Emilie Kormienko

While educating users, entice them with your product's value so they're willing to put up with the boring parts of onboarding. Tease them with how amazing life will be once they are done.

C. THI NGUYEN: The way I navigate the world right now is I’ve developed a fair amount of defensive suspicion about certain kinds of pleasure. A marker of design game-like systems is that they’re very pleasurable to operate in.

Smartphones were inherently social, too, unlike the desktop web. Apps could tap into a smartphone’s address book for a ready-made social graph; they could import photos from a user’s camera roll, or easily grab the user’s coordinates for location-based networking.

Inefficacy refers to feelings of incompetence and a lack of achievement and productivity. People with this symptom of burnout feel their skills slipping and worry that they won’t be able to succeed in certain situations or accomplish certain tasks.

As crypto becomes mainstream, regulation is coming. A united industry that has thought deeply about coordination and scaling issues, and has developed sophisticated institutions that can engage with existing structures will be invaluable. Institutions could support growth, innovation and help to bring crypto mainstream in a way that retains the... See more

EZRA KLEIN: You’ve said that the world is, and I’m quoting you here, “The world is an existential hellscape with too many values and games offer a temporary relief from that.”

C. THI NGUYEN: The structure of games is not that the points are valuable, but that the attempt to get those points, the attempts to win the game and the game’s terms sculpt some kind of interesting or beautiful activity. 

Smartphones represented a new generation of computing. But they also represented a new generation of users: the birth of the casual user, where anybody could be a part.