Matt Buchanan:

Attention is the real currency of social-media companies, and it can be mercilessly capricious, particularly among the most coveted demographic of all, youth.

The question, then, is less why Snapchat is able to turn down three billion dollars than why and how attention has come to be so valuable, and if it will continue to be.

Tyler Cohen, on the future:

The good jobs will be about branding. They're all about figuring out how to get other people's attention ...

Emily Falk:

You'd expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated and successful in spreading ideas that they themselves are excited about. But our research suggests that's not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important.

Mat Honan:

If you use Twitter actively, it almost inevitably becomes unwieldy. It needs a way to only show us the stuff we need to see. Discover is an interestingness surfacing tool that looks at the signals you give Twitter -- things like who you follow and which tweets you interact with -- to determine what to show you. Yet when you click the Discover tab and start scrolling, you'll see lots of updates from people and organizations you don't follow. While it is finding some things from your own timeline you may have missed, far more of what it brings to light are tweets that you would not otherwise have seen at all. In simple terms, it's adding tweets to your reading list, when what it should be doing is taking tweets away.

Robert W. Gehl:

The great sin of Facebook is that it made "like" far too important and too obvious. Marketing is in part the practice of eliding the underlying complexity, messiness, and wastefulness of capitalist production with neat abstractions. Every ad, every customer service interaction, every display, and every package contributes to the commodity fetish, covering up the conditions of production with desire and fantasy. As such, Facebook may reveal too much of the underlying architecture of emotional capitalism. The Like button tears aside this veil to reveal the cloying, pathetic, Willy Lomanesque need of marketers to have their brands be well-liked. Keep liking, keep buying. Like us! Like us! Like us!