We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor AT&T business.
Think about a device that's going down the aisles on Wheels by itself sleek-looking tall friendly fast and curious. These robots are
That's Robert. Boyanov. Ski a 5 G
expert at AT&T business
and the robot. He's describing is making its way to a supermarket near you think of a robotic vacuum, but on steroids, it's got the ability to scan inventories up and down the aisle in an autonomous way. Is it on the Shelf? Not on the Shelf? What's selling? What's not selling? These retail robots are ready to realm beyond the supermarket.
Else, but how later in the show Robert will explain how five G's Mass connectivity will help allow a fleet of retail robots to flourish in the meantime visit att.com 5G for Biz to learn more that's att.com 5 G fo R bi Z.
You are the framer. You are the framer of the constitution in this world that you are building. You are the Abraham in the series of begats an Abraham begat Isaac Isaac begat Jacob.
That's Kettering a fake. She's the co-founder of Flickr and arguably the Abraham of social media.
Clicker begat a whole series of innovations that would shape the way we use social media back in 2004, which is basically Biblical times in Silicon Valley Flickr was the home to a teeny tribe of people who started sharing their photos online photo-sharing begat. The idea of followers followers begat activity feeds activity feeds begat more followers, and then Bots pretending to be followers. It's actually started showing how many conventions of social media
You were begat by Flickr.
And when Katarina looks back through that long series of begats and behold her creation. What does she say
these products have come to be called social media, but that's not what Flickr was.
I know plenty of people who would love to take credit for the Genesis of social media even partial credit or accidental credit Katerina. However, doesn't want to take any credit at all social media to her is like an alien that burst out a flicker stomach and to
One who loves flicker together with Facebook Twitter Instagram. She wants to make one thing clear. That was not what she was trying to beget.
It was an online community. The reason that they called it social media is because you can sell media you can sell column inches, you can sell broadcast hours. You can advertise against it, but it was not social media. That's not what it was. It was an online community and that meant that everybody who was there was not marketing.
They were having conversations. They were known to each other and they were being part of the community. They're participating. And so that is the spirit under which flicker had been
conceived if anything Katerina is no longer the Abraham of social media. She is the Noah moments before the flood what she sees in today's social media is a Corruption of the online communities. She hoped to see blossoming across the web to fix them. She says you
Almost have to start over go back to the founding principles.
And this doesn't apply only to what we call social media. There are many communities online marketplaces crowdfunding platforms content sites and many of them are thriving because they recognized as Katarina. Does that what you're creating is a civilization you are the framer The Giver of laws the establisher of norms and the way you lead your first generation of users will shape how they lead the Next Generation and the next that's why I believe every founder of an online community.
Has to shape the culture from day one because the tone you set is the tone. You're going to keep you got to have incredible Talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going home. This is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. So so it's do I have no idea what to
do. Sorry. I made a
mistake with you have to time it right.
This is masters of scale.
I'm Reid Hoffman co founder of LinkedIn investor Greylock and your host and I believe that every founder of an online community has a responsibility to shape the culture from day one because the tone you set is the tone. You're going to keep your first users and the tone of their first interactions will set the Norms of the entire civilization. Maybe you don't think you're an online community. Maybe you think you're a platform or Marketplace. Maybe you think you're a Commerce site with reviews or
Content site with comments. Maybe you think your social media I have news for you. Those are all online communities and given the year we had in 2017. We all have a lot to learn and I say this recognizing that no cider platform can 100% control what its users do particularly when they run in the millions or billions. Some of them will run amok count on it. That's all the more reason to put the guard rails in place before it's too late those
Early users are a bit like a primordial amoeba just moments before devolves into a more advanced life-form lightning strikes and what crawls out of the muck is anybody's guess what you can control however is the climate in which this microscopic Community evolves. You can make it hospitable to good behavior or to bad behavior. You can get the troll like creatures to shrivel up and die or you can let them grow too grotesque.
Portions and lorded over everyone one rule of scale. Whatever you are when you're small gets Amplified when you're big. So take a really close. Look at what you are the good and the bad and if there's anyone who believes Founders can and must shape their communities, it's Katerina fake. I wanted to talk to her about this because she played a key role in shaping so many iconic companies that set the standard for what an online community could be her first company flicker launched many.
E of the conventions now common in social media. It's hard to overstate the influence. She has had she also played a role as an investor advisor and board member and shaping many other iconic online communities companies like Etsy Kickstarter and stack Overflow, which expanded are very definition of what an online community could be her Eagle Eye for the seeds of communities that can scale have made her an impressive investor.
Katerina's fascination with online communities began as a teenager in the 1980s back. Then the internet was like a gathering of ham radio enthusiasts breaker breaker. We're tuning in and out of each other's conversations Katarina had dabbled with computers and early chat rooms, but what hooked her was a long-distance connection around a shared passion.
The real thing that got me interested in it was I was really into bore Hayes you Jorge Luis Borges Hayes the Argentinian writer who in many ways predicted the
internet we ask Katarina to select her favorite passages from Jorge Luis Borges and you can find them on our website masters of scale.com. But if you have no familiarity with Boris, you're not alone. In fact, you're in the majority. It's the bore his fans who are more likely to feel alone, which is exactly
actually what Drew Katerina to A Primitive chat room for fellow fans, they found a group of
Scholars and Denmark who are born Hayes Scholars online and then I contacted them and this was over like bbs's or ways or I don't remember how you're getting in touch with each other but this was back kind of pre-web and we were having all of these fascinating conversations across the world and this to me just was astonishing I was you know,
this New Jersey kid and Reagan America and you know a bit of an oddball interested in all these peculiar things and a football and cheerleading Town. It was a revelation. It was amazing all of these people who were intelligent interesting fascinating like the same things that I did that didn't live in Morris County New Jersey were suddenly people that I could be in
touch with
Think about it. She felt more at home online than she did in our actual Hometown. This is the power of an online community writ small notice how she can't even remember which tool she used for communication to katharina. The tool is an afterthought. What sticks out in her memory is the conversation that connection she forged with her fellow users and this deep-seated appreciation for these very human factors is one of the things that sets
scattering apart from so many other entrepreneurs and investors a lot of Founders, especially the tech entrepreneurs tend to think of the tool. They want to build as opposed to the community. The primary Paradigm tends to be here's a tool. It's a hammer. It's a screwdriver I give it to users to do a specific thing and the secondary thing tends to be here is the interface. How can I modify to make the behavior addictive you can see it in the craze and Silicon Valley for a versus B testing?
When a programmer says see when the button is red and jiggles a little bit you click on it a lot more but Katerina doesn't fight for clicks. She fights create that homey feeling that she first experienced in the Boer Jesus message room the connection between people that's what she hopes to scale. She is a passion for human interaction. That's not exactly typical in Silicon Valley. So how did Katerina the boar case fanatic and liberal arts graduate wind up in Silicon Valley. It was a
Typical error actually, she got waylaid on a trip to the Himalayas. I was on my way
to climb mountains in Nepal. I was on a mountaineering Expedition and decided to stop off and see my sister and then my trip got canceled. So I stayed in my sister spare bedroom. This was back when San Francisco actually you could have a spare
bedroom for those of you who do not live in San Francisco. The cost of living has gone way up a spare bedroom is hard to
find tell me about it. And then at some point she said, you know
Have you ever thought of
getting a job
and I was an artist who moved here from New York my resume did not appeal to employers which was fine because actually I never really sought employment. You know, this is a kind of probably a very common thing with entrepreneurs is that I distinguished myself and my unemployability and as a result had to find my own way and build my own companies and this was something that
You can
do if you have initiative if you have freedom in a few also happen to show up in San Francisco in
1994.
Back then Silicon Valley was a wild west of job opportunities Katarina, hop from one startup job to the next become new skills along the way she worked for a CD-ROM company a research lab all the while she held fast to one enduring truth people love to connect online her first entrepreneurial venture was a multi-user game called game never-ending you did.
That name rings a bell. Congratulations. You're clearly listening to this show carefully a previous guest slack Stewart Butterfield worked on a very same game. You might recall how that early Venture
fared. It did not take off and we went through that miserable miserable marks where you just go from investor meeting to investor meeting to investor meeting and you just just pile up projections. It's a miserable March.
Ouch, I have been on that March that March is not
fun. You can hear all about that miserable march on the masters of scale episode called the big pivot. I want to focus instead on its happy ending there was a buried feature in the game that let players share photos and leave notes for one another a conversation emerged a community formed and that photo sharing system would eventually form the foundation of flicker a service that did nothing short of rewrite the way people interacted online.
Remember that bolt of lightning that strikes an amoeba and creates a new life form. This was it and it will go faster than anyone could have predicted.
Flicker would pave the way for every social site that would come after it like Facebook Pinterest Instagram Snapchat. They introduced conventions like tagging and following that are now deeply woven into the fabric of our online relationships. And if you ask Katerina, there were two hidden secrets behind flicker
success.
Bill gross at idea lab did this research where he looked at all of the different companies 200 300 companies that he had invested in over his career and tried to figure out what it was that made them successful was it execution was that the market was at their financing was at their team? What was it and it turned out that it was their timing and that they had found a parade in gotten in front of it. They had found larger societal and cultural movements that were happening and
You look at when we started Flickr we started it in 2003 more than 50% of all cameras were shipping with digital phones and nobody had any idea where to put these photographs and so Flickr was born at exactly the right moment.
So their timing was impeccable, but it wasn't the only secret to their success Katerina did more than just get users to click on the upload a photo button. She shaped their conversation from day one. She volunteered to greet each and every new user on Flickr personally
Flickr was as I said an online community and not social media and all of us participated in it, and we were engaged in the conversation and it grew and it grew very rapidly your
In a civilization you were the person who actually everybody is taking the lead from whatever values whatever the mores are of the platform of the community. We say this and we don't say that we have a custom of reading people here.
These early interactions set the tone for everything that will follow and in every kind of community from a company to an online photo sharing site culture cement very quickly. It's critical to get in front of it. But that's not to say it's
easy, you know in the very beginning of flicker each of us, you know, we're a team of five or six people. We're posting an average of 50 times a day in communication with our user base. I mean, it was kind of like a remarkable amount of
Communication directly with the
users most Founders would consider these social interactions grunt work and try to automate them away as quickly as possible with Bots or interns, but Katerina, she just keeps engaging
if you do that and you do it. Well, it will carry through and then 500 people will be behaving the same way and then five thousand people will be behaving that same way and then eventually
Hundred thousand people will be behaving that same way
culture sticks. It's hard to appreciate just how much it sticks the tone you set from day one from the first greeting is the tone. You keep Katarina understood this instinctively and as counterintuitive as it may sound she knew it was worth her time as a Founder to get it right what really astonishes her is how quickly Founders try to distance themselves from the community. They're trying to
build it's very rare these days for there to be direct.
It tation between companies and their user base. In fact, they're seen as a customer service problem eating up customer service hours and actually most companies actually try to prevent you from getting in touch with them, you know just can't spend all of the time to kind of nurture each individual person
katharina understood instinctively not only the importance of cultivating a community but also the complexity have no doubt community building is complex.
And it's filled with traps. It's not sufficient to Simply say hello to new users and send them on their merry way. Remember you were building a civilization. You have to lead by example, but it will only take you so far. Sometimes you have to assert your values at the risk of losing users. And you may be surprised how quickly users test your values. I heard a great example of this kind of test for my friend Joey toe. He's the director of the MIT media lab and a great champion.
Open egalitarian systems online. He told me a story of being tested by users the kind of users. We've come to call trolls this story took place last decade but it could easily be last week. It started with a mailing list called net surf where we would all share our links about the interesting websites that we'd found and at some point some slightly troll. Like people were hanging on the mailing list. And I said, you know you guys this is like my living room get out of here. Don't behave like that.
That they said this isn't your living room. It's a but it's all my services. I don't care. This is a public space. I can say what I want and I thought oh that's kind of weird because I created I'm running it. But all right, fine whatever, you know, I've lost control of this mailing list.
Giving up as one option and later in the episode. Joey will share his latest thinking on fighting trolls Katerina. However was a bit more vocal from the beginning Flickr was tested very early and very vocally by its users and this shape Katarina's fundamental approach to online communities. You have to know who you are who you're for and what you stand
for, you know, a very interesting case came up very early on in Flickr, which is that a great number of the users were from the United Arab Emirates and at the same.
Time Britney Spears was ascendant with her bare midriff outfits these two things were incompatible. You know, the Muslim Community did not like the bare midriff photographs that were all over Flickr and we had to make a decision and we came down on the side of the bare midriff. We're like, the bare midriff is okay here and that is a decision that we are going to from on high are going to make and many
e of the community members went
away this bare midriff issue may sound trivial. In fact decisions. Like these are the lifeblood of your community. It isn't that anyone decision is the right decision. You can imagine other flourishing communities coming down against the bare midriff, but you have to decide this is what I mean by creating a hospitable climate for certain types of behavior every founder of an online community must grapple with a daily if you're not crap.
With it, you're living with a false sense of neutrality. You're actually allowing your most extreme users to make the decision for you because in these cases a non-decision is also a decision. So for example, early and Linkedin we created a connections game the number of connections you have with other members was your score we put that score front and center on your profile. So that people would play the connections game. It was an excellent way to drive user growth and we could have just let the game go on.
On Ad nauseam, there was just one problem as users got a bit too hooked on the game and inevitably some of them would then that connection score would signify nothing. It would represent a pointless. Tally of how many hands are user could shake a day. In fact, I remember one person on LinkedIn who a match 32 thousand connections. There's no way he knew 32,000 people. So he kept the scored 500 after that the score remained fixed and you got stuck with a
Old plus sign 500 plus game over the point is we're aspiring to create a very real and specific social interaction your connections on LinkedIn had to be people you knew well enough to refer to other people that you know, anyone who's ever attended a networking event will know how this can play out in the real world. You'll make superficial connections where you just say. Hey I bumped into you in the hallway and now we're connected that was not the sort of interaction. We were trying to recreate on LinkedIn and said we wanted users to say. Oh, yeah. I met this person.
Person at a conference. They seem pretty interesting and solid what they're interested in seems to be something that's interesting to you. So here I'm passing along the introduction. That was the conversation we aim for that was the conversation we designed for and that we never lost sight of that said some small percentage of people started putting their total number of Connections in the headline because they wanted to keep playing the game C'est La Vie. The point is you need to imagine those interactions in Vivid detail. You need a hypothesis for how
The community should behave so you can model the behavior you want to see and as you see that good behavior emerge you'll have clarity about the way forward. You can set the guardrails that keep interactions from veering off course and the often unpredictable ways that humans can Katerina always had a clear idea of how people should engage and this help flicker grow quickly and civilly into a platform with remarkably few trolls amongst a remarkably large user base and March 2005.
Less than a year after their pivot flickers told Yahoo! And Katarina found herself for the first time with both money and time to pursue what she loved and what she loved as much as community and art and bore case was entrepreneurs. She started a parallel career of Angel Investing in early-stage companies especially ones that had all of the signs of a flourishing fledgling Community
a very strong motivating force and all of the work that I've done has been building a more human internet bill.
A very thoughtful people oriented internet and if you look at the companies that I subsequently invested after flicker they have a lot of things in common at Sea is a very strong example of that's a very community-oriented product. It's very person-to-person. It's very human.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor AT&T business think of a robotic vacuum, but on steroids, we're back with Robert boyanov. Ski a 5 G expert at AT&T business. He was telling us about the retail robots that roam Supermarket aisles and are now expanding their territory moving into a cellular environment allows the robot to do more things. It can now go
Outside the building now you can take it back to where those trucks are coming in unpacking and doing more inventory Logistics control in and out of the front office or back office. Now, imagine a fleet of these retail robots communicating with millions of store items the numbers get mind-boggling. They're supposed to be 35 billion connected things. Give or take a few billion, depending on Whose estimate you're looking at we all know 5G Networks.
Are fast but they're also built to handle the billions of devices will find in the future from retail robots to smartphones. So one of the enabling Technologies and five she is This Promise around massive device connectivity. The network has got to be able to manage all of these things and very small spaces. So it really gives customers this new Option or opportunity to think about if I'm going to connect all these things and get data from
These things now I can use a 5 G system to do that. Where in the past you really couldn't the 5G future is coming fast along with its capacity for Mass connectivity to learn what that means for your business. Visit att.com 5G forbids to learn more. That's att.com 5 G fo R bi Z.
At see the marketplace for small-scale Artisans selling homemade goods from quirky ceramic mugs to Whimsical fuzzy socks. The company went public in 2015 with a valuation of roughly 3.5 billion dollars revenue and 2016 was north of 350 million dollars, but in 2005, it was a different picture that around 2,000 users a few staff members and a dream
some of the people that I've invested in including for example.
Rob Kalin of etsy just had a story and Rob had had no prior work experience at all zero. He was a
college student a college student who wanted to create a Marketplace for home that had hats it was not an obvious win, but Kettering the saw something that others including me missed
Etsy to me was a I loved it immediately and I actually brought it to you. I don't know if
if you remember it was one of my
regrets and your and
your comment was so let me understand this. This is a bunch of women knitting sweaters and then putting them into a Marketplace and I was like, correct not only is it that but it's a movement. It's the sort of rebellion against big box retail and people want their soap to come from a grandmother in Peoria. They do it's a kind of a thickets of it's a way of life.
At the time it just it kind of seemed ludicrous like really people are making tassels and they're about it. And this is gonna be a big business. I
told Katerina I regretted passing on Etsy and I do what I missed about it was this, you know, it was pitched as handmaids Goods literally handmade Goods is the opposite of scale like you can't make him a Goods. I mean, I can hire a bunch of people maybe to make handmade goods and it's kind of a factory and you'd how many can
They make look how I gotta you grow your business. How a scalable is that it's a little bit like are you creating the corner bookstore or are you creating Amazon? Right? Are you creating the gourmet chocolate tear which is really cool or you creating, you know, Godiva or Nestle, right? And so I was kind of like, well, that's cool, but it isn't really good investment. My mistake was not realizing that once you get to a network connected world that the what business people
Pam total addressable Market isn't significantly higher than you think because like we're example I was going as well as it just like the gourmet chocolate store in San Francisco's and no because it's an online Marketplace. It's the gourmet chocolate store in every city each different and you get a piece of them and I would have gone. Oh actually an early stage investment in that might actually be reasonable and so part of the mistake was, you know, when she presented to me it was before it was Venture invested, right?
If I could have put in money essentially as an angel and you know, I don't know what it's evaluation is today two billion dollars some of that but you know, that would have been a probably 50 x investment. Oops. Maybe it's one of the axe loops.
But this latent potential is what Katerina saw from the start. I asked her about it when you were looking at Etsy as part of this what made you see that Miss Marketplace there was something that could sufficiently scale into a breath of humanity. What made you look at Etsy and go this isn't just a knickknacks thing, but actually in fact is a handmade or a custom-made
Revolution one of the things that was missed.
Was that it was a principally female marketplace, right? And at the time it was 2005 2006. There were a few examples of that. But at Sea was also a market that appealed to a certain kind of semi counter cultural group
how to read a call this one right because she was looking for different markers than I was she saw an Etsy.
A start of a countercultural movement a movement that placed the value on the homemade the artisanal the local it was another parade. She could get in front of
there is definitely something to be said for positioning yourself as outside of something or as counter to something it gives you a stronger sense of identity. I stand for this and I am not that yeah. I'm not big bucks.
Tell I'm not Walmart. I'm not Target. I'm handmade soaps by Grandma's in Peoria.
Etsy also showed all the signs of community that could Thrive when Katarina took a close. Look at those first two thousand sellers what she saw was not just willing Merchants but passionate community members. They're very
passionate. It had forums in which all of the people were mutually supporting each other. They were forming their own sales groups. You could see that the activity in it pointed to always like a really interesting behaviors that sir.
Surprised you that you didn't expect you know, this unbelievable level of collaboration aren't these people competitive know they were collaborating with each other. It was a sort of amazing kind of strange thing
Katerina served as etsy's board chair for eight years and was intimately involved in growing the company her eye for Community offered foundational insights. She knew that for Etsy to thrive the founders had to include the community in decision-making these weren't the trolls on Joey toes mailing list, but rather
either passionately devoted community members who had a real stake in what happened inside their civilization and that's an important distinction. It's critical to recognize the difference between members who care about the health of the community and those who only care about themselves when you recognize these members, you see the early signs of scale and it comes back to the theory what you are when you're small gets Amplified when you grow the Etsy leadership knew they had to water these seeds of collaboration by including the
The in key decisions and fostering the connections between them in the early days. These decisions helped Etsy stayed true to its Homespun culture and they also played an advantage at Sea had in the Commerce World rather than competing. The sellers were collaborating another sign that this Commerce driven Community would have a self-propelling power to go the
distance in the very beginning a lot of the customers of at Sea. We're actually also the sellers so they were buying from each other and they were kind of it was this
Positive feedback loop it was constantly feeding into itself. The happy seller becomes the happy buyer and then invites their friends and then gradually expands in this fruitful way. And if you're building a movement a community a culture it kind of just happens organically it's rare and very few people can pull it off but you know it when you see it and I think customers know it when they see it, too.
Kettering and clearly knows it when she sees it in 2009 she made another bet that had other investors scratching their heads.
I invested in Kickstarter when it was a PowerPoint deck. They had nothing
Kickstarter the crowdfunding platform that lets fans fun projects by artists and makers it sounded unlikely the time but who go on to fund nearly a hundred and fifty thousand projects to the tune of 3.5 billion dollars pledged would initially Drew Katarina was what this community of communities could mean to the world.
I grew up wanting to be a writer or an artist and
Nobody in my family thought that that was a viable career choice for me. So I know you'll be a starving artist. You won't be able to support yourself. And so I lived with that and of course I tried I went to art school. I was living on like nine dollars an hour working as a painter's assistant and I struggled as an artist and then to hear about these companies.
Etsy and Kickstarter as these ways in which these people who have this inspired creativity have would actually have the possibility of making their work possible. That's huge. It's a dream it's blue sky. It's a magical outcome. So I think that was what ended up getting me
involved Katarina would go on to found invest in many.
Companies drawing impressive returns her latest Venture is an investment fund with her partner Yuri angstrom called. Yes Ventures the specialize in seed and proceed Investments. And yes, you can predict that cultivating communities broadly defined will be at the center of what they do, but her Investments that interest me the most are the ones that I could never have made myself because they're just too far outside the area of my expertise. I asked her about the one that's farthest out for me. It was a
Another investment in a passionate Community, but of a totally different sort, what was your vision of the possibility and blue bottle? How did you see it as something that could interestingly scale and to being a great product and great
company you could see that there is a sixth incredibly strong culture and a very strong seed had been planted. It had that that very human element. It had that Mystique. It had a creation myth it had this eccentric location in the
Sally and there was something about it that you felt was true that was real that was not contrived was not grafted on marketing speak and inauthenticity. It was
real blue bottle was valued at over 700 million dollars with 50 locations worldwide and the customers there is passionate as ever. So once again, you can see how the earliest interactions with users or customers sets the tone for the community as it grows.
Whether it's a physical store or virtual community the same principles apply and when something goes awry you can place a pretty good bet that what went wrong went wrong early on Katerina sees a lot that's gone wrong with today's social media platforms. But the biggest problem she says they don't know who they are.
This is a very controversial position because a lot of my colleagues in building these social platforms don't believe this but I do and which is that I believe that
Your moral compass the things that you believe and these systems are so big that they are trying to Encompass all and I think that that's why they're failing one of the things that Heather champ who is a community manager the First Community manager on Flickr one thing that she says repeatedly, is that what you tolerate is what you are. So if you tolerate white supremacists on your platform, you're a platform for white supremacists and you just
Have to accept that and that unless you draw the lines unless you say what is and is not acceptable on your platform. It just becomes a disaster because you want to be part of a community that share your values and you don't share values with white
supremacists. I generally agree with Katarina in the case of flicker. They tolerated the bare midriff and they welcome the Britney Spears fans, but they drew a bright red line at White.
Chemists and the truth is every founder of an online community tends to draw lines like this in their heads. They just tend to get a bit sheepish about stating them aloud and with good reason. There's a standard way of thinking about this in Silicon Valley which argues that large online platforms are inherently objective and do not have values of their own. I think this is incorrect all platforms are in fact, value-laden the question for a very large platform then becomes how do you create a set of values?
Who's that has the kind of shared objectivity for example on the Facebook side. They say well what people click on mass demonstrates their actual preferences what they actually like and so we have a democratic platform that promotes what people click on it's a reflection of actual behavior and preferences you might reply will if you let that run wild we'd all be clicking on the seven deadly sins all the time whether it's nude pictures hate speech a photo of a baby cheetah sitting on your new Maserati.
And that's real by the way look it up on Rich Kids of Instagram. If you don't believe me. Anyway, the list goes on we know that those are our triggers and we don't want to be collectively reduced to our basest instincts. We don't want to become a quivering mass of the seven deadly sins on the other hand when people say well, you know, Facebook should have human editors. I think o human editors and they'll decide what 2 billion people who use Facebook today should and should not see
Who are these trusted supervisors who will oversee Facebook's Ministry of Truth? So it's a tricky question. I'm not sure I know where to strike the balance between editorial Anarchy and orwellian control. The question is actually dog to creators online community since the invention of the internet as my friend Joey to observed. He's been thinking about the problem internet trolls since he launched the mailing list. He told us about earlier what's complicated about trolling is that well, first of all, it's been around
Obviously from the very beginning and some trolling is actually funny and I troll people as well. So there's really horrible trolling and then there's sort of just mildly annoying trolling when you think about it online communities, like any civilization are always evolving. It is after all a living system and Joey has the Perfect Analogy to explain why this battle for a healthy Community will never end. Maybe a good metaphor is bacteria or some sort of human health system.
And how you're always constantly battling with pathogens and some of it is your immune system. Some of it is you just power through it some of it like the common cold just still happens, but there are deadly epidemics it occur and we try to figure out system sometimes, you know, the behavior will just run its course and kill a huge percentage of the population, but then we're resistant to it. And I think those metaphors are actually quite strong. I mean II think of isis's trolls right there, really?
Kind of in that category and and the similarities in the microbiome CDF is a category of bacteria that when you get you get massive diarrhea and it's a horrible problem, but you don't fix it by taking more antibiotics, which was the original thing actually doing a fecal transplant seems to work better and it's by bringing a vibrant culture of healthy bacteria into the system. The C diff is still there, but it becomes a minor subculture rather than the dominant culture and so for me one of the ideas that I'm thinking about is, how do you overcome?
I run bad culture with good culture. And how do you do the online equivalent of a fecal transplant? I guess it doesn't sound perfect. But besides this but roughly like that and so so I feel like you fight bad with good rather than fighting bad with control or destructive forces. Maybe it's not yet. The Perfect Analogy fecal transplants aside what I find clarifying about this analogy is that it shuts down the question. How do we eradicate bad and ugly Behavior online that's like wishing all of mankind would
Actually, behave like angels on Earth. It's just contrary to our nature. But if we reframe the question as how do we invigorate good behavior? So it drowns out the bad and ugly Behavior than the solution comes into view first invigorate the good behavior from day one make that the foundation of your community at the very least. You'll have a wall between your first users and The Barbarians at the gate second never tell yourself that battle for civility has been won it
it hasn't it never will be the barbarians are coming.
But if you are me Community with good tools good manners and good examples from day one. You'll be ready.
I'm Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening.
Next week on Masters of scale my friend Sam Altman the president of Y combinator silicon Valley's most prestigious startup accelerator startups. Once they get big enough can only grow by word of mouth all the growth hacking eventually stops working if you're going to keep growing exponentially at some point it is probably going to be because people tell you you got to use this product with me or you got to try this at so great masters of scale is a wait what original our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren true if I pretend
Here's our Dan CAD me Chris McLeod Jenny Cataldo and been Manila are supervising producer is Jay Punjabi original music and sound design is by the holiday Brothers mixing and mastering by Brian Pew special. Thanks to Chris Shea say it except ieva Eliza Schreiber David Sanford and Stephanie Kent visit masters of scale.com to find the transcript for this episode.
And now a final word from our sponsor AT&T business.
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