Apps are not about people.

· Bits and Bobs 2/24/25
  • Apps are not about people.
    • Everything else is, ultimately, about people.
    • Every heavily used tool that has even incidental multi-user support becomes inherently a social experience of meaning-making.
    • We think of "social" today as primarily a broadcast / engage loop, the insatiable social vortex.
    • But that's not some fundamental, inescapable fact.
    • You can only create or share experiences that fit within code the platform owner's engineers wrote.
      • This is part of what causes the collapse towards #content[ww] and the engagement vortex.
    • Social software experiences today are anti-social.
    • Social should be about co-creating meaning and value in the world.[wx]
    • Social experiences today are not turing-complete.
    • If we had a way to safely allow bottom-up turing-complete experiences, we could reinvent what social tools can be.
    • Social as it was meant to be.