@itsbasil

my favorite all-time scapegoat, beyond the day one idiom, is: “we don’t know what the users want” i’m sorry. are we not venture-backed businesses with years of direct learnings? with nearly a decade of consumer crypto behind us, layered on top of twenty years of social and forty years of networking? what do *you* mean *you* don’t know what *your* users want? what have we been doing then? and then comes the escalation: “the user doesn’t even know what they want” so now it’s not just that we lack insight. it’s that insight itself is unknowable. the users are confused, the future is opaque, and therefore anything we do is justified. a perfect abdication of responsibility. this is how we got here… this mindset is the downstream effect of trying to force behavior instead of observing it; of mistaking authority for insight; of believing that vision alone is sufficient to override revealed preference. and when that fails, we retreat to an even lazier framing: “attention is the only thing that matters.” mimetic value is the only value. if people are talking, we’re winning. but attention without utilty is just measurement without meaning: numbers on a screen that never materialize. you can manufacture eyeballs but you cannot manufacture retention. the tokens of last cycle are not the ones still here. the projects that optimized for virality over value didn’t graduate into infrastructure, but into case studies we aptly ignore. mimetic energy can spark adoption but it cannot sustain it. at some point, the user asks: what does this actually do for me? and if the answer is “others are watching,” that’s not a product; that’s a performance and all performances must come to an end. we’ve seen this before; many times, actually. we have more lessons to pull from than we know what to do with, but we choose to play God. we tried to normalize always-on cameras in public before society had arrived at norms for them. we tried to invent premium short-form video while stripping away sharing, the very behavior that made short-form work in the first place. we tried to replace lightweight, asynchronous communication with heavy, immersive presence, assuming that “more real” would beat “more convenient.” hell, this is crypto, we’ve been trying to force behaviors for a decade now. none of these failed because the technology didn’t work; they failed because the behavior never emerged. contrast that with how durable systems actually form: the most efficient paths on campuses aren’t drawn first. they appear as dirt under repeated footsteps. rivers don’t follow blueprints; they follow energy minimization. languages don’t wait for committees; grammar crystallizes after misuse, not before it. open-source software doesn’t ship perfect architectures; it hardens only what survives real use. in every case, structure follows behavior. yet in consumer tech, and especially in crypto, we keep attempting the inverse. we declare primitives. we prescribe flows. we demand that users onboard into complexity before they’ve received value. we design systems that require belief before benefit. then, when adoption stalls, we claim the “users weren’t ready” or “it was just an experiment” an experiment that caused those very users to lose money and churn out. alas. ready for what? ready to abandon patterns they’ve spent decades reinforcing? ready to shoulder cognitive load, financial risk, and social friction for a product that hasn’t yet earned trust? that doesn’t make sense to them? that doesn’t add value to their lives? this is not how systems scale. it’s how they fracture. emergent systems don’t require users to change who they are. they meet users where they already are and quietly remove friction until new behavior feels inevitable rather than imposed. the uncomfortable truth is most failures blamed on “users” are actually failures of observation; they are failures of those who ignored their users: those who want to play God. we didn’t watch closely enough. we didn’t listen long enough. we didn’t let reality invalidate our egos and theories. we doubled downs because forcing a primitive is easy and riding some flashy abstracted attention thesis makes us sound smart. but admitting you’re wrong, and letting the system teach you, is hard. but the path is already there… it’s always been there, lying in the grass… you just have to look down and accept it.

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