I think in general it’s like life is tricky because it happens once and there’s no opportunity for A/B testing. It could be that you are living your best possible life and that if you re-play Felix Salmon’s life hundreds of other times, that this life you’re living is the best or among the top 5…
Catalog
Jonah Peretti
Jonah Peretti (born January 1, 1974) is an American Internet entrepreneur, a co-founder of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, and developer of reblogging under the project "Reblog". 2Life and educationEdit Peretti grew up in Oakland, California. His father is of Italian and English descent and his mother is Jewish. His stepmother was African-American. He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he graduated with a degree in environmental studies in 1996. He taught computer science classes at Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, Louisiana in the mid-1990s. He completed a postgrad at the MIT Media Lab. While there, he became known for an email exchange with Nike over a request to print "sweatshop" on custom order shoes that went viral. He is the brother of comedian and writer Chelsea Peretti and married to blogger Andrea Harner. 2CareerEdit 3The Huffington PostEdit Peretti co-founded The Huffington Post, along with Kenneth Lerer and Arianna Huffington in 200
It’s not paranoid to think that the audience watching broadcast television is old. And it’s not paranoid to think people, particularly young people, are spending a lot of time on their phones and a lot of time on the Internet. It’s accurate to say that media consumption is changing in a pretty…
Part of the idea of BuzzFeed from the beginning was can we get to the point where the platform is more valuable than the expertise? If you actually have an idea or an insight into how things are shared or why they’re shared or what works, can you build that into either the technology platform or the…
I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, particularly for a single metric, you end up finding that the best way to optimize for that metric ends up perverting the metric and…
When we have something that’s a hit, usually our response is not, “Let’s do more of those.” Our response is, “Let’s figure why this is a hit and make variations of this.” This was successful because it was tied to someone’s identity, it was successful because it had cats in it, or it was successful…
When there’s a startup that sells, for example, or there’s a startup that’s super successful and is growing, people’s view of who drove the success is very highly correlated to who they know at the company. Chris Dixon will say, “Oh, HuffPost is really a tech company and Jonah was a big important…
You end up reaching people who are not satisfied with what they’re getting from you. Which isn’t good for a brand.
Around that time, at BuzzFeed we had figured out that you could rapidly swarm a breaking news topic, particularly about a person, place, or thing that was new, like a beauty queen who loses her crown and no one’s heard of this beauty queen. If you make a great page about that thing, you often could…
There’s sometimes moments where networks are so amenable to spread. Duncan uses this forest-fire analogy, which is if there’s a forest where the underbrush is wet, the trees are far apart, there’s not many dead trees, you could take a flamethrower to it and it won’t burn. If the forest is dry and…
The default is always, and I saw this with all the good teachers, that it’s your fault, not the students’ fault. You should be able to figure out how to teach students something, and if there’s a student who has a learning disability, you should figure out how to route around it and explain it in…
Preferential attachment is a node in a network that you connect to early and then it’s more connected so it’s more likely to attract other connections.
The trend that is easy to forecast in broad terms is the internet – more things are going to be transformed by the Internet.
If every news organization puts the majority of their content behind paywalls, it’s hard to have an informed electorate.