And You Will Know Us By The Company We Keep: Graph Design in Social Media

The author argues that social apps built as a content feed over the user's social graph face a hard-to-reverse design problem, since who a user follows and who follows them shape the feed's quality and the audience for posts. The essay says Western apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram approximate an interest graph with a social graph, which requires getting users to follow many accounts early and causes negative network effects at scale. Facebook's churn is described as stemming from context collapse as its graph grew to include everyone's family, and Pinterest's female skew at launch is cited as an example of a feedback loop built from the social graph.