Almost every social product you use is built around a single goal: keep you there longer. The feed is ranked by a model that learns what holds your attention and serves more of it. It works, in the narrow sense that it increases time on app. It also produces the low grade dread most people now feel about their own scrolling. When we built PopIn, we chose not to do this, and the choice was deliberate.
What an attention algorithm actually optimises
An engagement ranked feed does not optimise for your happiness, your friendships, or your real life. It optimises for the next tap. Those things sometimes overlap and often do not. The content that holds attention best is rarely the content that is best for you, which is why you can finish an hour of scrolling feeling worse than when you started. The system did its job. Its job was just never your wellbeing.
PopIn is about getting off the app
PopIn exists to get you into a room with people, not to keep you staring at a screen. The whole product points outward, toward the dinner, the picnic, the Saturday night thing. A feed engineered to maximise scrolling would directly contradict that. We would be building a machine to keep you in the app while claiming to be a tool for leaving it. So we did not build the machine.
What we have instead
The feed shows you the people you actually chose: your friends and the accounts you follow, in a straightforward order, plus the occasional genuinely useful card like a reminder about an event you said you would attend. There is no model deciding what you should see to keep you here longer. It is small on purpose. You can get to the end of it, which is a feature, not a flaw. The end of the feed is permission to go and live your life.
The honest trade off
This choice has a cost. An attention optimised feed would almost certainly make people spend more time in PopIn, and time in app is the metric most of this industry is measured by. We are deliberately leaving that on the table. We think the trade is worth it, because a product that respects your time is one you can keep using for years without resenting it, and we would rather have that than a bigger number on a dashboard.
A different definition of success
For most social apps, a good week is one where you spent more time scrolling. For PopIn, a good week is one where you saw your friends in person more often, and the app barely came into it beyond sorting the logistics. That is a strange goal for something in this category, to be useful and then get out of the way. It is also the only goal that makes sense for a product about real life events.