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Does the internet have neighborhoods? There’s no locality to the thing natively, though we’d tried to introduce it. When I lived in St. John’s in Portland, you learned people’s faces just going about doing your business. But when do you encounter others on the Internet? Your neighborhood is your social graph, whether it feels social or not, whether you can see more than your bit of it. Ideas jump along X-follows-Y relationships. The power of all the algorithmic ordering and search ranking was always that it could traverse and squeeze value from these emergent structures that we ourselves find too nebulous to name, too invisible to attend to. Those structures are what’s being built up when someone links to you, which is maybe one reason why it feels like Something in a disproportionate way – you’re not just being acknowledged with an incremented ❤️-counter, you’re being drawn closer into a mesh-neighborhood in the only way that anyone ever is
Does the internet have neighborhoods? There’s no locality to the thing natively, though we’d tried to introduce it. When I lived in St. John’s in Portland, you learned people’s faces just going about doing your business. But when do you encounter others on the Internet? Your neighborhood is your social graph, whether it feels social or not, whether you can see more than your bit of it. Ideas jump along X-follows-Y relationships. The power of all the algorithmic ordering and search ranking was always that it could traverse and squeeze value from these emergent structures that we ourselves find too nebulous to name, too invisible to attend to.
Those structures are what’s being built up when someone links to you, which is maybe one reason why it feels like Something in a disproportionate way – you’re not just being acknowledged with an incremented ❤️-counter, you’re being drawn closer into a mesh-neighborhood in the only way that anyone ever is