A desire path is a path that’s created by people using it, rather than by top-down design.
The path is proof that people want to go wherever it leads. It’s an emergent, user-created phenomenon.
Was the Silk Road a desire path? How did trade happen?
Let’s talk real quick about how subways form, slime mold paths
Here is one of my most referenced tweets:
my twitter philosophy, which informs my content philosophy, which is informs my life philosophy, is something like… pay attention to the sticky riffs in your conversations, and embellish them, and then use them as landmarks to navigate by, and pave the desire paths
people ask questions like “how are you so confident” and “how do you remember all your tweets” – it’s all sort of the same thing. I’m confident because I know my stuff, I know my stuff because I have this magnificent memory-palace, it works because I allow the emotions to guide
Take a minute to watch and rewatch any slow-motion GIF of how lightning works.
Lightning begins as static charge built up in a cloud
once you have a few good riffs or talking points or whatever you wanna call them, those are like buoys or lighthouses that you can navigate by. they are like major cities in a trade network. you can build out everything in between them. connecting them creates additional wealth
and here’s the really wild thing: this is a multiplayer co-op game. we don’t have to do it alone. we can build desire paths to each other’s thoughts. and all of us are enriched by the wealth created by the trade
If we do it really, really well, I would actually bet that Twitter could ascend into legendary status relative to all the other social networks. 50 years from now this part of Twitter could be looked back on as THE place to be, across the whole Internet
I’m not sure that anybody who works at Twitter even realizes just how powerful the potential of this is
In 2019, I wrote: Now that more of us are playing the threading game: As we compete+collaborate effectively articulate things we all care about, And weave each other’s thoughts into our respective webs, The desire paths will assemble a mindcity paved with the best individual thoughts.
We used to each aggregate & share our favorite blogs and blogposts, each of which were themselves elaborate thought paths. That was great, but twitter’s killer feature is that each specific thought is both self-contained and modular. The rate of reference & rework is accelerating.
It’s easier than ever to play, and it’s cheaper than ever to make mistakes. You don’t even need to solve entire problems by yourself – partial contributions and partial coinages can be tremendously valuable, because each tweet can function as a setup or a punchline for your other tweets and for other people’s tweets
the system of routing is IMO fundamentally superior. And the cost of false starts and dead ends is decreasing, you can take more swings than ever before. A thousand tweets is a smaller commitment than a thousand blogposts, for both writer & reader
One of my biggest frustrations with the old way – which is what drew me to threading in the first place – was that good ideas from the past get forgotten. Once enough people are combing through threads, the good stuff can continually be resurfaced, & the resurfacing is positive signal
I’m already seeing a substantial increase in people quote-tweeting each other’s old tweets in response to other people’s tweets. This is exhilarating. IMO the value of each individual tweet and the threads these tweets are in are increasing dramatically as a result
The race is on to assemble the best possible articulations of ideas in ways that are not just funny or clever, but deeply resonant in ways that make other people want to revisit and reuse them repeatedly broke: viral tweet woke: tweet that’s referenced & reused in many threads
The more people play the threading game, earnestly, directed by their own taste and curiosity and eagerness to share what’s good, the better chances individual tweets have of reaching a sort of semi-immortality. One person’s thoughts can become connective tissue serving thousands
The important distinction is that thoughts have to be repurposed, reused, referenced, even contradicted. They have to be *in play* as currency, not frozen into plaques in museums where they languish in a sort of disuse-death
ThoughtRank or TweetRank is the next iteration of PageRank
how braincells make connections: https://twitter.com/slava__bobrov/status/1502973100538875905
“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar Internet company. Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time . . . identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
further reading:
https://thehooksite.com/walkways-utilized-by-students-at-ohio-state-university/
http://www.waxine.nl/waxine/thoughts/20150105_desire_paths.php
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/05/desire-paths-the-illicit-trails-that-defy-the-urban-planners
i use this concept a lot, i’m currently updating the archives version of it but i’d like to eventually merge it with /blog/desire-paths and use that primarily