LinkedIn Post: Goodwill Has a Limit

Source: /opt/gcv-portfolio/captions/CwShzQ_VWA8.en.vtt — GCV "great day / Twitter rate limit" talk, ~00:02–01:45

We opened the show with "it's another great day." Then: well, kinda.

It's a great day for most people. Might not be a great day if you're Elon Musk and you're currently struggling to run a social media platform. Turns out he's just a little bit like the rest of us.

That got us talking about outages, and about how much people will actually put up with.

Everyone will forgive a certain amount of outages from their favorite sites. But there's a limit to what people will accept. And there's even more of a limit when you tell them you're going to rate-limit them on a platform whose whole appeal is the scroll.

I keep turning that over. Goodwill is a real asset, and it's finite. People will forgive a lot from a thing they love. They won't forgive forever. Every time you put friction between somebody and the one thing they came for, you spend some of it.

Doesn't matter if you run a social network or a restaurant. Figure out what people come to you for, then stop putting things between them and it.

The goodwill is the business. Don't run it out.

draft from corpus — based on Brandyn's GCV "great day / Twitter rate limit" talk (CwShzQ_VWA8.en.vtt)