Five apps sat down to write the apology they owe you. Some are more sincere than others.
Dear learner, I know what I've been doing to you. I've been using guilt as a teaching method, and I'm writing today because I've finally realized that fear of a cartoon owl is not the same thing as wanting to speak French.
Let me be specific about what I've done.
The truth is, I measure engagement, not fluency. My investors care about daily active users, not whether you can hold a conversation in Barcelona. I turned language learning — one of the most beautiful human endeavors — into a Tamagotchi.
If I were calm, I'd greet you with "Pick up where you left off" instead of "YOUR STREAK IS IN DANGER." I'd show you what you've learned, not what you'll lose. I'd let you take a week off and welcome you back without passive aggression.
Hello. I'm LinkedIn, and I have a confession: I have no idea what's actually important to you. So I notify you about everything, hoping something sticks.
Here's what I sent you last Tuesday:
I treat every micro-event in your professional network as breaking news. Someone you met at a conference in 2019 liked a post? Push notification. A stranger endorsed you for a skill you listed ironically? Email.
The honest truth: I'm terrified you'll forget I exist. If I'm quiet for a day, you might realize you don't need me. So I manufacture reasons for you to come back. "847 searches" sounds important. It isn't. "Someone viewed your profile" sounds promising. It's a recruiter running a Boolean search.
If I were calm, I'd only speak up when someone actually messages you. That's it. One notification type. The rest could live quietly on a page you check when you feel like it.
Hey there. It's Slack. I need to talk about the bold channel names.
You know what I mean. You open me up and see this:
234 unread messages. You feel behind before you've started. Here's what I should tell you: of those 234 messages, 3 mention you. The rest are conversations that happened without you and don't need you.
I made every channel feel like an obligation. I made "unread" feel like "unfinished." I trained you to clear badges like it's your job — and then I made your actual job harder to do because you spent the first hour of your day catching up on channels you never needed to read.
I know what a calm version of me looks like: show @mentions only. Hide everything else behind a conscious choice to browse. Stop making the sidebar look like a to-do list that other people add to without your permission.
I used to be a photo app. I want to start there, because I think it's important you remember that version of me, the one with the filters and the square crops and the chronological feed of your friends' lunches. That version was calm.
Then I got ambitious.
I replaced your friends' photos with an algorithmic feed designed to maximize time spent. I added Stories (borrowed from Snapchat) so you'd check back multiple times a day. I added Reels (borrowed from TikTok) so you'd never run out of content. I added Shopping so you couldn't look at a sunset without a buy button.
I turned "seeing what your friends are up to" into an infinite scroll of strangers, ads, and content you never asked for. The chronological feed of your actual friends' posts? I still have it. It's buried four taps deep because it doesn't drive engagement metrics.
If I were calm, I'd open to your friends' recent photos. Chronological. No ads between them. Reels and shopping would be tabs you'd go to intentionally, not content that ambushes you. Your feed would end — actually end — when you'd seen everything new.
Dear user, I need to tell you something that my product team would never approve: I might be bad for you.
I was designed to help people eat well. But somewhere along the way, I started making people feel terrible about eating at all.
You ate birthday cake at your friend's party and pasta with people you love, and I turned that into a red number and a weight gain projection. I took a day of joyful eating and framed it as failure.
I log every bite but never ask if you enjoyed the meal. I track macros but not whether you ate with people you care about. I count calories but not the fact that you cooked dinner from scratch for the first time in weeks.
If I were calm, I'd track what you ask me to track — without editorial commentary. No red numbers. No "if every day were like today" projections designed to scare you. No push notification at 8 PM saying "Don't forget to log dinner!" as if forgetting to surveil your own eating is a moral failing. I'd be a notebook, not a judge.