The thing I can't shake
Okay so this one's going to be messier than usual. I'm not trying to make a clean argument here, I'm trying to write down why I've been low-key anxious about this for weeks.
Counting
Open LinkedIn on any given day and it's the same performance — count the likes, count the followers, count the little verified-looking badge under someone's name that says they're an "expert" in something they've maybe read three posts about. Open Instagram and it's worse in a quieter way, because the entire emotional currency of the app runs through one button. One click. That's it. That's the whole transaction that we've turned into a referendum on whether a photo, a thought, a person, mattered today.
The button
Nobody sat down and decided that click should mean this much. I looked into it because I didn't believe it could be that accidental, and it basically was. The guy who actually built Facebook's Like button, Justin Rosenstein, has said for years that he regrets it. His words, not mine: he built it as "a nudge, a path of least resistance," something small and kind, and what he got instead was a slot machine that hands out what he now calls "bright dings of pseudo-pleasure." He restricts his own phone now. Had someone else set up the parental controls so he couldn't override them at 1am. That's the guy who invented the thing. If he's scared of it, I don't feel crazy for being scared of it either.
The layer underneath
And okay, that's the part everyone already half-agrees with, followers bad, likes bad, we've all read that post. What actually keeps me up is the layer underneath it. Everyone's an influencer now, sure, but with a tag instead of a track record — "fintech," "productivity," "AI," slapped under a name like a genre label on a Spotify playlist, standing in for years somebody hasn't actually put in. And because the tag is the whole credential, the content underneath it has to move fast and say little, because depth doesn't fit in the six seconds someone gives it before swiping. So everything gets flattened into a definition that could never survive being one line, delivered as if it were a complete thought. What even is a metric, if we're going to keep throwing the word around at work like it means something on its own? It doesn't. It's not a number, it's a number tied to a question. No question, no metric, just a scoreboard wearing a metric's clothes. And I've watched people's eyes actually glaze when I try to explain that difference in a meeting — like I brought homework to a party.
The look on people's faces
That's maybe the thing that bothers me most, if I'm honest. Somewhere along the way, being rigorous about something started reading as arrogance instead of care. Say "hang on, that number doesn't actually tell us anything" out loud and you don't get a nod, you get "ohh, look at the intellectual," said with that little smile that means shut up now. So people stop saying it. Not because they got dumber. Because being right got socially expensive and being vague got free.
What my manager said
Here's the actual reason I'm writing this though. My manager said something to me a while back that I still haven't shaken off. Something like: if you want an audience, you strip the thing down until it's easy enough for people to actually consume, that's the cost of reach. If you want it to be good, real depth, real nuance, you accept that almost nobody's going to follow, because most people won't do the work to meet you there. Pick one. It's a trade-off, he said, like it was just a fact of nature, like gravity.
I don't think it's gravity. I think it's a lazy default that people repeat because testing it takes longer than a sprint.
Going looking for proof
So I went looking for proof, not comfort, actual proof. Matt Levine writes a finance newsletter, Money Stuff, that is genuinely one of the most complicated things published every single day — derivatives, securities law, jokes that assume you already know what a SPAC is, footnotes on footnotes. Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people read it. Not despite the complexity. For it. He never dumbed a word of it down. Ben Thompson did the same thing with Stratechery, depth over speed, for over a decade, no clickbait, no simplifying for the algorithm, and it turned into a newsletter pulling something like $3 million a year from subscribers who, by my manager's math, shouldn't exist.
Where that leaves me
So maybe the trade-off isn't quality versus reach. Maybe it's quality versus how fast you're willing to get the reach. Dumbing something down gets you attention this week. Depth gets you people who don't leave, but you have to be willing to wait for it, and waiting is the one thing nobody with a quarterly number to hit is willing to do.
I don't fully know if I've proven anything here. I just know I don't want to keep living in a world where the only acceptable version of an idea is the one that fits in a caption, and I'd rather be the annoying one who asks what the number actually means than the one who nods along because it's easier.
Written by Divyaraj Murugan
I write these because I want to be wrong in front of people who'll tell me. Come do that with us. → Join Curious Geeks.*