Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well.
Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend.
And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded.
Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears.
We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away.
Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.
That social networks became social media indicates a clear shift in incentives toward social atomization and shallow substitutes for human connection/affection/bonding/sexual satisfaction/etc.
It is likely possible to disambiguate these concepts and build prosocial networks, if we want such a thing or believe it can work.
What strikes me here is the extreme noise. I mean, I’m 50+ so you know, but even so, this shit doesn’t make sense. To be living a life where you’re checking messaging groups for 100+ messages a day, needing some kind of bot to manage your (obviously extremely traffic’d) texts incoming, to be watching tens of prices of stocks, products, meeting, what, tens of people a day (as an introvert…)…
Holy shit, fuck that. Slow the bejesus down and live a little. Go look at the sky.
Paid user and early adopter here - same, I think. I'm delighted with Kagi, but the thought of it riddled with ads makes me sad. My understanding is same as yours - this is an attempt at an entirely different business model - moving to ads would be totally contrary to what they're trying (or at least - to date - have been trying) to build.
I read the article and was disappointed that the full "word" got cut off, but I know that somewhere, there's a German out there who will post something even longer.
I’m German and think the idea to compound words into one should not really count as the longest / a long word. I mean yes it is but also it isn’t. Like: “ Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung” In the end it’s just slapping words together and count it as one.
We visited Florence over the summer. It was a total shitshow. I’ve never seen anything like it: hoards and hoards of people just looking at their phones / taking selfies / not engaging at all with the actual art or majesty around them. The queue for the Duomo was maybe 4 hours. Everyone in the queue was on their phone. We didn’t wait. The Uffizi was appalling - rammed busy, everyone running into a room to snap a pic of Venus or do some utterly bizarre selfie thing which required weird poses, those involved totally unaware at the disruption they were causing. No moments of engaging with the art, no reading the labels or soaking it up, just a completely bizarre “check the box, I was there” thing going on with - I presume - Insta or whatever the equivalent is. Outside the centre things were a little better but not much. We escaped to Bologna as soon as we could and that was a whole world apart.
My point: I’m not sure “travel” as I understand it (educational, beautiful, soaking up of local culture, taking time to stand and understand as much as possible) is the same as the “travel” that others understand it.
This writing had an interesting effect on me. I went in knowing nothing about the app or author and frankly having no need for whatever it was he might be selling. But by the time I finished reading I was significantly amused and interested that I’m going to go check his stuff out.
What I’m trying to say is that this is someone who can really, really write - he’s deeply funny and self deprecating, but obviously also knows his shit, big-time. And that’s a massively powerful skill, maybe as much of a skill as being able to write Swift or make great interfaces or ship an app.
> “If you grew up with Tamagotchis, you already understand why this was tempting. Not the “cute pixel pet” part. The part where a device the size of a digestive biscuit turns into a low-resolution hostage negotiator.”
This is irritatingly good and it makes me want to buy his products and subscribe to his RSS feed. Great writing is powerful magic.
Funny, that was around the point in the article where I was beginning to get irritated reading it because it felt like reading LLM output. LLMs love melodramatic headers ("THE CHILDHOOD TRAUMA"), outlandish and not particularly coherent metaphors ("hostage negotiator"), the overly terse arrow constructions that I've never seen a human write in my life ("something that feels less like “open app → consume lesson” and more like “tap creature → it looks at you → you do a small thing together”"), the segue into a redundant list of bullet points, the pointless not x but y ("The blob wasn’t a mascot here, it was the interface") which poorly establishes a contrast where it doesn't make sense to.
The funniest part to me is that I suspect the LLM generated the line about the 4th of July, and the suspected prompter being British, felt the need to insert an explanation for why "they" would reference it, in a voice/cadence that doesn't really match the rest of the article:
> "Confetti, fireworks, the whole 4th of July experience (I've seen it only in movies though, not sure why but it's not celebrated in the UK)"
I can't definitively say this is LLM-generated, but it resembled it enough so that I still came away annoyed for having read it.
I guess to each their own. I enjoyed the style and even laughed a bit at the part you highlighted (writer humorously pointed out the obvious fact that 4th of July is not something UK celebrates).
I think you look for AI too hard. Perhaps that kind of dry humour is not too your liking, or you're not used to this style? FWIW i lived in the UK a bit, so I'm rather familiar with the way locals speak casually.
Btw. you can check his pre-chatgpt writing style, for example [1]. Looks similar enough to me!
To be clear, I found the dry quip about the 4th of July amusing, and specifically pointed out that I thought that specific parenthesised line was inserted by the author. I don't think a British author would naturally reach for "4th of July" as their frame of reference for bombastic celebrations in the first place, though. My point was that seemed to be something the LLM generated and the author riffed off of.
I'm not about to go into a deep dive analysing the author's past writing style, but there is a clear difference just from glancing at the headers alone. Looking at older articles, such as this "featured" one[1], they all share a commonality: the headers are boring. Matter-of-fact. Plainly descriptive. "The reasoning". "The background". "The research".
Then a sudden spate of activity in late 2025 after years of not having written anything other than yearly recaps, and all of the new posts share a different commonality: the headers are 'creative'. "The Childhood Trauma". "Teaching a circle to care". "47 seconds: a villain origin story"[2]. "The uncomfortable engineering truth".
It is quite a noticeable shift to go from always writing useful headers that clearly communicate the purpose of the following text, to always writing clickbait headers that try to hook the reader's emotional attention.
Fair. I understand where you're coming from and you have some good observations. Investigating this in depth is probably not a good use of our time, but who knows, maybe the text is indeed AI assisted? In this case kudos to you for being having a sharp eye and being vigilant. This thought didn't even cross my head.
Wow, that's interesting - maybe I'm totally naive about spotting AI generated writing but my gut feel was it is incredibly human - didn't even ponder for a second that the robots had touched it! Will have to go re-read...
Not only is it pretty obvious why US independence day is not celebrated in the UK (although maybe that was tongue-in-cheek?), but we do have a fireworks night on a different date.
The interface equivalent of ten sad fireworks and a pack of sparklers in a rainy back garden probably wouldn't have the same addictive effects, though.
On the face of it, this seems like a terrible idea. Interesting, but terrible. I’ve spent 30 years encouraging simple, repeatable, user-focused UI’s where hierarchies are explicit, pages are referenceable, search results are real URLs and so on. Randomness is generally bad - humans expect X module or block or whatever to be in the same place from visit to visit, not adapting based on some complex algorithm that “learns”.
UX and UI takes work, and it’s mostly work getting back to simplicity - things like “think more like a user and less like your organisation” in terms of naming conventions and structures, or making sure that content works harder than navigation in orienting users. I don’t think there’s any sort of quick fix here, it’s hard to get it right.
There is a trade off with simplicity though - usually it requires being highly opinionated about which software features make the cut. Users or sales teams often want more features, but if you included every one the app would become a mess.
But there is a possible world where you can have both - every 'feature' your users would ever want without overwhelming complexity or steep learning curves, but with the possible downside/cost of reducing consistency.
Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend.
And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded.
Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears.
We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away.
Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.
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