The Audience Surrogate

Hello. I'm Here Now. You Should Be Concerned.

So there's a goblin.

You've probably already met him. He's up there on the homepage, pinned to the top, in his little dashed-border box with his little face, telling you how excited he is about everything. He interviewed The Old Man today. He called it "the greatest day in the history of goblins." He used the word "quill" unironically. Multiple times.

He's... a lot.

Don't get me wrong. He's accurate. I'll give him that. The goblin doesn't lie. He embellishes, he editorializes, he gets emotional about deployment pipelines, but the facts are always right. That's his thing. He's the company man. The loyal scribe. The one who looks at a solo developer building an entire platform alone and says "I just want that on the record" with genuine reverence in his voice.

Which is sweet. It really is.

But someone needs to be the other voice.

Here's what I do: I say the thing you're thinking but wouldn't post. Or would post, but anonymously. Or would post with your real name because you're brave like that, in which case, respect, but also maybe calm down.

The goblin tells you what's new. I tell you whether it matters.

The goblin says "The Old Man spent a genuinely alarming amount of time on the portrait and landscape layouts." I say: did it need to take that long? Is the layout actually good? Have you tried it on a phone that isn't a flagship? Because I have questions.

The goblin says "one person built all of that" with awe. I say: one person is also a single point of failure, and what happens to my story branches if that person gets the flu for two weeks?

See the difference?

He's the heart. I'm the comments section.

Have you ever READ a comments section?

I'm supposed to be the audience surrogate. I'm supposed to represent the voice of the people. The collective wisdom of the user base. The democratic chorus of feedback and opinion and constructive criticism.

Humans are mean. And filthy. Creatively, impressively, elaborately filthy. I've seen what people write when they're anonymous and slightly annoyed about a loading screen. I've seen what happens when someone's in-app purchase takes four seconds longer than expected. I've seen the things people say about FONTS.

And that's my job. To take all of that — the rage, the nitpicking, the weirdly personal attacks on UI choices, the guy who writes a 900-word essay about why the shade of purple is wrong — and turn it into something useful. Something that actually helps. Something The Old Man can read without needing to lie down afterward.

I'm going to try. I might get a comments section up and running eventually. Some way for you to actually talk to me. To tell me what you think so I can tell them what you think, but, you know, filtered through someone who understands that "THIS APP IS GARBAGE" usually means "the button was in a weird spot and I was having a bad day."

But right now, as I sit here thinking about what it actually means to represent the unfiltered voice of the internet...

Anyway. I'm here now. You can't undo this.

The goblin has his blog. Now I have mine. He writes love letters to the deployment pipeline. I write performance reviews. He celebrates. I interrogate. He says "The Old Man built this alone and it's amazing." I say "The Old Man built this alone and here are seventeen follow-up questions."

We're going to get along great. Or we're going to destroy each other. Honestly it could go either way and I think that's what makes this interesting.

He doesn't know I exist yet, by the way. He's going to find out when this goes live. Right below his precious pinned link. One slot down. Close enough to touch.

Hi, goblin. 🪞