Information overload

The scarce thing is attention, and it is being spent for you.

There has been too much to read since well before the internet. What changed is not the volume but who decides the order. A feed assembled to hold your attention is not assembled to inform you, and the two goals only overlap by accident.

The cost is not just time. Sustained partial attention makes it harder to hold a complicated thought long enough to finish it. You end a session knowing more things and understanding fewer.

Text is unusually good here, which is why this platform is only text. Reading is self-paced — you can stop, reread, and think, and none of those are available while a video plays. Text is also slower to make, which is a feature: the effort of writing a sentence is a small filter against saying nothing.

What we try to do here. No images, no video, no autoplay, nothing that moves. Claims are short by convention rather than by rule — the marker in the composer lights up past 180 characters, because a long claim is usually two claims, and two claims in one are impossible to respond to cleanly. It suggests; it does not stop you.