Build a more human internet, w/Caterina Fake

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

Creative planning was built to fix exactly that. One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together. Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

Global hiring is such a headache when you're building fast, but companies like Eleven Labs are scaling effortlessly with deal. They quadrupled their workforce in twenty twenty five. Without hiring an HR team. Build your global team with deal. Visit deal.com slash MOS and start expanding your business today. That's D E L

dot com. Slash M O S. Hey, folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more.

Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too. Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscot com slash apply. Twenty six.

Yeah. 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. And Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac.

We got Jacob. That's Katerina Fake. She's the co-founder of Flicker. And arguably The Abraham of social media.

Flicker. Begat. A whole series of innovations that would shape the way we use social media. Back in two thousand and four. Which is basically biblic in Silicon Valley. Flicker 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 astonishing how many conventions of social media were begat by Flickr. And when Katarina looks back through that long series of bigats and beholds her creation. What does she say? These products have come to be called social media.

But that's not what Flicker. 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 of flicker's stomach. And to anyone who lumps Flickr 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. Ба і вас на соціаль.

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.

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 recognize, as Katerina 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 gonna keep.

You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. We haven't made it. Just how you do it. This is masters of scale.

I'm Reed 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 gonna keep.

Your first users and the tone of their first interactions Will set the norms for the entire civilization. Maybe you don't think you're an online community. Maybe you think you're a platform or a marketplace. Maybe you think you're a commerce site with reviews, or a content site with comments. Maybe you think you're 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 side or 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 guardrails in place before it's too late. Those early users are a bit like a primordial amoeba, just moments before it evolves into a more advanced life form. Lightning strikes, and what crawl out of the muck is anybody's guess.

What you can control, however, Із 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 to grotesque proportions and lord it 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 it'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, Flickr, launched many 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 in shaping many other iconic online communities. Companies like Etsy. Kickstarter. And stack overflow, which expanded our 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. Material's fascination with online communities began as a teenager in the 1980s. Back then, the internet was like a gathering of ham radio enthusiasts who were tuning in and out of each other's conversations. Katerina had dabbled with computers and early chatrooms, 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 Borges. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer, who in many ways Predicted the internet. If you have no familiarity with Borges. You're not alone.

In fact You're in the majority. It's the Borges fans who are more likely to feel alone, which is exactly what drew Katerina to a primitive chat room for fellow fans. I found a group of scholars in Denmark. who were Borges scholars online. And then I contacted them, and this was over like BBSs or Ways or

I don't even remember how we were 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 Well Intelligent, interesting, fascinating, like the same things that I did, that didn't live. In Morris County, New Jersey.

We're suddenly People that I could be in touch with. Think about it. She felt more at home online than she did in her actual home town. This is the power of an online community.

Rich small. Notice how she can't even remember which tool she used for communication. To Katerina, the tool is an afterthought. What sticks out in her memory is the conversation, the connection she forged with her fellow users. And this deep seated appreciation for these very human factors is one of the things that sets Katarine 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 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 it to make the behavior addictive? You can see it in the craze in 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 to create that homey feeling that she first experienced in the Borg's message room. the connection between people. That's what she hopes to scale.

She has a passion for human interaction that's not exactly typical in Silicon Valley. So how did Katerina The Borges fanatic and liberal arts graduate. Wind up in Silicon Valley. It was a logistical 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's 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.

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. Um you know, this is a kind of probably a very common thing with entrepreneurs, is that I distinguished myself in 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, and if you also happen to show up in San Francisco in nineteen ninety four. Back then, Silicon Valley was a wild west of job opportunities. Katarina hopped from one startup job to the next. Take up 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.

If that name rings a bell, congratulations. You're clearly listening to the show carefully. A previous guest Slack Stuart Butterfield worked on the very same game. You might recall how that early venture fared. It did not take off, and we went through That

Miserable. Miserable March. Where you just go from investor meeting to investor meeting to investor meeting. And you just just pile up rejections. It's a miserable march. 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 wanna 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 Flickr. 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. Then Anyone. Could have predicted. Flickr would pave the way for every social site that would come after it.

Like Facebook. Pinterest. Instagram, Snapchat. They introduce conventions like tagging and following that are now deeply woven into the fabric of our online relationships. And if you ask Katarina

There were two hidden secrets. Behind Flickr's 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 it the market, was it their financing, was it their team? What was it? And it turned out that it was their timing.

And that They had found a parade and gotten in front of it. They had found larger societal and cultural movements that were happening. And if you look at when we started Flickr. We started it in 2003.

More than fifty percent of all cameras were shipping with digital phones. And nobody had any idea where to put these Photographs. And so Flicker 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. You're building a civilization.

You are the person who actually everybody is taking the lead from. Ветер валюз, вотер море з артформ. Of the community. We say this and we don't say that. We have a custom of greeting 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 cements 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 were posting An average of fifty 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.

Cannarina? She just keeps engaging. If you do that And you do it well. It will carry through.

And then Five hundred people will be behaving the same way. And then Five thousand people will be behaving that Same way. And then eventually

Five 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. Katerina 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 communication 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, you just can't spend all of the time to kind of nurture each individual person. Katerina 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 are 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. Flickr was tested very early and very vocally by its users. And this shaped Katerina'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 bear midriff. We were like the bear midriff is okay here. And that is a decision that we are going to from on high are going to make. And Many 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 any one 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 daily. If you're not grappling 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 in 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 ad nauseum. 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 a user could shake a day. In fact, I remember one person on LinkedIn who amassed thirty two thousand connections. There's no way he knew that

Thirty two thousand people. So we capped the score at five hundred. After that, the score remained fixed, and you got stuck with a boring old plus sign. Five hundred plus Game over.

The point is we were 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 in you in the hallway and now we're connected. That was not the sort of interaction we were trying to recreate on LinkedIn.

Instead we wanted users to say, Oh yeah. I met this 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 aimed 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. Sella V.

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 behaviour 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 in the often unpredictable ways that humans can. Katerina always had a clear idea of how people should engage, and this helped Flickr grow quickly and civilly into a platform with remarkably few trolls amongst a remarkably large user base.

In March two taus and five, less than a year after their pivot. Flicker Soldiahoo And Katerina 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 Borgas was entrepreneurs.

She started a parallel career of angel investing in early stage companies. Especially ones that had all the signs of a flourishing fledgling community. A very strong motivating force in all of the work that I've done has been building a more human internet, building a very thoughtful, People oriented internet. And if you look at the companies that I subsequently invested it after Flicker, they have a lot of things in common.

Etsy is a very strong example of that. It's a very community oriented product. It's very person to person, it's very human. When you've build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building.

Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Chayubi.

And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. At C. 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. Revenue in twenty sixteen Was north of three hundred and fifty miljones. But in two thousand five?

It was a different picture. They had around two thousand users. A few staff members And a dream. Some of the people that I've invested in including

For example, Rob Kalen 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 homemade hats. It was not an obvious win.

But Katarina 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 you remember. It was one of my regrets. And and your and your 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 this 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 like it's a 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 better 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 well. Handmade goods. Literally, handmade goods is the opposite of scale.

Like You can't make handmade goods. I mean I can hire a bunch of people maybe to make handmade goods, then it's kind of a factory and you how many can they make? Like how like how do you grow your business? How 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 chocolatier, which is really cool.

Or you're creating, you know, Gadiva or Nestle, right? And so I was kinda like, Well, that's cool, but it isn't really a good investment. My mistake Was not realising. That once you get to a network connected world

That they What business people call tam total addressable market. isn't significantly higher than you think. Because, like, for example, I was going as well, is it just like the gourmet chocolate store in San Francisco? It's like, 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'd 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 was before it was venture invested.

Right. I could have put in money essentially as an angel. And you know, I don't know what Etsy's valuation is today, two billion dollars. Something like that, but You know, that would have been a

Probably fifty X investment. Oops. Maybe twenty X. Oops.

But this latent potential is what catering is saw from the start. I asked her about it. When you were looking at Etsy as part of this. What made you

Snis 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 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 two thousand five, two thousand six, there were a few examples of that. But Etsy was Also

A market that appealed to A certain kind of Semi counter cultural group. Katerina called this one right because she was looking for different markers than I was.

She saw an Etsy. A start of a counter-cultural 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 box retail.

I'm not Walmart. I'm not Target. I'm handmade soaps by grandma's imperia. Netsy also showed all the signs of a 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 were 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 Oh, these like really interesting behaviors that sort of surprised you.

That you didn't expect. You know, this unbelievable level of collaboration. Aren't these people Competitive? No, they were collaborating with each other. It was a sort of amazing Kind of strange thing. Katarina 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 trolls, but rather 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 community in key decisions and fostering the connections between them. In the early days, these decisions helped Etsy stay true to its homespun culture. And they also played an advantage Etsy had in the commerce world.

Rather than competing, the sellers were collaborating. Another sign that this commerce driven community would have the self-propelling power to go the distance. In the very beginning, a lot of the customers of Etsy were actually also the sellers. So they were buying from each other and they were kinda 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 kinda 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. Katerina clearly knows it when she sees it. In two thousand nine, 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 fund projects by artists and makers.

It sounded unlikely at the time, but it would go on to fund nearly a hundred and fifty thousand projects. to the tune of three point five billion dollars pledged. What 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 Fiable career choice for me. So Like no, 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. I have uh would actually have The possibility of

Making their work possible. That's huge! It's it's a dream. It's blue sky. It's a magical outcome.

So I think that was what ended up getting me involved. Katerina would go on to found and invest in many companies. Drawing impressive returns. Her latest venture is an investment fund with her partner Yuri Youngstrom called Yes Ventures.

though specialize in seed and pre seed 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 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 another investment in a passionate community. But of a totally different sort. What was your

vision of the possibility in Blue Bottle. How did you see it as something that could interestingly scale into being a Great product and a great company. You could see that there is this extr incredibly strong culture and a very strong seed. had been planted it had that that very human element it had that Um mystique. It had a creation myth. It had this

eccentric location in this alley. 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 over seven hundred miljones with fifty locations worldwide. And the customers?

They're as 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 a 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. Katarina 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 line.

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 Katerina. In the case of Flicker, they tolerated the bare midriff and they welcomed the Britney Spears fans. But they drew a bright red line. At white supremacists. 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 cheapish 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 that has the kind of shared objectivity? For example, on the Facebook side, they say, Well what people click on mask

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 behaviour and preferences. You might reply. Well, 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 basis 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. Oh. human editors? And they'll decide what two 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 Orellian control. The question has actually dogged the creators online community since the invention of the internet. But if we reframe the question as, how do we invigorate good behavior so it drowns out the bad and ugly behavior, then 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 the battle for civility has been won. It hasn't. It never will be.

The barbarians are coming. But if you arm your community with good tools, good manners, and good examples from day one. You'll be ready. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening.

Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Dan Kedme, Chris McLeod, Jenny Cataldo, and Ben Manila. Our supervising producer Jay Punjabi. Original music and sound design is by the Holiday Brothers. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh.

Special thanks to Chris Shay, Saeda Sepieva, Elisa Schreiber, David Sanford, and Stephanie Kent. visit masters of scale dot com. Find a transcript for this episode.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.