I think a lot about building social experiences. Building social and communities sites were hugely formative in my life, and the time in which I grew up. I also believe that social and communitiy experieces are a critical force in makign the world better, and as a technologist I think a lot about in what ways technology can play a positive role in their formation. But there is a problem that haunts me, so I'm writing this out as a way to start addressing it.
It used to be relatively cheap and easy to build a social network. This was great because there are lots of social experiments that can be a positive force in the world, but don't achieve the kind of scales that make them commercially viable in our modern advertising ecosystem. The internet (including the pre-web) internet flourished with dedicated small community discussion sites, and early 2000s web saw a similar flourish of purpose built social experiments around interests (think last.fm, or allconsuming, or mirror project, or dozens and dozens of ot