Startupy Issue #4: a laid back newsletter about very serious ideas

 

🥸  MOOD

🪐  HOT LINKS IN OUR UNIVERSE

103 bits of advice I wish I had known by Kevin Kelly

🕺  Curated in Inspiration, Personal Development, Habits, Communication

Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors by Michael Mauboussin, Dan Callahan & Darius Majd

🕺  Curated in Investing Wisdom

The Tinderization of the Internet by Sean Monahan

🕺  Curated in Future of Social Networks, Tech and Society 

🕺  Curated in Psychology, Career Management and Coaching & Ambition

9 connections → 2 content, 3 companies, 4 related topics

143 connections → 108 content mentions, 4 topics

80 connections → 40 content, 31 companies, 9 related topics

54 connections → 41 content, 7 companies, 6 related topic

19 connections → 6 content, 11 companies, 2 related topic

Top Author → Future of Social Networks, Future of Media & Writing

🌱  COMMUNITY HEALTH

Welcoming Rahul Ramchandani, Tengji Zhang, Yaqi Zhang, and Joey DeBruin to our curator community this week and virtual high-fiving Caroline Nguyen, Johanna Einsiedler, and Marcel Mairhofer for their contributions.

✨  CURATOR SPOTLIGHT

Why is community design interesting? 

We fail to realize the impact community design has on our interactions online. It shapes how we create and consume information, and in doing so, it shapes how we think and how we interact with other people.

 

Many communities take design for granted. They might have processes for interacting with members, channels for information, and types of information they like to see, but in many areas, design isn’t thought about at all. The structure of the platforms, incentives, size, information flow, and more impact what we see and what we do. Not enough people think about this for the communities they are a part of.

 

We should care about the design of our communities and work to make it better. There is lots to learn to design the best possible internet communities and help members flourish in them.

 

Designing Digital Economies by Gabriel Leydon

In mobile gaming, every incentive is optimized. Gabriel Leydon is the co-founder and former CEO of Machine Zone, one of the biggest and most important mobile gaming companies. He understands how to create incentives to get people to spend more, get their friends to join, and stay playing the game. His Invest Like The Best podcast provides insights into this communities can learn to design better incentives of their own.

 

The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes by Christopher Allen

The internet removes friction and restrictions. That has allowed communities to grow well beyond what they could in the real world. Dunbar’s number (the limit on social relations we can maintain) has been shattered. Communities need to be aware of this fact and design ways to deal with its consequences.

 

“Context is that which is scarce” by Tyler Cowen

An assumption many communities have is that everyone knows everything all the time. This isn’t true. Context is scarce. It is tough to build and constantly must be rebuilt. Many problems within a community are caused by a context failure. If communities aren’t designing more ways to build context, they will face more of these failures.

 

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility by Venkatesh Rao

The world is never as neat as we want it to be. We want everything to have its place, but it just doesn’t work like that. Powerful people (in a community’s case managers and moderators) force people, ideas, and behaviours into understandable units. They make them legible. The problem with making things legible is that a lot of information is lost in the process. When designing community spaces, we should be aware of what’s illegible and what was lost by making things legible. Sometimes, chaos is a good solution.

 

Foster has designed their community to incentivize writing and providing feedback. Most of my interactions with the community come through the comments from other members on my writing, which incentivizes me to write more. They’ve designed several tools to help these interactions. They are an excellent example of a community that has been designed towards a goal well.

 

A popular community platform at the moment is Discord. Discord, in many ways, is rigid in its structure. A way to implement many of the designs and incentives detailed above is through bots. Top.gg is the largest source of bots for Discord. If you don’t find something that fits your needs, it will at least inspire you.