missing middle — Tarik Yildirim

When your first baby is born, you will feel an irresistible desire to immediately share the news. If you use social media, then you will share your baby's photo and let the ranking algorithms take care of the rest.

However, if you do not use social media, then the dissemination dynamics will be very different. Being unable to broadcast to your entire network, you will have to separately write to individual people. This in turn will cause an uneasy situation.

You will feel comfortable writing to both close friends and far away ones whom you have not seen for a very long time. After all having a baby is a good excuse to catch up with everybody. But it will feel very weird writing to friends who are neither too close nor too far away.

Similarly, it is easy to ask for money from your close friends and totally unknown strangers, but it feels very difficult to do so from semi-strangers.