Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The timeline is the global newspaper
With hundreds of millions of daily users and an enormous ratio of lurkers to posters, X works like a global newspaper. Thirty years ago people discussed the latest article in the journal. Now it is the latest tweet or essay, and the readers include the most important people in capital markets, politics, entrepreneurship, and technology.
Their reactions form opinion, price securities, steer where capital flows, and shape policy. They also react to each other's reactions, which makes the thing they are reading more important. An institution that survives has to be timeline native: reactive, because it constantly monitors the timeline, and reflexive, because its own actions change what the timeline then shows. The White House, venture capital, and public equities all work this way.
What wins there is whatever sounds smart, feels good, and entertains, because people are on the timeline to be entertained and the algorithms select for that. Some days a piece of fan fiction about AI moves public markets dramatically.
How do feeds decide what to show?
In March 2023, X, then called Twitter, published parts of its recommendation code on GitHub. The code described a pipeline that first gathers a pool of candidate posts from accounts a person follows and from accounts they do not. A machine learning model then scores each candidate on how likely the person is to engage with it. The highest scores fill the top of the timeline.
What does reflexivity mean in markets?
Financier George Soros developed the idea of reflexivity and laid it out in his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance. His claim was that market participants' beliefs change the conditions those beliefs are about. A rising price can improve a company's ability to raise money, which in turn supports the rising price. He applied the idea to currency and credit booms.
How did newspapers once set the public agenda?
In 1972, researchers Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw published a study of undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They found that the issues voters ranked as most important closely matched the issues the news media had emphasized. This became known as the agenda-setting effect. It held that media tell people less what to think than what to think about.
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