It’s the weekend, and I have some Thoughts about federated social media. So, buckle up, I guess, it’s time to start some fights.

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Recently there has been some discourse about Bluesky’s latest fundraising round. I’ve been participating in conversations about this on Mastodon, and I think I might sometimes come across as a Mastodon partisan, but my feelings are complex and I really don’t want to be boosting the ActivityPub Fediverse without qualification.

So here are some qualifications.

Bluesky Is Evil

To the extent that I am an ActivityPub partisan in the discourse between ActivityPub and ATProtocol, it is because I do not believe that Bluesky is a meaningfully decentralized social network. It is a social network, run by a company, which has a public API with some elements that might, one day, make it possible for it to be decentralized. But today, it is not, either practically or theoretically.

The Bluesky developers are putting in a ton of effort to maybe make it decentralized, hypothetically, someday. A lot of people think they will succeed. But ActivityPub (and, of course, Mastodon specifically) are already, today, meaningfully decentralized, as you can see on FediDB, there are instances with hundreds of thousands of people on them, before we even get to esoterica like the integrations Threads, Wordpress, Flipboard, and Ghost are doing.

The inciting incident for this post — that a lot of people are also angry about Bluesky raising millions of dollars from Evil Guys Doing Evil Stuff Capital — is indeed a serious concern. It lights the fuse that burns towards their eventual, inevitable incredible journey. ATProtocol is just an API, and that API will get shut off one day, whenever their funders get bored of the pretense of their network being “decentralized”.

At time of writing, it is also interesting that 3 of the 4 times that the CEO of Bluesky has even skeeted the word “blockchain” is to say “no blockchain”, to reassure users that the scam magnet of “Blockchain” is not actually near their product or protocol, which is a much harder position to maintain when your lead investor is “Blockchain Capital”.

I think these are all valid criticisms of Bluesky. But I also think that the actual engineers working on the product are aware of these issues, and are making a significant effort to address them or mitigate them in any way they can. All that work can still be easily incinerated by a slow quarter in terms of user growth numbers or a missed revenue forecast when the VCs are getting impatient, but it’s not nothing, it is a life’s work.

Really, who among us could not have our life’s ambitions trivially destroyed in an afternoon, simply because a billionaire decided that they should be? If you feel like you are safe from this, I have some bad news about how money works. So we are all doing our best in an imperfect system and maybe Bluesky is on to something here. That’s eminently possible. They’re certainly putting forth an earnest effort.

Mastodon Is Stupid

Meanwhile, not nearly as much has been made recently of Mastodon refusing funding from a variety of sources, when all indications are that funding is low, and plummeting, far below the level required to actually sustain the site, and they haven’t done a financial transparency report for over a year, and that report was already nearly a year late.

Mastodon and the fediverse are not nearly in a position to claim moral superiority over Bluesky. Sure, taking blockchain VC money might seem like a rookie mistake, but going out of business because you are spurning every possible source of funding is not that wise either.

Some might think that, sure, Mastodon the company might die but at least the Fediverse as a whole will keep going strong, right? Lots of people run their own instances! I even find elements of this argument convincing, and I think there is probably some truth to it. But to really believe this argument as claimed, that it’s a fait accompli that the fediverse will survive in some form, that all those self-run servers will be a robust network that will self-repair, requires believing some obviously false stuff. It is frankly unprofitable to run a Fediverse instance. Realistically, if you want to operate a mastodon server for yourself, it is going to cost at least $100/year once you include stuff like having a domain name, and managing the infrastructure costs is a complex problem that keeps getting harder to manage as the software itself gets slower.

Cory Doctorow has recently argued that this is all worth it, because at least on Mastodon, you’re in control, not at the whims of centralized website operators like Bluesky. In his words,

On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server

He concludes:

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none

(Emphasis mine).

This is a beautiful vision. It is, however, an incorrect assessment of the state of the Fediverse as it stands today. It’s not true in two important ways:

First, if you look at any account of a user’s fediverse account migration, like this one from Steve Bate or this one from the Ente project or this one from Erin Kissane, you will see that it is “painful for the foreseeable future” or “wasn’t as seamless as advertised”, and that “the best time to […] migrate instances […] is never”. This language does not presage a pleasant experience, as Doctorow puts it, “without pain”.

Second, migration is an active process that requires engagement from the instance that hosts you. If you have been blocked or banned, or had your account terminated, you are just out of luck. You do not have control over your data or agency over your online identity unless you’ve shelled out the relatively exorbitant amount of money to actually operate your own instance.

In short, ActivityPub is no panacea. A federated system is not really a “decentralized” system, as much as it is a bunch of smaller centralized systems that all talk to each other. You still need to know, and care, about your social and financial relationship to the operators of your instance. There is probably no getting away from this, like, just generally on the Internet, no matter how much peer-to-peer software we deploy, but there certainly isn’t in the incomplete mess that is ActivityPub.

JOIN, or DIE.

Neither Mastodon (or ActivityPub) nor Bluesky (or ATProtocol) has a comprehensive solution to the problem of decentralized social media. These companies, and these protocols, are both deeply flawed and if everything keeps bumping along as it is, I believe both are likely to fail. At different times, on different timelines, and for different reasons, but fail nonetheless.

However, these networks are both small and growing, and we are not yet in the phase of enshittification where margins are shrinking and audiences are captured and the screws must be tightened to juice revenue. There are stil possibilities. Mastodon is crowdfunded and what they lack in resources they make up for in flexibility and scrappiness. Bluesky has money and while there will eventually be a need to monetize somehow, they have plenty of runway to come up with that answer, and a lot of sophisticated protocol work has been done. Not enough to make a complete circut and allow users true, practical decentralization, but it’s not nothing, either.

Mastodon and Bluesky are both organizations with humans in them, and piles of data that is roughly schema-compatible even if the nuances and details are different. I know that there is a compatible model becuse thanks to both platforms being relatively open, there is a functioning ActivityPub/ATProtocol bridge in the form of Brid.gy Fed. You can use it today, and I highly recommend that you do so, so that “choice of protocol” does not fully define your audience. If you’re on bluesky, follow this account, and if you’re on Mastodon or elsewhere on the Fediverse, search for and follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy.

The reality that fans of decentralized, independent social media must confront is that we are a tiny audicence right now. Whichever site we are looking at, we are talking about a few million monthly active users at best, in a world where even the pathetic husk of Twitter still has hundreds of millions and Facebook has billions. Interneceine fights are not going to get us anywhere. We need to build bridges and links and connect our networks as densely as possible. If I’m being honest, Bridgy Fed looks like a pretty janky solution, but it’s something, and we need to start doing something soon, so we do not collectively become a permanent minority that mass markets can safely ignore.

As users, we need to set an example, so that the developers of the respective platforms get their shit together and work together directly so that workarounds like Bridgy are not required. Frankly, this is mostly on the ActivityPub and Mastodon devs, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, not a lot of this seems to be public, or at least I haven’t witnessed a lot of it directly, but I have heard repeatedly that the ActivityPub developers are prickly, and this is one high-profile public example where an ActivityPub partisan is incredibly, pointlessly hostile and borderline harrassing towards someone — Mike Masnick, a long-time staunch advocate for open protocols and open patents, someone with a Mastodon account, and thus as good a prospective ally as the ActivityPub fediverse might reasonably find — explaining some of the relative benefits of Bluesky.

Most of us are technology nerds in one way or another. In that way we can look at signifiers like “ActivityPub” and “ATProtocol”, and feel like these are hard boundaries around different all-encompassing structures for the future, and thus tribes we must join and support.

A better way to look at this, however, is to see social entities like Mastodon gGmbH and Bluesky PBC — or, more to the point, Fosstodon, SFBA Social, Hachyderm (and maybe, one day, even an instance which isn’t fully just for software development nerds), as groups that deploy these protocols to access some data that they publish, just as they might publish their website over HTTP or their newsletters over SMTP. There are technical challenges involved in bridging between mutually unintelligible domain models, but that is, like, network software's whole deal. Most software is just some kind of translation from one format or context to another. The best possible future for the fediverse is the one where users care as much about the distinction between ATProtocol and ActivityPub as they do about the distinction between POP3 and IMAP.

To both developers and users of these systems, I say: get it together. Be nice to each other. Because the rest of the social media ecosystem is sure as shit not going to be nice to us if we ever see even a hint of success and start to actually cut into their user base.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more of it, or you’d like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor!

Shortly after my previous post, my good friend David Reid not-so-subtly subtweeted me for apparently yelling at everyone using a twitter thread to be quiet and stop expressing themselves. He pointed out:

Threads are being used to say things which might not otherwise be said.

If you only see threads from blowhards stop following blowhards.

— dreid (@dreid) December 14, 2016

This is the truth. There are, indeed, important, substantial essays being written on Twitter, in the form of threads. If I could direct your attention to one that’s probably a better use of your time than what I have to say here, this is a great example:

Who radicalized Dylan Roof? And why aren't more people asking this question?

— Christiana A Mbakwe (@Christiana1987) December 13, 2016

Moreover, although the twitter character limit can inhibit the expression of nuance, just having a blog is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for clumsy, hot takes:

@glyph 🎶 isn't it ironic 🎶 that your blog post failed capture nuance 🎶

— dreid (@dreid) December 14, 2016

I screwed this one up. I’m sorry.

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The point I was trying to primarily focus on in that post is that a twitter thread demands a lot of attention, and that publishers exploiting that aspect of the medium in order to direct more attention to themselves¹ are leveraging a limited resource² and thereby externalizing their marketing costs³. Further, this idiom was invented by⁴, and has extensively been used by people who don’t really need any more attention than they already have.

If you’re an activist trying to draw attention to an important cause, or a writer trying to find your voice, and social media (or twitter threads specifically) has helped you do that, I am not trying to scold you for growing an audience on - and deriving creative energy from - your platform of choice. If you’re leveraging the focus-stealing power of twitter threads to draw attention to serious social issues, maybe you deserve that attention. Maybe in the face of such issues my convenience and comfort and focus are not paramount. And for people who really don’t want that distraction, the ‘unfollow’ button is, obviously, only a click away.

That’s not to say I think that relying on social media exclusively is a good idea for activists; far from it. I think recent political events have shown that a social media platform is often a knife that will turn in your hand. So I would encourage pretty much anyone trying to cultivate an audience to consider getting an independent web presence where you can host more durable and substantive collections of your thoughts, not because I don’t want you to annoy me, but because it gives you a measure of independence, and avoids a potentially destructive monoculture of social media. Given the mechanics of the technology, this is true even if you use a big hosted service for your long-form stuff, like Medium or Blogger; it’s not just about a big company having a hold on your stuff, but about how your work is presented based on the goals of the product presenting it.

However, the exact specifics of such a recommendation are an extremely complex set of topics, and not topics that I’m confident I’ve thought all the way through. There are dozens more problems with twitter threads for following long-form discussions and unintentionally misrepresenting complex points. Maybe they’re really serious, maybe not.

As far as where the long-form stuff should go, there are very good reasons to want to self-host things, and very good reasons why self-hosting is incredibly dangerous, especially for high-profile activists and intellectuals. There are really good reasons to engage with social media platforms and really good reasons to withdraw.

This is why I didn’t want to address this sort of usage of twitter threading; I didn’t want to dive into the sociopolitical implications of the social media ecosystem. At some point, you can expect a far longer post from me about the dynamics of social media, but it is going to take a serious effort to do it justice.

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A final thought before I hopefully stop social-media-ing about social media for a while:

One of the criticisms that I received during this conversation, from David as well as others who contacted me privately, is that I’m criticizing Twitter from a level of remove; implying that since I’m not fully engaged with the medium I don’t really have the right (or perhaps the expertise) to be critical of it. I object to that.

In addition to my previously stated reasons for my reduced engagement - which mostly have to do with personal productivity and creative energy - I also have serious reservations about the political structure of social media. There’s a lot that’s good about it, but I think the incentive structures around it may mean that it is, ultimately, a fundamentally corrosive and corrupting force in society. At the very least, a social media platform is a tool which can be corrosive and corrupting and therefore needs to be used thoughtfully and intentionally to minimize the harm that it can do while retaining as many of its benefits as possible.

I don’t have time to fully explore the problems that I’m alluding to now⁵ but at this point if I wrote something like “social media platforms are slowly destroying liberal democracy”, I’m not even sure if I’d be exaggerating.

When I explain that I have these concerns, I’m often asked the obvious follow-up: if social media is so bad why don’t I just stop using it entirely?

The problem is, social media companies effectively control access to an enormous audience, which is now difficult to reach without their intermediation. I have friends, as we all probably do, that are hard for me to contact via other channels. An individual cannot effectively boycott a communication tool, and I am not even sure yet that “stop using it” is the right way to combat its problems.

So, I’m not going to stop communicating with my friends because I have concerns about the medium they prefer, and I’m also not going to stop thinking or writing about how to articulate and address those concerns. I think I have as much a right as anyone to do that.

Update: I've written a brief follow-up to this post to clarify my feelings about other uses of the tweetstorm, or twitter thread, publishing idiom. This post is intended to be specifically critical of its usage as a self-promotional or commercial tool.

I don’t like Tweetstorms™¹, or, to turn to a neologism, “manthreading”. They actively annoy me. Stop it. People who do this are almost always blowhards.

Blogs are free. Put your ideas on your blog.

As Eevee rightfully points out, however, if you’re a massive blowhard in your Tweetstorms, you’re likely a massive blowhard on your blog, too. So why care about the usage of Twitter threads vs. Medium posts vs. anything else for expressions of mediocre ideas?

Here’s the difference, and here’s why my problem with them does have something to do with the medium: if you put your dull, obvious thoughts in a blog², it’s a single entity. I can skim the introduction and then skip it if it’s tedious, plodding, derivative nonsense.³

Tweetstorms™, as with all social media innovations, however, increase engagement. Affordances to read little bits of the storm abound. Ding. Ding. Ding. Little bits of an essay dribble in, interrupting me at suspiciously precisely calibrated 90-second intervals, reminding me that an Important Thought Leader has Something New To Say.

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The conceit of a Tweetstorm™ is that they’re in this format because they’re spontaneous. The hottest of hot takes. The supposed reason that it’s valid to interrupt me at 30-second intervals to keep me up to date on tweet 84 of 216 of some irrelevant commentator’s opinion on the recent trend in chamfer widths on aluminum bezels is that they’re thinking those thoughts in real time! It’s an opportunity to engage with the conversation!

But of course, this is a pretense; transparently so, unless you imagine someone could divine the number after the slash without typing it out first.

The “storm” is scripted in advance, edited, and rehearsed like any other media release. It’s interrupting people repeatedly merely to increase their chances of clicking on it, or reading it. And no Tweetstorm author is meaningfully going to “engage” with their readers; they just want to maximize their view metrics.

Even if I cared a tremendous amount about the geopolitics of aluminum chamfer calibration, this is a terrible format to consume those thoughts in. Twitter’s UI is just atrocious for meaningful consideration of ideas. It’s great for pointers to things (like a link to this post!) but actively interferes with trying to follow a thought to its conclusion.

There’s a whole separate blog in there about just how gross pretty much all social-media UI is, and how much it goes out of its way to show you “what you might have missed”, or things that are “relevant to you” or “people you should follow”, instead of just giving you the actual content you requested from their platform. It’s dark patterns all the way down, betraying the user’s intent for those of the advertisers.

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My tone here probably implies that I think everyone doing this is being cynically manipulative. That’s possibly the worst part - I don’t think they are. I think everyone involved is just being slightly thoughtless, trying to do the best that they can in their perceived role. Blowhards are blowing, social media is making you be more social and consume more media. All optimizing for our little niche in society. So unfortunately it’s up to us, as readers, to refuse to consume this disrespectful trash, and pipe up about the destructive aspects of communicating that way.

Personally I’m not much affected by this, because I follow hardly anyone⁴, I don’t have push enabled, and I would definitely unfollow (or possibly block) someone who managed to get retweeted at such great length into my feed. But a lot of people who are a lot worse than I am about managing the demands on their attention get sucked into the vortex that Tweetstorms™ (and related social-media communication habits) generate.

Attention is a precious resource; in many ways it is the only resource that matters for producing creative work.

But of course, there’s a delicate balance - we must use up that same resource to consume those same works. I don’t think anyone should stop talking. But they should mindfully speak in places and ways that are not abusive of their audience.

This post itself might be a waste of your time. Not everything I write is worth reading. Because I respect my readers, I want to give them the opportunity to ignore it.

And that’s why I don’t use Tweetstorms™⁵.

I’m an introvert.

I say that with a full-on appreciation of just how awful thinkpieces on “introverts” are.

However, I feel compelled to write about this today because of a certain type of social pressure that a certain type of introvert faces. Specifically, I am a high-energy introvert.

Cementing this piece’s place in the hallowed halls of just awful thinkpieces, allow me to compare my mild cognitive fatigue with the plight of those suffering from chronic illness and disability¹. There’s a social phenomenon associated with many chronic illnesses, “but you don’t LOOK sick”, where well-meaning people will look at someone who is suffering, with no obvious symptoms, and imply that they really ought to be able to “be normal”.

As a high-energy introvert, I frequently participate in social events. I go to meet-ups and conferences and I engage in plenty of public speaking. I am, in a sense, comfortable extemporizing in front of large groups of strangers.

This all sounds like extroverted behavior, I know. But there’s a key difference.

Let me posit two axes for personality type: on the X axis, “introvert” to “extrovert”, and on the Y, “low energy” up to “high energy”.

The X axis describes what kinds of activities give you energy, and the Y axis describes how large your energy reserves are for the other type.

Notice that I didn’t say which type of activity you enjoy.

Most people who would self-describe as “introverts” are in the low-energy/introvert quadrant. They have a small amount of energy available for social activities, which they need to frequently re-charge by doing solitary activities. As a result of frequently running out of energy for social activities, they don’t enjoy social activities.

Most people who would self-describe as “extroverts” are also on the “low-energy” end of the spectrum. They have low levels of patience for solitary activity, and need to re-charge by spending time with friends, going to parties, etc, in order to have the mental fortitude to sit still for a while and focus. Since they can endlessly get more energy from the company of others, they tend to enjoy social activities quite a bit.

Therefore we have certain behaviors we expect to see from “introverts”. We expect them to be shy, and quiet, and withdrawn. When someone who behaves this way has to bail on a social engagement, this is expected. There’s a certain affordance for it. If you spend a few hours with them, they may be initially friendly but will visibly become uncomfortable and withdrawn.

This “energy” model of personality is of course an oversimplification - it’s my personal belief that everyone needs some balance of privacy and socialization and solitude and eventually overdoing one or the other will be bad for anyone - but it’s a useful one.

As a high-energy introvert, my behavior often confuses people. I’ll show up at a week’s worth of professional events, be the life of the party, go out to dinner at all of them, and then disappear for a month. I’m not visibily shy - quite the opposite, I’m a gregarious raconteur. In fact, I quite visibly enjoy the company of friends. So, usually, when I try to explain that I am quite introverted, this claim is met with (quite understandable) skepticism.

In fact, I am quite functionally what society expects of an “extrovert” - until I hit the wall.

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In endurance sports, one is said to “hit the wall” at the point where all the short-term energy reserves in one’s muscles are exhausted, and there is a sudden, dramatic loss of energy. Regardless, many people enjoy endurance sports; part of the challenge of them is properly managing your energy.

This is true for me and social situations. I do enjoy social situations quite a bit! But they are nevertheless quite taxing for me, and without prolonged intermissions of solitude, eventually I get to the point where I can no longer behave as a normal social creature without an excruciating level of effort and anxiety.

Several years ago, I attended a prolonged social event² where I hit the wall, hard. The event itself was several hours too long for me, involved meeting lots of strangers, and in the lead-up to it I hadn’t had a weekend to myself for a few weeks due to work commitments and family stuff. Towards the end I noticed I was developing a completely flat affect, and had to start very consciously performing even basic body language, like looking at someone while they were talking or smiling. I’d never been so exhausted and numb in my life; at the time I thought I was just stressed from work.

Afterwards though, I started having a lot of weird nightmares, even during the daytime. This concerned me, since I’d never had such a severe reaction to a social situation, and I didn’t have good language to describe it. It was also a little perplexing that what was effectively a nice party, the first half of which had even been fun for me, would cause such a persistent negative reaction after the fact. After some research, I eventually discovered that such involuntary thoughts are a hallmark of PTSD.

While I’ve managed to avoid this level of exhaustion before or since, this was a real learning experience for me that the consequences of incorrectly managing my level of social interaction can be quite severe.

I’d rather not do that again.

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The reason I’m writing this, though³, is not to avoid future anxiety. My social energy reserves are quite large enough, and I now have enough self-knowledge, that it is extremely unlikely I’d ever find myself in that situation again.

The reason I’m writing is to help people understand that I’m not blowing them off because I don’t like them. Many times now, I’ve declined or bailed an invitation from someone, and later heard that they felt hurt that I was passive-aggressively refusing to be friendly.

I certainly understand this reaction. After all, if you see someone at a party and they’re clearly having a great time and chatting with everyone, but then when you invite them to do something, they say “sorry, too much social stuff”, that seems like a pretty passive-aggressive way to respond.

You might even still be skeptical after reading this. “Glyph, if you were really an introvert, surely, I would have seen you looking a little shy and withdrawn. Surely I’d see some evidence of stage fright before your talks.”

But that’s exactly the problem here: no, you wouldn’t.

At a social event, since I have lots of energy to begin with, I’ll build up a head of steam on burning said energy that no low-energy introvert would ever risk. If I were to run out of social-interaction-juice, I’d be in the middle of a big crowd telling a long and elaborate story when I find myself exhausted. If I hit the wall in that situation, I can’t feel a little awkward and make excuses and leave; I’ll be stuck creepily faking a smile like a sociopath and frantically looking for a way out of the converstaion for an hour, as the pressure from a large crowd of people rapidly builds up months worth of nightmare fuel from my spiraling energy deficit.

Given that I know that’s what’s going to happen, you won’t see me when I’m close to that line. You won’t be in at my desk when I silently sit and type for a whole day, or on my couch when I quietly read a book for ten hours at a time. My solitary side is, by definition, hidden.

But, if I don’t show up to your party, I promise: it’s not you, it’s me.

Recently, I saw this tweet where John Carmack posted to a thread on Hacker News about working hours. As this post propagated a good many bad ideas about working hours, particularly in the software industry, I of course had to reply. After some further back-and-forth on Twitter, Carmack followed up.

First off, thanks to Mr. Carmack for writing such a thorough reply in good faith. I suppose internet arguments have made me a bit cynical in that I didn’t expect that. I still definitely don’t agree, but I think there’s a legitimate analysis of the available evidence there now, at least.

When trying to post this reply to HN, I was told that the comment was too long, and I suppose it is a bit long for a comment. So, without further ado, here are my further thoughts on working hours.

... if only the workers in Greece would ease up a bit, they would get the productivity of Germany. Would you make that statement?

Not as such, no. This is a hugely complex situation mixing together finance, culture, management, international politics, monetary policy, and a bunch of other things. That study, and most of the others I linked to, is interesting in that it confirms the general model of ability-to-work (i.e. “concentration” or “willpower”) as a finite resource that you exhaust throughout the day; not in that “reduction in working hours” is a panacea solution. Average productivity-per-hour-worked would definitely go up.

However, I do believe (and now we are firmly off into interpretation-of-results territory, I have nothing empirical to offer you here) that if the average Greek worker were less stressed to the degree of the average German one, combining issues like both overwork and the presence of a constant catastrophic financial crisis in the news, yes; they’d achieve equivalent productivity.

Total net productivity per worker, discounting for any increases in errors and negative side effects, continues increasing well past 40 hours per week. ... Only when you are so broken down that even when you come back the following day your productivity per hour is significantly impaired, do you open up the possibility of actually reducing your net output.

The trouble here is that you really cannot discount for errors and negative side effects, especially in the long term.

First of all, the effects of overwork (and attendant problems, like sleep deprivation) are cumulative. While productivity on a given day increases past 40 hours per week, if you continue to work more, you productivity will continue to degrade. So, the case where “you come back the following day ... impaired” is pretty common... eventually.

Since none of this epidemiological work tracks individual performance longitudinally there are few conclusive demonstrations of this fact, but lots of compelling indications; in the past, I’ve collected quantitative data on myself (and my reports, back when I used to be a manager) that strongly corroborates this hypothesis. So encouraging someone to work one sixty-hour week might be a completely reasonable trade-off to address a deadline; but building a culture where asking someone to work nights and weekends as a matter of course is inherently destructive. Once you get into the area where people are losing sleep (and for people with other responsibilities, it’s not hard to get to that point) overwork starts impacting stuff like the ability to form long-term memories, which means that not only do you do less work, you also consistently improve less.

Furthermore, errors and negative side effects can have a disproportionate impact.

Let me narrow the field here to two professions I know a bit about and are germane to this discussion; one, health care, which the original article here starts off by referencing, and two, software development, with which we are both familiar (since you already raised the Mythical Man Month).

In medicine, you can do a lot of valuable life-saving work in a continuous 100-hour shift. And in fact residents are often required to do so as a sort of professional hazing ritual. However, you can also make catastrophic mistakes that would cost a person their life; this happens routinely. Study after study confirms this, and minor reforms happen, but residents are still routinely abused and made to work in inhumane conditions that have catastrophic outcomes for their patients.

In software, defects can be extremely expensive to fix. Not only are they hard to fix, they can also be hard to detect. The phenomenon of the Net Negative Producing Programmer also indicates that not only can productivity drop to zero, it can drop below zero. On the anecdotal side, anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of cleaning up after a burnt-out co-worker can attest to this.

There are a great many tasks where inefficiency grows significantly with additional workers involved; the Mythical Man Month problem is real. In cases like these, you are better off with a smaller team of harder working people, even if their productivity-per-hour is somewhat lower.

The specific observation from the Mythical Man Month was that the number of communication links on a fully connected graph of employees increases geometrically whereas additional productivity (in the form of additional workers) increases linearly. If you have a well-designed organization, you can add people without requiring that your communication graph be fully connected.

But of course, you can’t always do that. And specifically you can’t do that when a project is already late: you already figured out how the work is going to be divided. Brooks’ Law is formulated as: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” This is indubitable. But one of the other famous quotes from this book is “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

The bearing of a child also takes nine months no matter how many hours a day the woman is assigned to work on it. So “in cases like these” my contention is that you are not “better off with ... harder working people”: you’re just screwed. Some projects are impossible and you are better off acknowledging the fact that you made unrealistic estimates and you are going to fail.

You called my post “so wrong, and so potentially destructive”, which leads me to believe that you hold an ideological position that the world would be better if people didn’t work as long. I don’t actually have a particularly strong position there; my point is purely about the effective output of an individual.

I do, in fact, hold such an ideological position, but I’d like to think that said position is strongly justified by the data available to me.

But, I suppose calling it “so potentially destructive” might have seemed glib, if you are really just looking at the microcosm of what one individual might do on one given week at work, and not at the broader cultural implications of this commentary. After all, as this discussion shows, if you are really restricting your commentary to a single person on a single work-week, the case is substantially more ambiguous. So let me explain why I believe it’s harmful, as opposed to merely being incorrect.

First of all, the problem is that you can’t actually ignore the broader cultural implications. This is Hacker News, and you are John Carmack; you are practically a cultural institution yourself, and by using this site you are posting directly into the broader cultural implications of the software industry.

Software development culture, especially in the USA, suffers from a long-standing culture of chronic overwork. Startup developers in their metaphorical (and sometimes literal) garages are lionized and then eventually mythologized for spending so many hours on their programs. Anywhere that it is celebrated, this mythology rapidly metastasizes into a severe problem; the Death March

Note that although the term “death march” is technically general to any project management, it applies “originally and especially in software development”, because this problem is worse in the software industry (although it has been improving in recent years) than almost anywhere else.

So when John Carmack says on Hacker News that “the effective output of an individual” will tend to increase with hours worked, that sends a message to many young and impressionable software developers. This is the exact same phenomenon that makes pop-sci writing terrible: your statement may be, in some limited context, and under some tight constraints, empirically correct, but it doesn’t matter because when you expand the parameters to the full spectrum of these people’s careers, it’s both totally false and also a reinforcement of an existing cognitive bias and cultural trope.

I can’t remember the name of this cognitive bias (and my Google-fu is failing me), but I know it exists. Let me call it the “I’m fine” bias. I know it exists because I have a friend who had the opportunity to go on a flight with NASA (on the Vomit Comet), and one of the more memorable parts of this experience that he related to me was the hypoxia test. The test involved basic math and spatial reasoning skills, but that test wasn’t the point: the real test was that they had to notice and indicate when the oxygen levels were dropping and indicate that to the proctor. Concentrating on the test, many people failed the first few times, because the “I’m fine” bias makes it very hard to notice that you are impaired.

This is true of people who are drunk, or people who are sleep deprived, too. Their abilities are quantifiably impaired, but they have to reach a pretty severe level of impairment before they notice.

So people who are overworked might feel generally bad but they don’t notice their productivity dropping until they’re way over the red line.

Combine this with the fact that most people, especially those already employed as developers, are actually quite hard-working and earnest (laziness is much more common as a rhetorical device than as an actual personality flaw) and you end up in a scenario where a good software development manager is responsible much more for telling people to slow down, to take breaks, and to be more realistic in their estimates, than to speed up, work harder, and put in more hours.

The trouble is this goes against the manager’s instincts as well. When you’re a manager you tend to think of things in terms of resources: hours worked, money to hire people, and so on. So there’s a constant nagging sensation for a manager to encourage people to work more hours in a day, so you can get more output (hours worked) out of your input (hiring budget). The problem here is that while all hours are equal, some hours are more equal than others. Managers have to fight against their own sense that a few more worked hours will be fine, and their employees’ tendency to overwork because they’re not noticing their own burnout, and upper management’s tendency to demand more.

It is into this roiling stew of the relentless impulse to “work, work, work” that we are throwing our commentary about whether it’s a good idea or not to work more hours in the week. The scales are weighted very heavily on one side already - which happens to be the wrong side in the first place - and while we’ve come back from the unethical and illegal brink we were at as an industry in the days of ea_spouse, software developers still generally work far too much.

If we were fighting an existential threat, say an asteroid that would hit the earth in a year, would you really tell everyone involved in the project that they should go home after 35 hours a week, because they are harming the project if they work longer?

Going back to my earlier explanation in this post about the cumulative impact of stress and sleep deprivation - if we were really fighting an existential threat, the equation changes somewhat. Specifically, the part of the equation where people can have meaningful downtime.

In such a situation, I would still want to make sure that people are as well-rested and as reasonably able to focus as they possibly can be. As you’ve already acknowledged, there are “increases in errors” when people are working too much, and we REALLY don’t want the asteroid-targeting program that is going to blow apart the asteroid that will wipe out all life on earth to have “increased errors”.

But there’s also the problem that, faced with such an existential crisis, nobody is really going to be able to go home and enjoy a fine craft beer and spend some time playing with their kids and come back refreshed at 100% the next morning. They’re going to be freaking out constantly about the comet, they’re going to be losing sleep over that whether they’re working or not. So, in such a situation, people should have the option to go home and relax if they’re psychologically capable of doing so, but if the option for spending their time that makes them feel the most sane is working constantly and sleeping under their desk, well, that’s the best one can do in that situation.

This metaphor is itself also misleading and out of place, though. There is also a strong cultural trend in software, especially in the startup ecosystem, to over-inflate the importance of what the company is doing - it is not “changing the world” to create a website for people to order room-service for their dogs - and thereby to catastrophize any threat to that goal. The vast majority of the time, it is inappropriate to either to sacrifice -- or to ask someone else to sacrifice -- health and well-being for short-term gains. Remember, given the cumulative effects of overwork, that’s all you even can get: short-term gains. This sacrifice often has a huge opportunity cost in other areas, as you can’t focus on more important things that might come along later.

In other words, while the overtime situation is complex and delicate in the case of an impending asteroid impact, there’s also the question of whether, at the beginning of Project Blow Up The Asteroid, I want everyone to be burnt out and overworked from their pet-hotel startup website. And in that case, I can say, unequivocally, no. I want them bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for what is sure to be a grueling project, no matter what the overtime policy is, that absolutely needs to happen. I want to make sure they didn’t waste their youth and health on somebody else’s stock valuation.