Old interview from Alex Zhu who founded Musical.ly now TikTok. Analysis still holds true for social media today, and actually has a lot in common with @eugenewei’s StaaS theory:

1. People come for utility and stay for content and networks

2. Young people have a lot of time and skills (creativity), but less social capitals

3. A platform needs to issue “tokens” (social status) by exchanging their “proof-of-work” (time*skills) created in the tool

4. The content has to be extremely light (within seconds) – both on the consumption and creation ends

5. To build a community from scratch you need to first let a small set of people be “rich”, then cultivate the “middle class”

6. Once they get over the fame, influencers need to monetization from the platform