The Good Online Game
Welcome to the 1,265 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since final Monday! Today’s Not Boring is delivered to you by… In March, I wrote that Excel Never Dies. I might have spoken too quickly. Rows very much wants Excel to die. It has a shot: Rows is one of the most “Holy shit 🤯” new product experiences I’ve had in a long time. Rows is a spreadsheet powered by APIs, with built-in integrations that allow you to enrich mailing lists, learn what’s in a company’s tech stack, discover company data via Crunchbase, and far more, right in the spreadsheet. They even made me a template to watch trending tweets on topics I’m writing about. Plus, the spreadsheets are always ready to share: beyond just collaborating with others, anyone can rework their spreadsheets into interactive internet apps in one-click. Anyone can construct forms, fashions, and internal tools out of a spreadsheet with out having to code.
Everything in Rows is formulation-based. It’s sort of like if Excel, Airtable, and Zapier had a baby, plus access to databases that usually live behind paywalls. It’s really unbelievable already, and it’s still in beta. Rows desires Not Boring readers — individuals who love finance & tech — to be among the early adopters. Happy belated Mother’s Day to all the not boring mothers! More often than not at Not Boring, I write about companies, with info and figures and histories and graphs. Occasionally, I’ll write about ideas and enterprise models, just like the Metaverse, DAOs, or APIs. Sometimes, I’ll allow you to into my brain to see what’s occurring in there earlier than an thought is totally baked, when its only a bunch of wisps starting to kind a braid. Today is a kind of items. It’s shorter. It’s meant to be interactive. A lot of the fun will occur when you’re taking the idea and check out to apply it to your personal work or life.
To be clear, much of today’s essay is predicated by myself private experience. I absolutely perceive that not everyone has the luxurious of having a roof over their head, food on the table, and an web connection. Many people can’t afford the time to play the game. But when you are taking the hours it takes to learn Not Boring, you’re probably already enjoying the good Online Game to some degree. You read this because you want to understand how the online economy works, and how you can play it higher. But you can’t play to win unless you recognize you’re enjoying. Let’s get to it. This didn’t start as a bit about games. I got down to answer this query: why are tech progress stocks sagging while crypto moons and worth roars again? Crypto is just extra enjoyable. But crypto itself is just not the game. It’s just the in-sport forex for a a lot greater recreation, played throughout the internet, that includes CEOs, influencers, artists, researchers, buyers, and common people, such as you and me.
That’s a much more enjoyable matter to explore than which asset class is outperforming which. That is bigger, extra permanent than day-to-day market fluctuations. We’re all taking part in an ideal Online Game. How properly we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline. The nice Online Game is performed concurrently by billions of individuals, on-line, as themselves, with actual-world penalties. Your monetary and psychological wellbeing is at stake, however the draw back is proscribed. The upside, however, is infinite. Social media is the clearest manifestation of this meta-sport. Beginner-degree Twitter feels weird, like a bunch of individuals exposing their private thoughts to the world. Medium-stage Twitter is Threads and engagement hacks. Twitter Mastery is indistinguishable from an ongoing recreation. This is also true for Reddit, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and different social networks. But social media is just one piece of an interconnected recreation that spans online and offline areas. The way in which you play in one space unlocks alternatives in others.
Sharing ideas on Twitter may get you invited to a Discord, your participation in that Discord might get you invited to work on a brand new project, and that new undertaking may make you rich. Or it’d carry you extra followers on Twitter and more Discord invites and extra challenge opportunities and new ideas that you simply want to discover which might kick off any quantity of new paths. We now reside in a world by which, by typing issues into your phone or your keyboard, or saying issues right into a microphone, or snapping photos or videos, you’ll be able to marshall assets, support, and opportunities. Crypto has the potential to take it up a notch by baking game mechanics — factors, rewards, skins, teams, and extra — right into the entire web. The nice Online Game is free to play, and it begins simply: by realizing that you’re enjoying a sport. Every tweet is a free lottery ticket. That’s a giant unlock. Anyone can play. You can select how one can play given your resources and skills at the present moment.