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Paul Frazee

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
356 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

If you were the original holder of it, you can go back. Nobody else can, though. And so, and I guess if you delete your account, then that gets relinquished. But yeah, yeah. So that is now fixed. Go wherever you like.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

If you were the original holder of it, you can go back. Nobody else can, though. And so, and I guess if you delete your account, then that gets relinquished. But yeah, yeah. So that is now fixed. Go wherever you like.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Okay. This one's pretty fun for a couple of reasons. Um, so first of all, let me start with the context of how that got built. We, um, The full context, you have to start with the fact that we are not an algorithm company. And so our initial algorithm that people are getting landed in, we're working on it all the time and we're making some great progress on it.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Okay. This one's pretty fun for a couple of reasons. Um, so first of all, let me start with the context of how that got built. We, um, The full context, you have to start with the fact that we are not an algorithm company. And so our initial algorithm that people are getting landed in, we're working on it all the time and we're making some great progress on it.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

And I don't want to harsh the team that's working on it. They're really cruising, but it is not great yet. And so new users coming in, it's really important that they are able to get their social graph built so that the following feed could start working for them. That's point number one. Point number two is building your social graph on the app. also a bit challenging.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

And I don't want to harsh the team that's working on it. They're really cruising, but it is not great yet. And so new users coming in, it's really important that they are able to get their social graph built so that the following feed could start working for them. That's point number one. Point number two is building your social graph on the app. also a bit challenging.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Getting good recommendations for follows, that is quite hard, especially when you're seeding communities. Like, here's a design challenge for you. Make a good recommender when you don't have social clusters on there yet. How do you even evaluate if this thing is doing its job correctly? You kind of can't do it. Like, we're learning a lot about algorithm design without content to work against.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Getting good recommendations for follows, that is quite hard, especially when you're seeding communities. Like, here's a design challenge for you. Make a good recommender when you don't have social clusters on there yet. How do you even evaluate if this thing is doing its job correctly? You kind of can't do it. Like, we're learning a lot about algorithm design without content to work against.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Thankfully, that is less a problem now, but that was the kind of... We had a real chicken and egg problem. Okay, your obvious thinking is...

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Thankfully, that is less a problem now, but that was the kind of... We had a real chicken and egg problem. Okay, your obvious thinking is...

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

yeah so so okay so you're obviously thinking you're you've got this design problem well let's do like a contact import of some kind either from an existing social network or like from the address book well you can't do the address book because that has privacy problems that may not be fixable as far as i know last i heard you can't come up with an anonymized upload your address book thing without creating triangulation of people's contacts so we just said hard no we're just not comfortable with that we're not there's a

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

yeah so so okay so you're obviously thinking you're you've got this design problem well let's do like a contact import of some kind either from an existing social network or like from the address book well you can't do the address book because that has privacy problems that may not be fixable as far as i know last i heard you can't come up with an anonymized upload your address book thing without creating triangulation of people's contacts so we just said hard no we're just not comfortable with that we're not there's a

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

It's a real shame. Now that I'm on the other side of that, I get why people go ahead and do it, but we still want to cross that line. It is a shame because we're sitting there going like, we're not trying to be jerks. We're actually trying to help you, but here you are. We didn't cook up some kind of breakthrough on the privacy solution there, so we didn't bother. So, okay, that's out.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

It's a real shame. Now that I'm on the other side of that, I get why people go ahead and do it, but we still want to cross that line. It is a shame because we're sitting there going like, we're not trying to be jerks. We're actually trying to help you, but here you are. We didn't cook up some kind of breakthrough on the privacy solution there, so we didn't bother. So, okay, that's out.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Well, then you can get into, can you try to get the social graph from another social network? And the reality is none of them want to give that up. And we're really in an era where like these APIs are getting closed down. You can't do it off of the meta products and you sure as hell can't do it off of Twitter. I guarantee I know how that would go. So we, that was a non-starter too, right?

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

Well, then you can get into, can you try to get the social graph from another social network? And the reality is none of them want to give that up. And we're really in an era where like these APIs are getting closed down. You can't do it off of the meta products and you sure as hell can't do it off of Twitter. I guarantee I know how that would go. So we, that was a non-starter too, right?

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

So we're sitting around going, how the heck do we solve this problem of getting people's social graphs seeded? The original idea for starter packs was actually not just to have like a list of people to follow. It was actually to create an invite link because we have had a lot of success seeding the social network back when we were invite only.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

So we're sitting around going, how the heck do we solve this problem of getting people's social graphs seeded? The original idea for starter packs was actually not just to have like a list of people to follow. It was actually to create an invite link because we have had a lot of success seeding the social network back when we were invite only.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

And ironically, when we switched to the public thing, we lost one of the best organic mechanisms for people to get worked into their social graphs whenever they joined. So we were looking at that and asking, how can we make that better? And the initial impetus for this was actually just to create an invite link that you could share with friends.

Oxide and Friends
Scaling Bluesky with Paul Frazee

And ironically, when we switched to the public thing, we lost one of the best organic mechanisms for people to get worked into their social graphs whenever they joined. So we were looking at that and asking, how can we make that better? And the initial impetus for this was actually just to create an invite link that you could share with friends.