How many networks does it take to generate relevant information?
Today like all other days, I opened my twitter account to an ad. I groaned ‘not another social network’ as I shot a tweet back at them casually remarking ‘Quora Killer?’.
The causality behind the off the cuff tweet is that I was one of those hard core Quora users who religiously wrote answers to questions, up-voted and generally to learn new knowledge from the collective human intelligence outside of Wikipedia that existed on the internet. Eventually the novelty wore off as the same questions kept popping up, some answers were more of a upvote game then a thoughtful response and overall it lost its charm. Perhaps it’s the life-cycle of certain products. Some would say ‘Quora hadn’t hooked me in to build habit forming behaviours’ — I would simply put it as the quality of the network was not maintained as it scaled. Admittedly I was part of the corruption as well.
This is not to say that Quora isn’t a fantastic product made by a bunch of very smart people who have achieved a ton in a short period of time. Building a product is hard, especially one based on Q/A — I know first hand with two separate projects here & here.
My “Quora Killer?” Tweet kicked off a microscopic frenzy of retweets, possibly folks assuming I was declaring Kifi to be a Quora killer. Apparently someone from Kifi picked it up and responded with my Medium post as part of a collection in the Growth? section in the network itself [Tweet now deleted].
Back to the question:
How many networks does it take to generate relevant information?
An attempt to break it down:
The closest one is text/email — where its most intimate. Facebook [news feed] is obviously the biggest one, to keep up to date with publications and news I would care about since they’re filtered through my relatively tight social graph. Facebook Groups are another network on its own, with information filtered through an extended social graph; simillar to Twitter. I don’t always personally know the people who I trust to filter the information, but its based on shared interests and industries. Quibb, is a curated network of technology folks who share and discuss technology related news — the filter is based on common interest of tech. The weightage is added via Twitter & the follow model. Quora takes the shared interest model but extends it, thus possibly diluting it. Medium to me is a publication with an added social layer of following authors. Between all thse is networks like GrowthHackers.com, Inbound.Org, work Slack channels and dozens of other niche communities that exist.
But really, how much of that information do I really need?
We probably overload ourselves with information, often the same from different sources just because of the fear of missing out. X raised $Y. Z sold to C. But at the end of the day, I’d much rather spend my evenings reading “Shop Craft as Soul Craft” and reflecting on it, or talking to friends and family.
How many Networks? Probably less then your currently signed up for.
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