The Importance of Network Effects For Emerging Tech
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startupnationcentral/2018/03/18/why-a-network-effect-is-the-only-way-your-startup-can-win/#2b9a61a07527 The article I chose spoke about the importance that strong network effects had on the success of emerging tech platforms and companies. As we learned in class, a network effect is a phenomena in which the benefit provided to each individual user increases proportionally with the total amount of users for that product. […]
Think Before You Retweet: Why False News Cascades Faster Than True News on Twitter
“We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude [on Twitter],” remarked Professor Sinan Aral of MIT Sloan School of Management regarding a research paper he recently co-authored on this subject. The research, conducted at […]
Information cascades in fake news
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/11/18/high-school-students-unequipped-spot-fake-news/ In recent years fake news has been a big issue with social media and online websites, particularly in relation to elections. This epidemic inspired a new Stanford experiment testing high school students’ ability to detect fake news. The results were alarming with one question having only a 4% success rate since the other […]
Power Laws on the Internet
This Guardian article is about the ubiquity of the effects of the power law on the internet. The author points out that although people tend to characterize things in terms of averages, the normal distribution is not all that common in many aspects of society. Some examples of power laws on the internet were the […]
Reverse Network Effects in Social Media
Link: https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/03/reverse-network-effects-todays-social-networks-can-fail-grow-larger/ Network effects can be key for internet startups looking for fast and large scale growth. On sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube the value for the user increases as the number of users does. As online networks continue to grow they can seem almost fail proof but there are also plenty of questions […]
The Relationship between Investing and Expected Utility
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/11/17/5-investment-strategies-that-can-help-you-become-a.aspx This article gives five pieces of investment advice. The first is to choose low-cost investments, for example, index funds. The second is to use the right accounts, which involves choosing a retirement account based on whether you will be making more or less money than now when you retire. The third is to stay […]
The Role of Weak Ties in Social Activism
For this post, I wanted to revisit an old concept we covered at the start of this course: strong and weak ties in a network. Specifically, I wanted to do so, since I’d come across this article – linked below – about the role that weak ties can play in allowing for effective social activism. […]
Academic Groupthink: An Information Cascade
How Groupthink Is Harmful in Academia This article discusses the problem of groupthink that exists in academia. This centers around the fact that when a prominent researcher or academic in a field publishes a paper or takes a certain stance, few will disagree, instead even conducting studies that tend to support the initial finding. Research […]
Digital platform and network effects
https://hbr.org/2018/06/why-network-effects-matter-less-than-they-used-to One of the reasons why people follow the crowd is because of the direct benefits that come along with it, despite whether or not it is a good decision for each of the individuals. And network effects was one of the key business model which describes the positive relationship between the number […]
The Rich Continue to Get Richer
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/11/12/the-1-owns-almost-as-much-wealth-as-the-middle-class-will-the-rich-keep-getting-richer/#4d4186e44323 We’ve talked about the “rich get richer” phenomenon in class, and how it applies to not just peoples’ income or net worth, but also to YouTube videos, tweets, etc. This article from Forbes discusses the present “rich get richer” situation in the United States, and why it doesn’t look like it will dissipate […]
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