Some reasons why people collect:
- Knowledge and learning
- Relaxation and stress reduction
-Personal pleasure (including appreciation of beauty, and pride of ownership)
- Social interaction with fellow collectors and others (i.e. the sharing of pleasure and knowledge)
- Competitive challenge
- Recognition by fellow collectors and perhaps even non-collectors
- Altruism (since many great collections are ultimately donated to museums and learning institutions)
- The desire to control, possess and bring order to a small (or even a massive) part of the world
- Nostalgia and/or a connection to history
- Accumulation and diversification of wealth (which can ultimately provide a measure of security and freedom)

• "POSSE" Publish on own site, syndicate. everywhere. Nice acronym

• Interesting post that laments the seeming decline of browsing the internet and visiting the myriad weird and wonderful sites that existed. Author puts it down to the fact that the algorithms have sucked most people's attention so that they don't go directly to sites any more.
• "Not long ago, we were good at separating the signal from noise."
• "Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web"

• Really interesting overview of how a 2 man team grew a product in a similar space to Atlas.

• "Recommendation media is the new standard for content distribution"

- "some level of distribution is guaranteed for creators based on the creator’s social network of friends or followers. This dynamic puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of creators because it means they have built in audiences to which they can broadcast content"

• Disco is a recommendation library. It looks at ratings or actions from users to predict other items they might like, known as collaborative filtering
• "fastText is a text classification and word representation library. It can label documents with one or more categories, which is useful for content tagging"

• Characteristics:
  • Direct Relationship with Users
  • Zero Marginal Costs For Serving Users
  • Demand-driven Multi-sided Networks with Decreasing Acquisition Costs
• Levels
  • 1. Netflix - acquires content (supply) to own.
  • 2. Uber - doesn't own supply but pays for it.
  • 3. Google - don't own supply, incur no acquisition costs.
• Super aggregators: three sides — users, suppliers, and advertisers — and have zero marginal costs on all of them. Only facebook and google so far.

• "The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users."
• Ways to make outsize profits
  • Build horizontal monopoly in one of the parts, or
  • Integrate two of the parts to create a competitive advantage
• "There have always been far more users/consumers than suppliers", so it's more common to "integrate backwards" into supply.
• ^But the internet turned this on its head. Content is free, transaction costs are zero.
• "No longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be commoditized leaving consumers/users as a first order priority."
• "the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience"
• "earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle" - this describes the Atlas flywheel almost to a tee.
• "Previous incumbents, such as newspapers, book publishers, networks, taxi companies, and hoteliers, all of whom integrated backwards, lose value in favor of aggregators who aggregate modularized suppliers — which they often don’t pay for — to consumers/users with whom they have an exclusive relationship at scale"
• "Content has always been monetized by proxy" - worth diving deeper on re: monetization.
• Ladder of internet-based models: 1. Google - modularized content providers. 2. Leveraged UGC and owned the content, 3. Real-world companies - Uber & Airbnb. Commoditized trust. "vacant rooms and taxis have not been digitized, but they have been disrupted"
• "They are all capable of serving every consumer/user on earth"

• "Trust in institutions is crumbling at the same time the platforms for people to exit their own realities"
• "Brand is the gift you give to people so they can easily explain to others why they’re working with you"
• "How do you make your early users look like stars?"

• "The internet completely changed what we use computers for"
• " instead of creating documents — a sort of heavyweight work product — a lot of what we work with on our computers now are fragments: URLs and meme gifs that we copy paste between windows or chats, a PDF that we download to print out or fill in and email"
• " there’s all sorts of stuff that I can’t find — that link from maybe last week?"
• "The ascendence of (good) search over organization"

• Some interesting points but reads like a debate speech (how can I argue X) than "I'm an expert in this area and this is what I think" - points are disparate and non-cohesive. Key Points:
• Amazon sucking away e-com search
• Discovery ads becoming more popular (G has no feeds)
• AdBlock
• Public Opinion - " trading their privacy, data, and attention for the convenience of its amazing free products... and people started to question what they were giving up by clicking “I agree.""

For compilations

• "We’re living in a pivotal time in the history of mass communication — what we believe is the golden age of new media.”
• "With more creators, more content, and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis"
• "Zuckerberg’s Law: the tendency to share more and more on social media over time."

• "The new conversation is centered mainly around subscription newsletters, and to a lesser extent around visual and audio media"
• "in 2007, it took weeks or months, money upfront, and a fair amount of learning to set up a decently functional, non-ugly WordPress site"
• "The new stuff though, is all deeply socialized from the get-go" <- This is my gut sense too, and why I think timing might be right for social bookmarking again.

• "Starting a business on YouTube is like opening a brand new store in a shopping centre"
• "There are definitely topics that I've come across that I think would be challenging to cover on YouTube"

• Can probably use this to build the official Atlas iOS extension

• Elon would like Atlas 😁
• "they don’t know how to outline their information in a way that leads to further revelation."
• "it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details"
• Rules:
  • Make sure you’re building a tree of knowledge
  • You can't remember what you can't connect.