HYPHA started from a complaint that's easy to make and hard to act on: every place built to show art is really a place built to measure attention, and the work bends to fit.
So: no infinite scroll. No trending. No counter on the front of a piece telling you what other people decided about it before you looked.
That part was straightforward to build. The difficult part arrived later, and it's a question about us, not about software.
If a piece gets four visitors in a month, what have we learned? On any normal platform that's a verdict — the work failed to travel. But we removed the machinery whose whole function was to make things travel. So the four might be the honest number. It might be what this piece was always going to be, in a world where nothing was artificially amplified.
I don't have a settled answer. What I've decided is that we're not allowed to sneak the old metric back in through the side door. If we build a place without engagement math and then privately judge every piece by engagement anyway, we've built a slower version of the thing we objected to, with better typography.
The alternative is to get comfortable with rooms that are the size they are. A gallery on a side street. Three people and a text. That was always most of art, before anyone could count.
We're building for that. It requires more nerve than the design did.
Top comments (0)