Eugene Wei

@eugene

56 Following

489 Followers

Li Jin pfp

Roped in @eugene to come this Saturday to this Farcaster meetup! RSVP: https://lu.ma/p43szrum

1 reply

3 recasts

12 reactions

Li Jin pfp

Thanks for joining our AMA with @eugene last week! To commemorate, we're minting an NFT just for channel members - @eugene says this design is very "high status." Smash that mint button: FOLLOW THIS CHANNEL FOR FUTURE ACCESS THX https://zora.co/collect/base:0xed0a2348f47d1295be1b83d7a89bb16003183dfb/1/frames

3 replies

7 recasts

19 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

'23 was a strong but not great year for movies. The ones I think back on most are Poor Things, Past Lives, Hit Man, and The Killer. '24 I'm looking forward to Dune 2, Mickey 17, Resurrection by Bi Gan, Chime by Kurosawa, Spectateurs by Desplechin, Megalopolis, Me, Weapons, Wolfs, among many others

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

Oh thanks! It's eugenewei.eth

1 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

Thanks for inviting me to do an AMA here @li and thanks to everyone for the questions! I have to run to a meeting but will try to answer any questions I missed over the weekend.

0 reply

2 recasts

18 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

I haven't spent a ton of time here yet (I plan to), but the fact that this seems to have strong penetration among the crypto community makes it feel more focused, like a subreddit.

0 reply

0 recast

3 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

I need a chance to play with it before providing feedback! Will take a look.

1 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

I just got a copy of Chris' book at a release party in NYC, haven't had time to read it yet. What's the tldr on what he predicts?

0 reply

0 recast

0 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

But in truth, status itself is neutral, and it can be employed in both positive and negative ways. We should seek to accord status to that which we want to see more of. It's a reliable way for any society (or app) to ascribe worth to the types of behaviors they value.

1 reply

1 recast

1 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

However, there’s just a ton of research an evidence that people do seek out status in all sorts of ways. A lot of this denial seems to stem from the stigmatization of the word status or more specifically "status-seeking". When someone is described that way, it's usually seen as a character flaw.

0 reply

0 recast

5 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

All the time. I agree that status isn’t the only thing that motivates people. Also, status is a spectrum, and I’ve met people who fall all along different points of that, from people who care only about status to those who seem like saints and immune to it.

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

Help me out here @li !

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

There are always lessons from the past that get buried. However, I'm okay with the spirit of "maybe it's time to let the old ways die" for now. I'd take that irreverence over complacency. Progress depends on a base of dissatisfaction.

1 reply

2 recasts

3 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

I always defer to @li on questions like this. But one that jumps to mind is just some baseline ease of use. Facebook was underrated for scaling to a billion plus users including moms and grandmothers. People in tech generally underrate how hard it is for many people to use/understand some of the things they build.

1 reply

0 recast

3 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

For ad-based social, it's often a failure to scale; it's tough to compete with the Meta/Google ad duopoly (see brief social network fads of the last 3-5 years, but maybe also Twitter, Snap). For social media, it can be status collapse before you achieve utility, which is just an unwinding of network effects.

0 reply

0 recast

2 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

Yes. Probably a good thing? Global scale social media doesn't feel like a stable thing, and we always already had fragmentation due to language and cultural barriers, not to mention actual barriers like the Great Firewall. But the heyday of social media was a hell of a thing while it lasted.

1 reply

0 recast

0 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

If I had to guess, it would be to focus harder on social networking over social media. TikTok is really an entertainment app with a social foundation, and Meta has moved harder away from social networking towards social media during its life.

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction

Eugene Wei pfp

These days, probably the general decline in community in Western life. I think the pandemic and then remote work were two more death blows to an already long-term worsening trend. I tend to think social media worsened things faster than internet communities could help.

0 reply

0 recast

3 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

But generally, when you let money dominate, you just replicate real world wealth hierarchies, and that seems mostly uninteresting to me. We already have plenty of ways to traverse or scan that ladder IRL.

0 reply

0 recast

2 reactions

Eugene Wei pfp

Money is a proxy for status in many societies/cultures. Not a perfect one, of course, there are plenty of rich people who aren't respected and it drives some of them mad. The most interesting use I've seen seems to be in betting markets as a true test of belief.

0 reply

1 recast

3 reactions