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> Has Kickstarter invented a new form of online commerce, where merchants who are close to you on the social graph, rather than in terms of physical geography,
by powrtoch 14y ago
> Has Kickstarter invented a new form of online commerce, where merchants who are close to you on the social graph, rather than in terms of physical geography, can thereby charge a premium for products which would never fly in the open market?
I think this is by far the most interesting sentence in the entire article. Traditionally we think of the web as a globalizing force, which will tend to strengthen big business: I might choose a mom-n-pop bookstore over Barnes and Noble if it's nearby and I'm buying in person. But online it will be at a severe disadvantage, and I'm not likely to find it at all unless I set out for it specifically. It's interesting to think that there may be an online equivalent of this physical proximity effect in the social graph. This possibility seems to open up lots of interesting avenues for discussion.
- maratd 14y agoIn this case, social is a really fluid term. I just bought into the Kickstarter for Wasteland 2 by Brian Fargo. I never played Wasteland. I did play Fallout, which was also a work that Brian Fargo was involved in. One of my favorite games. I would have never jumped in on the Kickstarter unless I knew and had experience with the work of Brian Fargo. I never met the guy, never even knew what the guy looked like, what he was up to in the last few decades, never talked to him ... but I heard and experienced his work. That was enough. Is that social? Even if you never do any kind of actual socializing, in the traditional sense? Sounds to me like the internet allows us to strongly connect with anything and anyone we have experience with, no matter how tangential, while filtering out the rest as noise.
- wahnfrieden 14y agoSocial proof. You don't need to make contact with someone for social elements to come into play.
- maratd 14y ago> Social proof. That's more like seeing that other people like something and you decide to try it out. I strongly limit my time in which I try new things that other people like. On the other hand, things that I already have experience with and like, have a far lower threshold for my time.
- wlesieutre 14y agoDoes "social proof" somehow differ from reputation? It feels like a new word for a much older idea, and I'm not clear on whether it's got some additional connotation to it.
- powrtoch 14y agomaratd's comment next to yours is correct. It's actually an old term (well, old relative to social media) used by psychologists to describe the way people make judgments (consciously or otherwise) based on the behavior of their peers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof