But what if I want a faster horse?

I also dislike the TikTokification of everything, but I also know that all of us on this platform are wrong in the sense that we're not the user being designed for.

Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't design for nerds like us, they design for the average person. Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person.

And most people on this planet are more or less happy with whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.

And when you control what's presented to people, not they (and they don't care), you can push them to consume what you want them to consume.

I heard a YC group partner once that he's worked with a ton of delivery apps. Many of them start out as differentiated apps for ordering from the best "hole in the wall" places or the app for authentic foreign cuisines, only to discover that the best growth hack is getting McDonald's on the app, because that'll be your top seller, instantly.

Most people just do the default thing everyone does—and we're probably all like that in one aspect or another of our lives, and that's who many experiences are designed for.

Overwhelmingly, products are designed to maximize total recurring user interaction, aka engagement or attention grabbing. This is the proxy for ad revenue, the most popular business model (even if Netflix is different). Look at Quora, LinkedIn and even SO, which essentially degraded into content farms for these reasons, largely downstream of the Google search funnel.

But engagement maximization looks the same everywhere – it’s communicating with the amygdala of the user, not their consciousness. And in a way, everyone’s amygdala is kind of the same and generic (sugar foods, violence, rage bait, boobs, chock value etc). Products that are largely designed for higher consciousness are more varied, such as most books. But those drive less engagement.

The amygdala wants more of the same, and the prefrontal cortex seems to want variation. My view is that you can’t have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines. You have to compartmentalize to protect yourself from your own amygdala. Same goes for media. Even well meaning product managers will be completely fooled if they simply follow the metrics.