Exit the Feed: The Best Coders Should Walk Away
I think our biggest technical talent should abandon for-profit social platforms. I’m talking usual suspects1 here: Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and so on. Not as a moral crusade, but because the platforms are crumbling under heavy regulation2 and cultural backlash. If you’re investing your peak years shaping public narratives there, you risk reputation and creativity (more on the latter later.) I’m noticing four big forces pushing this shift: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation convincing parents to restrict phones. At this point it doesn’t matter whether we agree with his evidence. The book eternally topples bestsellers, and it is a zeitgeist shift normal people actually believe. Bi-partisan3 school smartphone bans. Teens are experimenting with burner phones,…
