@danielbmate x @thedandelionking
[What’s the difference between destroying in the name of your country versus your god?]
Twitter’s game mechanics select for a low-effort posting strategy, the dunking game. The rules are: find a way to misunderstand the tweet so that it is wrong. If you can’t, quote it out of context so that it is wrong. Tired.
If you are loud & obnoxious, you’ll most likely get your paperwork done first, because the agent can’t focus with all your noise and just wants to finish your stuff quickly & get it over with. Unless it backfires and the agent decides to turn around for a few minutes and sip his coffee while everyone calms down.
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.
The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again.
Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.
You might think Marl just doesn’t know about the settings. You might think to make things more convenient for Marl, perhaps add a little “see less like this” button below a piece of content. Oh boy, are you ever wrong This absolutely infuriates Marl. On the margin, the handful of pixels occupied by your well-intentioned little button replaced pixels that contained a triggering headline or a cute image of a puppy. Insufficiently stimulated, Marl throws a fit and swipes over to TikTok, never to return to your app. Your feature decreases DAUs in the A/B test. In the launch committee meeting, you mumble something about “user agency as your VP looks at you with pity and scorn. Your button doesn’t get deployed. You don’t get your promotion. Your wife leaves you. Probably for Marl.
A substantial fraction of the world’s most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people, armed with near-unlimited capital and increasingly god-like computers, spend their lives serving Marl.
The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy
Love isn’t more ‘real’ when acting out of compromise.
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
[The word ‘monetize’ implies there is no ‘attention economy’ in the pure sense: users need to pay fiat at some point.]