Sublime

A personality sketch of the marginal user

Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headlin... See more

My latest column at The New Yorker is about the revenge of homepages: Why we're turning toward individual websites as the platform era of the internet continues to disintegrate.

I started working on this piece because I've found myself going to homepages more often. It's a way to get a controlled, curated look at what a publication offers, and a ch... See more

In other words, instead of “one app to rule them all,” which was never realistic and is getting even less so, we’ll have dedicated “capture apps”( like Evernote) that specialize only in capturing and organizing content, alongside other kinds of apps (like Obsidian, Tana, and Mem) that specialize in distilling and expressing new ideas.

The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.