Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc

At this rate everyone’s gonna have their own app and zero users.

Ok this figure is pretty intimidating...

JUST IN: Meta announces they'll be shutting down the Metaverse, after pouring $80,000,000,000.00 into the project.

This is the core problem of the next 5 years in the AI scientist era: infinite hypotheses about which nobody cares

Social media has diminishing returns. Sometimes it is better to post less frequently. For example, I increasingly don’t think it is useful to write long-form posts on niche topics, because they attract the same audience repeatedly and take time away from ideas that take longer to write about, but which are probably more impactful over time. I’ve been using Asana to track my tasks for the last ~two years. There are certain tasks I try to do every day, like email a new person, jog for 30 minutes, read a book for one hour, write for three hours, and so on. One of these daily tasks was “Publish a thoughtful social media post.” Many days, I did not do this because I was too busy. But I thought it was a worthwhile goal to have a daily writing prompt, and it often forced me to sit down and read a paper, think about it, and then convey those thoughts through words. I’d share these writeups (many of them long) on X and LinkedIn. Doing this repeatedly was a useful forcing function. And by sharing the things I was learning in public, I often got to meet interesting people. But although this was useful at first — and had big “returns” on things like number of readers — I don’t think repeated social media posts add more value after a certain point, for a few reasons: 1. Learning about and sharing thoughts on papers is not a unique skill. When that Cell Simulation paper came out last week, I spent ~an hour reading it and writing down my thoughts. But anybody can do this! Just upload the paper to a LLM and ask it lots of questions. The fact that so much misinformation spreads about science is *not* because there is a shortage of good technical writers explaining the truth, but rather because most people are too lazy to actually care. People *will* take 15 minutes to do their own research on a topic if it’s important to them. 2. Anybody who publishes daily (or frequently) sees their traffic drop-off at some point. Like, I love Matt Levine’s newsletter, which only comes 3x per week, but I don’t have the time to read every single issue. I read even less of what Derek Lowe and other daily writers have to say. Spacing out your ideas to focus on the “really good ones” seems to have higher returns from readers (and feels more sustainable over time.) 3. Writing a daily article takes time away from writing longer articles. I want to go deep on things, and writing even long posts on social media still isn’t *enough* space to fully flesh out the ideas I care. If people remember me for anything in 100 years’ time (and there’s no guarantee), it certainly will not be for my social media. The only thing I’ve built that might have a decent half-life is Asimov Press, so probably I should launch more big projects like that, rather than dither my days away on Twitter and LinkedIn. This is not a sappy post about me quitting social media, or a political statement, or whatever. I’m still going to post stuff. It’s just I no longer care about posting frequently, and I thought maybe my thought process in arriving at this idea would be helpful to other people as well. (Some of you post much too often!)