(2019-07-22) Bell People Who Are Having Fun On The Internet

John Bell: People who are having fun on the internet. Which brings us to online communities and the silos we self-select into.

Andy Baio did an experiment in 2014 where he analysed a giant internet battle to see who was talking to whom. It turns out the majority of the traffic was aimed inward, to true believers.

So this year I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to come up with other approaches. I’ve been doing my best to do some personal silo busting.

if I told you right now to find people having fun on the internet, where would you go? (playful)

This is something I’ve been working at recently and documenting here. The longer I do it, the more I realise that those links are the future

the rise of Slack, Discord, and private communities has been fun to watch. In these communities, you can find real internet friends because the format encourages it.

chat is closer to how real people talk at the water cooler. Quick, informal, and without a clear beginning or end.

As a result, conversations are more likely to lead to real connections with people

Buster Benson is writing a book called Why Are We Yelling, and he recently started a little internet community on Discord called Rickshaw

along comes Darius Kazemi, a man whose work I’ve been eagerly following for years. He wrote a great little guide called How To Run a Small Social Network Site for Your Friends. And it’s amazing.

I spend a lot of time wondering what technology I’d use in my company if I were to start one today. I wouldn’t use Google’s office suite, for starters. I’ve been using Notion for about a year, and I like it. But the bigger story for me is how quickly Figma is being adopted. This is reminding me of when everyone moved from Photoshop to Sketch, but even faster this time.