Attention has become the scarcest resource on the internet, and advertising is largely to blame. To optimize advertising revenue, the internet has fragmented our collective attention into countless small, specialized groups, each a targetable market niche. At first glance, this might seem harmless or even beneficial. But the reality is more subtle and troubling: by splintering attention so thoroughly, we’ve ended up with subcultures too thin to sustain real human connections.

Before the internet, mass culture had more coherence. Shared experiences from TV, movies, newspapers, and national events created common reference points. You could discuss the evening news or a popular TV episode with nearly anyone. This unified mass culture had its flaws, but it fostered something valuable: a shared context that allowed deeper relationships to form.

Even more interestingly, pre-internet subcultures themselves were significantly deeper. Movements like rock, punk, and grunge weren’t merely passing interests, they were entire lifestyles. These communities required active participation: attending live shows, buying physical albums, reading underground magazines, and adopting specific fashions. Commitment ran deep, often shaping identities and forging strong interpersonal bonds.

Today, algorithms deliberately partition us. To advertisers, the ideal user isn’t someone deeply engaged in a community, it’s someone superficially engaged in dozens. Each subculture acts as another advertising surface, another attention bucket to monetize. This economic incentive reshapes culture into a mosaic of thin slices rather than coherent wholes.

The problem with thin cultures is that human relationships don’t thrive in shallow waters. Deep connections emerge through repeated interactions, shared experiences, and trust, qualities rarely nurtured by quick-scroll social media or ephemeral online trends. Thin cultures may entertain briefly, but they rarely offer lasting community or meaningful bonds.

This fragmentation also affects identity formation. Humans understand themselves partly through group affiliation; meaningful identity requires depth. In thin cultures, identity becomes superficial, temporary, and unstable. The result isn’t just weaker social ties, but weaker selves, constantly shifting in response to algorithmic nudges.

What can be done? First, we need platforms that don’t rely entirely on advertising models. Subscription or decentralized community based platforms might prioritize depth over reach. Second, we must consciously cultivate fewer, deeper communities rather than spreading ourselves thin across countless shallow ones.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t to rewind to mass culture, it’s to find balance. The internet still holds incredible potential to deepen connections, not just fragment them. But achieving this requires us to acknowledge that culture isn’t merely a surface to monetize; it’s the rich soil from which genuine human bonds grow.

One of the strangest consequences of social media is the rise of parasocial relationships. These are the one-sided relationships where someone invests emotional energy and time in another person — usually a celebrity or influencer — who doesn’t even know they exist. What’s remarkable about parasocial relationships is that they take up a slot in your social life. And because there’s a hard limit to how many slots you have, this isn’t a trivial thing.

Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist, famously proposed that humans can maintain about 150 meaningful social connections at once. This includes friends, family, and acquaintances — the people you wouldn’t feel weird sitting next to uninvited at a bar. This limit is baked into our biology, so no amount of technological progress is going to change it. But technology can mess with how we allocate those 150 slots. And this is exactly what’s happening.

Social media has created a world where parasocial relationships can thrive. Influencers and celebrities put out endless streams of content that feel personal and intimate. This tricks your brain into thinking you have a connection with them. You don’t, of course — they have no idea who you are — but your brain doesn’t know the difference. It still counts them as part of your social world. The result is that people fill up their friend slots with what are essentially fictional characters.

The problem isn’t just that parasocial relationships are one-sided. It’s that they’re crowding out the real ones. Your capacity for connection is finite, so every slot taken up by an influencer or celebrity is one less slot for a friend, a family member, or someone who might genuinely enrich your life. This is why, paradoxically, in a world where we’re more connected than ever, people are feeling lonelier. The connections they’re forming lack depth and reciprocity.

The pandemic made this worse. As in-person interactions became impossible, people leaned harder into digital relationships. Parasocial relationships aren’t inherently bad — they can provide entertainment or even comfort — but they’re a poor substitute for the real thing. And if you let too many of them into your life, they start to displace the connections that actually matter.

So what can we do about this? The obvious answer is to be intentional about how we spend our social energy. If you notice that you’re spending hours watching influencers but rarely calling your friends, it might be time to rethink your priorities. Another approach is to demand more from the platforms themselves. Instead of designing algorithms that maximize engagement, they could design tools that help people deepen real-world relationships. (Though asking a social media company to reduce parasocial relationships is like asking a casino to help people gamble less.)

Ultimately, the real challenge here isn’t technological — it’s human. Parasocial relationships exist because they’re easy, and real relationships aren’t. But the hard truth is, the most fulfilling things in life usually take effort. If you want to feel connected, you have to put in the work. There’s no shortcut, and certainly not one that involves following someone who doesn’t even know you’re there.

Fast forward to today, where there is now a computer in every pocket, on our wrists, in our ears, in space, and even on Mars. (Speaking of which, did you know that a single Airpod contains more computing power than the entire Apollo mission?)

Sure, we’ve come a long way, but we’ve got a much longer way to go.

As advanced as technology has become, and as connected as we all are, we are a deeply unhappy and unhealthy species. Depression will be the #1 cause of disease worldwide by 2030, our world is burning and flooding (often at the same time), and most people can’t afford basic rights such as education and childcare.

Introducing Offline Ventures. We are a firm run by four entrepreneurs-turned-investors: Brit Morin, Dave Morin, Nate Bosshard and James Higa. Our mission is to back beautiful companies that matter in the world and elevate the well being of the founders who create this change. We are driven by a belief that the foundational technological breakthroughs which most benefit humanity are forged by diverse founders dwelling where science, engineering, art and design, and culture collide.

The four of us have been in tech for quite awhile now, but we’ve never been this excited about the future, especially by the opportunities that live at the intersection of online and offline experiences that will give humans healthier and happier lives. As we explore these industries and opportunities and companies, we’re venturing to the far edges of fundamental humanist technological shifts in consumer, Web 3.0, women’s health, brain health, sustainability, and bringing the offline online.

Founders are fellow artists as far as we’re concerned. Offline is the music studio where you come to write, record and mix your new album with us. And while you are busy innovating, we are purposeful about giving you the offline space we all need to find unbound creativity that can transform the world.

On our mission to bring balance to our online and offline lives, we believe that this balance starts first with you as a founder. We know that too often founders are put in an unsustainable pressure cooker, where the demands of the job prevent even minimal levels of self-care. If professional athletes and artists are surrounded with the support and resources to keep their bodies and minds operating at peak performance, founders should be treated the same. As a firm, we are committed to ensuring that you receive comprehensive mental health and wellbeing support on your journey to build impactful companies.

We announced our first fund of $100M today, as well as some very exciting investments in companies like Clubhouse, Bobbie, Pinata, Hedgehog, Potion, Kindbody, Ramble, Autumn Adeigbo and many more. We believe innovation happens at the edge of unreasonableness and we push our founders for as much diversity of expression, experience and perspective as humanly possible. We are very proud that this approach has not only led us to invest in some incredible companies, but has also resulted in more than half of Offline founders being women or people of color.

Furthermore, as one of the first venture thought leaders in “web3,” we’ve dedicated nearly one-third of our portfolio to this emerging space. The promise of a decentralized internet is also one of a healthier internet, and we are eager to help fund and build its future.

Yes, we said “build.” Because not only are we investing in companies, but we are inventing and incubating them as well. We are founders too, after all! Sometimes when we see a white space in a big market, we can’t help ourselves. Stay tuned for more news from us on that front.

We couldn’t be doing all of this without our incredible supporters in the tech and investment world that share our vision of giving people healthier and happier lives. Partners like Apple, ICONIQ Capital, Parallel Advisors, Dolby Family Ventures, and individual investors and operators such as Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Peter Theil, Josh Koppelman, Kevin Starr, Dan Rosensweig, Bryan Meehan, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Caterina Fake, Scott Belsky, Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Dr. Jordan Shlain and more.

Plus, we’ve begun adding venture partners to our investing team, welcoming investor and entrepreneur Randi Zuckerberg to the roster this year. We are eternally grateful to be on this journey together with some of the best and brightest around.

Changing the world in a meaningful way is no easy feat, but we are ready for the challenge. If you are working in one of the areas we are focused on, and excited about what you read here today, talk to us. We want to hear from you.

If you like our mission and want to join us for the journey, we’re actively hiring for various roles. Send us a note and tell us about yourself.

And now, we’re headed Offline and back to work.

Dave, Brit, Nate, and James

Introducing Offline Ventures was originally published in Offline Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Daum Kakao Will Acquire Path and Path Talk

In 2010 a small team of us set out to build a company focused on quality products that bring you a source of happiness, meaning, and connection. Five years later, Path continues to follow that simple mission primarily within communities in Southeast Asia. We have reached a tipping point on our journey and for Path to truly grow we need more resources and a larger local team that deeply understands Southeast Asian markets. That is why today we are announcing a definitive agreement under which Daum Kakao will acquire Path and Path Talk. Kong will continue to operate as part of Path, Inc.

Path and Daum Kakao share an important core value: we both strive to better connect you to the people, places and things that are the most important to you.

What does this mean for you? Nearly everything you have come to love about Path and Path Talk will remain as is. Daum Kakao’s extensive experience in mobile innovation along with a network of millions of users will ensure continued and reliable service. Future product updates will continue to improve connecting, sharing and communicating in the Path community.

Along our journey we have celebrated some wonderful successes and learned valuable lessons. All of which have shaped Path into the product it is today. Like many social networks and consumer apps, our intent was to create a meaningful product loved and used globally. We are very proud that Path found a home with over 10 million people a month around the world.

On a personal note, thank you for all your support and feedback throughout the years. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had this opportunity to serve you. I also couldn’t be more proud to be part of a team of people who created a network with happiness at its core — a personal network that brings out the best in all by fostering nearly 600M genuine friendships and 400M moments viewed per day.

I am excited to see what the future holds for Path and feel confident that Daum Kakao will take great care of the Path community.

Thank You,
Dave Morin, CEO & Co-Founder of Path, Inc.

“The book you wrote may not be the book people read.” — Michael Lewis

Frequently after an entrepreneur has built the first version of their product I get the question: now what?

This is usually coupled with another question: why aren’t users doing what I wanted them to do?

I usually try to answer these questions with a design philosophy I call: Get Out Of The Way. It’s the philosophy that helped Path 50X DAU in a single release.

When we started building the first version of Path, it was in the year 2010 and everyone was very excited about mobile. Similarly, there was a lot of focus in the industry around public networks leading to what seemed to be a broad shift away from privacy.

Dustin and I, both coming from small towns and being passionate about photography, were focused on the idea that too many of the best photos were imprisoned and forgotten in the Camera Roll. Often these were the best photos to be shared with close friends and family, but rarely did they find a way there.

Because the only places to share photos on the internet were becoming broadly more public, rather than less, we thought it was important to focus on privacy. Especially in the context of mobile, where your typical mobile use cases beyond taking photos were calling, texting with your close friends and family.

So, we set out to build the best way to share the photos of your life with your close friends and family.

In late 2010, we released the first product into the wild, and quickly achieved about 10,000 daily active users coming into early 2011. Whereby, the growth plateaued and we quickly started asking ourselves: now what? Followed up by: how do we unlock more growth?

I was reminded by a story from early Facebook. Early on, Facebook did not have a photo sharing feature. It was simply an “online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges”. Meaning the core functionality was profiles, the ability to connect to friends, and then browse the profiles of your friends and other people in your college. One key feature of the Facebook Profile was the Profile Picture. Which, users were passionate about. So passionate, in fact, that users were changing their profile picture multiple times per day.

Users were changing their profile picture more times
than they were changing their clothes.

Furthermore, over 70% of outbound links from the “About Me” section were to Webshots. Which, at the time was one of the favorite photo sharing apps on the web along with Flickr. The rest, as they say, is history.

Perhaps most famously, Twitter started out as “an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.”

The key constraint of the medium was 140 character status updates. But as time went on, users started to hack it in order to add things that made the experience better, first with adding the @ symbol to usernames, and then second with the #hashtag to organize tweets into topics or groups.

˗ˏˋ Chris Messina ˎˊ˗ on Twitter: "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]? / Twitter"

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

As time went on, Twitter took these ideas and incorporated them into the product. The rest is history.

Often times when you are building the first version of a product, you develop strong, dogmatic, thinking around what the initial use case might be. This thinking colors your interpration of what you think users think your product should be used for. Often times, users think about your product in very different ways, and indeed use it in fascinating and curious ways. Users hack your product to make it do what they want it to do. You have to search deeply for these behaviors and hacks, unlock them, and then, Get Out Of The Way.

At Path, as we went on through 2011, we spent most of the year at around 10,000 DAU. As the months went on it became harder and harder to figure out how to unlock the growth we so desired. Our fears set in: would we ever figure it out? We searched deeply for interesting user behavior, and finally struck gold while we were doing primary user research into what types of content users were posting to their Paths.

Users were posting more than just photos, they were posting screenshots of their favorite apps: music album covers, the yellow notes app, Nike+ Running maps, health apps and more.

We had the realization that users saw their “Path” as more than just photos, they saw it as a way to journal their everyday life, and to ultimately share life with close friends and family. Because of the private nature of the network, users were willing (and wanted) to share much more than we had originally intended.

This insight intimately colored our redesign for Path 2. We focused in on the core cases we saw occuring most in the research: photos, music, locations, thoughts, health. We even had the incredible luck to collaborate with some friends at Nike who believed in our vision, leading to a custom integration with Nike+ Running based on this research.

We launched Path 2 in November of 2011 at which point we had 10,000 DAU. Within 2 weeks we grew 50x to over 500,000 DAU and we were off to the races.

In times where you are wondering where next to go to unlock your vision, look to your users and be open with your thinking. Don’t let dogma stand in the way of giving the users what they want. And then, Get Out Of The Way.

Get Out Of The Way was originally published in Design Philosophy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I regularly get asked the question: What do you think of <insert social app here>? This question is usually followed up by another question which goes something like: How would you design a great social app?

Usually I answer this question by telling the story of “Super Normal,” one of my favorite Japanese design philosophies.

When you set out to create a new product, you usually do not start by trying to think of something completely new. You think of a product or concept that is already “normal” to the world, and then try to make it better. You make it Super Normal.

For example, imagine that you are an innovator in the world of simple tools for around the home. Today you are interested in creating a new and innovative version of the everyday metal bucket. At the outset, you would not start your design by thinking of anything other than a bucket.

Imagine a basic metal bucket in your mind. The design we know today has evolved over the years to include a few simple features. The bucket is made of durable metal for longevity. It has ripples on the sides to make it easy to grasp with the hands. It has a curved metal handle making it possible to carry with one hand. The bucket design of today serves its function well.

To apply Super Normal thinking we start by looking at what is normal and then ask the question: What are the key problems? In the case of our basic metal bucket we can find a few. First, the metal handle cuts into your hand when carrying a bucket full of cold water. Second, when picking up a bucket of cold water the metal is freezing to the touch. Third, when pouring the water out, it’s hard to control the stream of water, causing you to lose water.

In thinking through these problems we can come up with some simple innovations that would make the bucket better. First, we can add a wood or plastic wrap to the metal handle, creating more surface area and thus a more comfortable carry. Second, we can wrap the entire bucket in a thin layer of plastic creating insulation when carrying hot or cold water. Third, we can add a spout to the side, making it easy to control the pour, causing you to lose less water.

When we finish our design, and put it in front of our customer, the bucket looks like a bucket. It is comfortably familiar and ordinary at a glance. But as the customer interacts with the bucket, what is familiar fades away, and what is left is something new. The customer is delighted because we have changed their perspective of what a bucket can be.

The same rules apply to design and innovation in social software. Often times I find that we start in the wrong place. To increase your chance of success, start with concepts that are normal to users.

A simple list of these concepts might be: friending, following, tagging, posting, sending, sharing, liking, commenting, chatting, listening, watching, writing, uploading, downloading. Each of these concepts has been put to work billions and billions of times by social software systems time and time again over the last couple of decades.

A good place to start when creating a new social app for the first time is to build upon these normal concepts, and then add your own twist. Much success has been seen on the Internet by doing this.

Friendster was friending.
Myspace was friending your favorite bands.
Facebook was friending your college friends (and then the world).
LinkedIn was friending your professional network.
NextDoor was friending your neighbors.
Twitter was blogging 140 character posts.
Tumblr was blogging with 5 different types of posts.
Yammer was blogging short posts to your co-workers.
Instagram was sharing photos with beautiful filters.
Path was sharing photos with up to 150 people.
Snapchat was sharing photos that explode after 10 seconds.
Mac was a personal computer with a graphical interface enabling graphical apps.
iPod was an MP3 player with a click-wheel interface enabling 1000's of songs.
iPhone was a smartphone with a multi-touch interface enabling multi-touch apps.
Tesla was a car with an electric engine (and now a multi-touch interface).

In each of these cases, the innovator did not invent the category. They simply took what was “normal”, and added a twist. They added an innovation. The innovation solved a key problem of the “normal” use case that we all already understood. Sometimes these problems were in how the human interfaced with the technology. Sometimes utility or creativity could be enhanced by adding a constraint. Sometimes, a previous constraint was no longer necessary. And, sometimes the technology enabled interaction in a whole new context.

In each case, the innovator built on top of concepts which had already been iterated upon billions and billions of times in social systems. Too often we make the mistake of trying to use concepts in our products, and thus words in our interfaces, which have no current meaning to users. As an innovator with limited resources, building a new concept is not something you can usually afford to do.

By removing friction for the user to interact in a new way, each of these products unlocked massive value.

As creators, we feel constant demand for innovation from the world. This puts immense pressure on the creative process and often times can have a dampening effect. I find it useful to keep in mind this simple philosophy when starting each new creative project and always remember to ask the questions: What is normal? How can we make it Super Normal?

Thanks to Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, Mike Volpi, Josh Elman, Jessica Lessin, Kevin Delaney, Dustin Mierau, Cynthia Samanian, Kallol Das, Sarah Brucks, Amy Swanson, and Brit Morin for reading drafts of this.

Super Normal was originally published in Design Philosophy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.