Against engagement

The essay opens with a question: what makes a person open an astrology product tomorrow morning? The answer is whatever this morning did not settle. A question that closes produces no second visit. A question left slightly open produces several. A calendar you check hourly, the essay says, is a fear rented by the day.

The number itself is usually fair: a maps app opened daily is genuinely being used. Every app counts daily active users, how many separate people open it on a given day; set that against the monthly count and you get the ratio the industry calls stickiness. Bhagol will count opens, but never as a goal.

Nobody has to intend any of that. A team keeps whatever moved the number and drops whatever did not, and after two years the number has designed the product. There is also a counting problem: an open can be charted by Tuesday, while whether a reader left with their question answered cannot be counted at all. The side with numbers wins every meeting.

What it aims at instead is resolution: the reader leaving with a decision they can make and no reason to come back this week. It admits it cannot measure that, and names four weak substitutes. Then the design: no streaks, no notifications of any kind (not even for a new essay), no red dots, and nothing playing next when an essay ends. A streak makes skipping a day feel like a loss; a badge is an errand somebody else set for you.

Last, the bill. The plan needs roughly 190 paying members and 20 guide sales a month, and frequency appears nowhere in that sum. Indian rules require a monthly subscription to warn the customer 24 hours before every charge, so members will get 12 reminders a year that they pay for a site built to be opened rarely. Facebook once reported cutting time spent on its service by about 50 million hours a day, with 1.40 billion daily users to absorb it. Bhagol is looking for 190 people.