The Punk PM #51

Hey there, punk!

This week I've been thinking a lot about engagement.

It's one of those metrics that feels unambiguously good. The number goes up, the mood in the room goes up. Most of us have built for it.

But engagement is a tool. And there’s a version of it that looks great on a dashboard, but costs your users something they didn’t agree to give up.

Let’s get into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

The phrase "brain rot" is 126 years old (at least). I found it in a copy of the Brooklyn Eagle from 1899 in a piece about low-brow magazines corrupting the reading public. The complaint was specific: people were losing the ability to learn, to know anything deeply, to concentrate on anything for longer than a paragraph.

Sound familiar?

Every generation gets its own version of this. Socrates thought writing would weaken memory. The printing press was going to encourage heresy through pamphleteering. Eighteenth-century moralists warned that novels were overstimulating women's imaginations. Cheap newspapers in the nineteenth century were destroying serious reading. Then radio. Television. Video games. I'm late Gen X. For me it was MTV.

The standard move at this point is to declare the current panic overblown. Every new medium gets the same scare story. It usually turns out to be wrong. Move on.

But I think that framing lets us off the hook. Because this time, some of us are building the the things that are meant to be rotting our brains.

A Victorian newspaper editor couldn't A/B test headlines in real time and optimise for the neurological response that kept you reading. He had a printing press and a hunch. You have cohort analysis, retention curves, and the ability to run fifty simultaneous experiments.

You probably know the Hooked model. Trigger. Action. Variable reward. Investment. Nir Eyal published it in late 2013 and it became a kind of PM bible—a clean, clinical framework for building habit-forming products. The variable reward is the key mechanic. Pull-to-refresh, the notification badge, the algorithmic feed—the same psychological lever as a slot machine, applied at software scale. It works. Nobody's disputing that.

What is in dispute is what you point it at.

Eyal published "Indistractable" five years later—a book about how to resist the exact psychological mechanisms he'd spent the previous decade teaching people to build. Make of that what you will, but it's worth sitting with the fact that the person who wrote the manual for attention capture felt the need to write a companion guide for surviving it.

The historical media panics were real, but the mechanisms were passive. The concern now isn't just that the content is low quality or overstimulating. It's that the product is explicitly engineered to occupy you, compulsively, in the moments when you might otherwise have done something else.

If engagement is your product's North Star, you need to be honest with yourself about what that means. Time in app and genuine user value correlate well enough, often enough, that it's easy to treat them as the same thing.

They're not.

The question to ask before you ship the next hook isn't "will this increase retention?" It's "what impact will this have on our users, and is it worth it?"

Action 🚀

Next week, pick one engagement mechanic in your product and think about the user who hits it at 11pm, when they meant to stop half an hour ago.

Are they getting real value out of it, or are they just caught in a loop you built?

That's a different question from "did it move the metric."

Inspiration 💡

Content is the New Pornography – Eugene Healey argues that most social media content is fantasy, not culture — people watch TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to escape reality, not to live it. We've been misreading the signal entirely. The metric and the meaning are pointing in different directions. Read more

Why Is The Internet Bad Now? – Evan Armstrong on how the internet turned bad through deliberate trade-offs, not drift — two decades of prioritising lock-in over users, compounded. He makes the case for interoperability and data portability as the real fixes, then explains precisely why neither will happen. No villain, no fix; just a clear diagnosis of how we ended up here. Read more

The Case for Regulating Platform Design – Hany Farid on why Section 230 has let platforms dodge accountability by claiming they're just the pipe — the real harm isn't the content, though, it's the design decisions that engineer compulsive behaviour at scale. If you built the slot machine, you don't get to call yourself neutral. The accountability argument has moved from content to design, and it's not going back. Read more

Signing Off ✍️

If this resonates with you, hit reply and let me know. And if you think a friend or colleague would enjoy The Punk PM, feel free to share it with them!

Play it your way,

Toby