Macromegas #11 - Friday Reads
Social Network Status, Cyber-Crime, and Automated Customer Complaints
Hi friends,
Happy Friday!
I changed provider for the newsletter, much better readability for you.
I am also changing the format starting from next week: stay tuned!
Useful Knowledge
Best articles I read over the past few weeks that can help you understand the world better around strategy, macroeconomics, finance, and economic history.
Looking at social networks as status brokers/marketplaces
Yeah, my title is messed up. But that's the beauty of this essay. Still more self-explanatory than the original one: "Status as a Service (StaaS)" - and I would argue, closer to what the author actually demonstrates.
It is a brilliant one though. Short extract:
"It's difficult to overstate what a momentous sea change it was for hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of humans who had grown up competing for status in small tribes, to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against EVERY PERSON THEY HAD EVER MET.
Predictably, everything exploded. The number of posts increased. The engagement with said posts increased."
The author looks at social networks as a way for users to accumulate status, as in "real life". He then runs an analogy between status and capital, social networks providing a way (utility) to monetize status into financial dividends. Not that far-fetched when you think of it.
Read the full essay here: Status as a Service (StaaS)
Why cyber-crime pays... as long as you stay low profile
To be 100% clear, I actually work against cyber fraud.
An easy-to-read article on the recent Twitter hack and underlying bitcoin scam. The author summarises very well why the fraudsters are probably very smart to have remained humble in their "earnings". He develops around a few hypothetical alternatives. Instructive and entertaining.
The discussion reminds me of my self-defence anti-terrorism lessons: a criminal always weighs risks vs. rewards. A criminal is as focused on ROI as any other business out there.
Only a terrorist does not care about the costs. Those guys clearly were not terrorists and knew where to draw the line.
Read the article here: The Hack: When Crime Pays Fractions of a Penny on the Dollar
For the very open-minded, a fascinating essay by the one and only Gwern on why Terrorism Is Not Effective: to take with a pinch (shovel?) of salt, but brilliant thinking.
Customer support bots... for customers
A very interesting business model - in the US only for now as far as I am aware. I guess GPT-3 will bring this to the next level.
Probably a more scalable way to push the customer-support time-destroying war back to companies' turf than having to write to their CEOs to actually solve things.
Read the full story there: DoNotPay’s legal bots help consumers fight the system during lockdown
Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and talk to you next week,
V