Notes to self

I think in general it’s like life is tricky because it happens once and there’s no opportunity for A/B testing. It could be that you are living your best possible life and that if you re-play Felix Salmon’s life hundreds of other times, that this life you’re living is the best or among the top 5 per…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

It’s not paranoid to think that the audience watching broadcast television is old. And it’s not paranoid to think people, particularly young people, are spending a lot of time on their phones and a lot of time on the Internet. It’s accurate to say that media consumption is changing in a pretty drama…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

Part of the idea of BuzzFeed from the beginning was can we get to the point where the platform is more valuable than the expertise? If you actually have an idea or an insight into how things are shared or why they’re shared or what works, can you build that into either the technology platform or the…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, particularly for a single metric, you end up finding that the best way to optimize for that metric ends up perverting the metric and…

— Jonah, Jonah Peretti, medium.com

When we have something that’s a hit, usually our response is not, “Let’s do more of those.” Our response is, “Let’s figure why this is a hit and make variations of this.” This was successful because it was tied to someone’s identity, it was successful because it had cats in it, or it was successful…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

When there’s a startup that sells, for example, or there’s a startup that’s super successful and is growing, people’s view of who drove the success is very highly correlated to who they know at the company. Chris Dixon will say, “Oh, HuffPost is really a tech company and Jonah was a big important pa…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

You end up reaching people who are not satisfied with what they’re getting from you. Which isn’t good for a brand.

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

Around that time, at BuzzFeed we had figured out that you could rapidly swarm a breaking news topic, particularly about a person, place, or thing that was new, like a beauty queen who loses her crown and no one’s heard of this beauty queen. If you make a great page about that thing, you often could…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

There’s sometimes moments where networks are so amenable to spread. Duncan uses this forest-fire analogy, which is if there’s a forest where the underbrush is wet, the trees are far apart, there’s not many dead trees, you could take a flamethrower to it and it won’t burn. If the forest is dry and it…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

The default is always, and I saw this with all the good teachers, that it’s your fault, not the students’ fault. You should be able to figure out how to teach students something, and if there’s a student who has a learning disability, you should figure out how to route around it and explain it in an…

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

Preferential attachment is a node in a network that you connect to early and then it’s more connected so it’s more likely to attract other connections.

— Jonah Peretti, medium.com

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Did you know what you were doing when you made Punch-Drunk Love? PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: No, I was just trying to get through every day. It started to feel -- it was horrible for the first three weeks. Just felt terrible, like I didn't know... none of it looked good, none of it l…

— Francis Ford Coppola & Paul Thomas Anderson, medium.com

'Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second-guessed by every little twat with a mouth. What if he starts second-guessing himself? That's the end. For him, for the clever little twats, for everyone.'

— Allister Thorne in Game of Thrones, medium.com

To calm himself at work he often blared heavy metal music.

— Michael Lewis, medium.com

Aspergers Mike Burry Tetris Affect

Desire takes the place of action and I just sit with it.

— Spencer Madsen, medium.com

Alt Lit Poetry

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