protocols are mainly schelling points. They tend to start off extremely simply, merely a convention everyone can agree is reasonable. The simpler they are, the more likely they are to em...
...ing a registry akin to npm. This totally makes sense for them to do! Being that schelling point in the ecosystem of maintaining the most common registry is a way of establishing strategic power. The namespace everyone knows everyone else uses is...
...g and then an inciting incident causes a cascade. The inciting incident forms a schelling point that has to stand out as obviously beyond the pale to get to the critical mass where the compounding anger can accumulate on its own. But a flood the...
...not yet self-evidently viable, there's a swirl of coordination around different schelling points.
...ide and inspire competition by making it measurable. Benchmarks are an emergent schelling point. Someone sets rules and a way to measure quality. No one has to use their rules if they don't find them valuable, but if people do, then other people...
Schelling points are lighting rods for luck. The thing that is most prominent, most distinctive, wins by default in the chaos. I was talking to a person at CES who h...
...um solves all known problems.[aor] If it's not converging, you need to create a schelling point that everyone can agree is reasonable to converge on.
A natural schelling point: a thing everyone can agree is reasonable and that they can live with. Seems like a low bar but is actually a very high one. It's also magnetic; an i...
...self up into ever larger and more established things. Without that toehold as a schelling point, nothing coheres. A tactic I've found robustly successful to establish that toehold is what I call a 70/20/10 doc. …I need a much better name for thi...
...e to converge on one coherent outcome, this technique won't work; discovering a schelling point via bottom-up processes has exponential costs. But if the swarm doesn't need to converge on one approach, the emergent approach can steadily accumula...
...far and away the best in a category. Nobody else even comes close. They are the schelling point, the most prominent example of the category that attracts usage by default. 2) That the would-be aggregator has some kind of compounding advantage. T...
... You have to stand out prominently from all the other options to be the obvious schelling point. If you can then kick off a private network effect that only benefits you and not the other alternatives, you can extend that lead into an everlastin...
...gorithms without that steep, scary gradient. The open platform would become the schelling point for little things like this, which would make it more attractive to other participants: a self-accelerating loop, a gravity well.
A concrete artifact, even one that is wrong, is at least a schelling point for discussion. It grounds the discussion in a specific thing. As opposed to an amorphous conceptual blob that looks different to everyone discussing...
... on price and reliability The option that everyone else will use too, a natural schelling point. You want to use the option everyone else will use because it's the one most likely to get investment to improve.
...emental users into it instead of other options. By being prominent it becomes a schelling point. If there is a network effect to the option, then its edge can increase as more people join in, becoming a runaway gravity well effect. In a truly op...
... be obviously better than everyone is very low. Someone who is better will be a schelling point that many agree is obviously better. That doesn't have to be that much better in the grand scheme of things if everyone else is obviously worse. The ...