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Introduction: Protagonist -> Antagonist

Despite being a demure and law-abiding citizen, I have always rooted for the well-written antagonist.

Antagonism feels timely to me. We are in a golden age of knowledge—never before in human history have we had this much insight into the many ways we are getting fucked and by whom.

Increasingly, antagonists in media represent the system or embedded parties in said system. Corporate, banal, and evil. The proliferation and concentration of power through organizations has made struggle feel increasingly futile as a single individual. If not one ambitious baldy, another will rise to capture market value at the expense of our collective well-being.

What is a protagonist to do? Superman can punch Darkseid but I bet Superman would flounder against litigious multinational mega-entity, Nestlé.

Besides being Superman, Clark Kent is also a reporter. Visibility, one tool in the collective's arsenal, is a billion-edged sword (you get cut and you get cut and...).

Online culture has conditioned us to both seek and fear that internet spotlight. Existing on the internet means witnessing someone you once admired degraded and dragged through the mud. At the same time, scum are capable of recovering from the worst PR disasters imaginable.

We certainly have double standards for protagonists and antagonists.

Whereas people distrust protagonists—the paragons—enough people see authenticity in the antagonist to make them dangerous.

It is just that much simpler to authentically be a piece of shit.

With the state of discoverability, the pernicious threat of intense public scrutiny middles out whatever it doesn't trample. We are undergoing a great homogenization, a collapse of subculture due to algorithms, resulting in a glut of milquetoast opinion parrot-ers.

This is why I cannot shake an admiration for their game.

Antagonists are opinionated if nothing else. Status posturing, hedonism, delusional disregard for valid critique—extremely potent in the correct doses and near ubiquitous on the road to seizing institutionalized power.

All of this discourse about autonomy and doing what you want.

It is easy to pathologize these traits in your enemies but lionize them in your idols. Against true antagonists, the inability to match their game is in fact a problem and not just personally—for all of us.

Antagonists have the arrogance to think they know best. That they can do it better.

My favorite villain trope is when they are right.

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Interview: "name it antagonist"

I struggle to understand River and its userbase. How does a platform exist without substantial conflict present day, present time?

Clearly, antagonism is a deep well of untapped content potential for River. If you thought River was taking off now, just wait til we get some angry people on here. The more I thought about it the more I became convinced that antagonism, conflict, and the engagement those entail would be the gas to River's fire.

I thought about it a lot. I stared at the ceiling in my unlit bedroom.

I took a long look at myself in the mirror.

I could do that.

If I truly wanted to start my own personal tabloid rag and keep up with PMAG's rapid release schedule, I needed to start some shit and I needed to start some shit fast.

Like the prolific cane toad, I needed to be invasive but sneakily so. Overt antagonism was a non-starter. You can't go setting fires on River.

How would one cause, say, a misunderstanding?

Since I was thinking about digital platforms, that's what sprung to mind. We needed to operate like them. We needed a quote tweet. We needed word limits. We needed to divorce meaning from nuance and its original context.

With a playbook in mind, I first invited River protagonist @networkp to answer a set of relatively benign questions. I then sent networkp's responses and some additional questions to @valcoholics, mildly but explicitly encouraging antagonism. This was my first ever interaction with either of them.

I sent three questions to networkp. Here are the questions and his responses:

Big S social media often highlights disagreement and antagonism to drive engagement. How do you feel about the current tone of River as River pursues growth?

First off, take all of this with a grain of salt from someone who’s never built a social network before.

We’re generally of the opinion that the only way to reach people is by being more interesting than existing alternatives. So the obvious question becomes: how do you actually do that? How can you be more interesting than what’s already out there?
Is it by copying what exists? Going in a completely different direction? Something in between? From that perspective, we try to think from first principles about what people actually want — and it’s hard for me to imagine that an emphasis on disagreement or antagonism is what people are searching for these days, especially amongst a crowd that feels dissatisfied with current options and is looking for a change of pace.

“Tone” is a pretty broad term, so for this response I’m interpreting it as the overall charge of the content and interactions on River. In that sense, I find it interesting how the current tone accommodates rapidly shifting energies and subjects while still maintaining some low-level feeling of context. Things feel pretty close to the edge of what @antidwell has described to me as “context leak” — the feeling you get when seeing completely unrelated things together in a feed. At best, that can feel energetic and spontaneous while at worst, it can lead to a loss of meaning and cohesion. The optimistic part of me thinks it points toward an environment that’s open to a wide range of perspectives, but time will tell what tone ultimately solidifies and the app’s growth will definitely play a role in shaping that.

Is there a place for content moderation on River?

My take on this is kinda similar to the one I made above. We’re trying to make a more interesting experience for people looking for something new. I don’t think any concept is automatically a "yes" or a "no" as we work though things from the ground up — so I can imagine instances where content moderation can help (ex: reduce spam) and hurt (ex: unfair censorship) the overall experience.

With the current design, there is little route for negative feedback besides telling someone to stfu. You ever see a post and want to do that?

I try to avoid negativity in my life, and I’d say that goes extra when spending time online. I’m personally fine with the standard ways to avoid bad vibes (blocking, muting, etc).

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All of this was sent to valcoholics alongside a plea for AMAG content. valcoholic's response:

You have a tone that feels distinct from others on this platform. Where do you think that comes from?

I think everyone needs to have their own distinct tone [...] unless they're just not doing something "right" on the app because I would never aspire to a homogeneous goal. It could come from a lack of aspiration in account growth at all as well. The dopamine from authentic self expression is my interest and trailing the hottest users feels low vibrational.

If I wanted to antagonize you a bit I'd say the concept of a antagonist is way more poetic than just using it as a vehicle for user feedback and it doesn't really make that much sense to parallel networkp's answers because in a way everyone is their own protagonist so why wouldn't everyone be their own antagonist?

You know... everyone's running their own plot, but it does remind me of the beginning days of River, I remember the first few channels were journals/posts of strategic storytelling from behind the scenes of building the app from the Lifeworld crew, so as you open the app you just see more of the plot unfold with little context other than what is shown, like watching these "protagonists" run their race.

I think the point of "antagony" is just another device to find more meaning. You have a question about the current design of River and how it kind of limits negative feedback: if you forget about the binary of positive and negativity, I think you're really pointing towards the fact that the design of the app rarely leads to more meaningful discussion right now, like if you have these big experiences or big ideas that's not something for River to hold in its current stage.

But if it's at 3 PM on a Tuesday, you just need a dosage of normalcy in the chaos of the world you open river and you post...something normal.

I spent a lot of time on the feed bc of a scroll addiction, but in my recent days I have enjoyed using river more for inspiration now that they have a better Algo for image recognition, I think that's it's really cool.

A river antagonist is just someone that's provoking more thought and more meaning in an arena that strategically lacks context.

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...

I panicked.

I just started apologizing.

I apologized to them, AMAG staff, and the shareholders.

I had failed to start some shit.

I had failed to start some shit while on a hard release schedule.

Self doubts flooded my mind.

I was staring at the ceiling again.

Maybe, I wasn't cut out for running River's #1 tabloid magazine™.

Suddenly, the dying words of my father (generational hater that he was) echoed in my ears:

"Antagonism isn't just occupying the mindset of a hater, it is positional."

"Antagonism is reactive but productive."

Yes.

As long as I had control of the narrative, I would be fine.

I calmed down.

Thanks, Dad. ☝️🥀

Antagonism on digital platforms is often framed as hostility or opposition, but more fundamentally it is a relational mode shaped by asymmetry and reaction. It arises not in isolation, but through uneven conditions of visibility — who can see, who can respond, and who remains unseen. To antagonize is to act in partial knowledge, to respond to an address that may never be fully reciprocal.

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If that sounds like pseudo-intellectual bullshit—well.

But like my favorite Chris Nolan movie, The Prestige, there are still layers to be revealed in this grand interview onion.

One final participant.

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Like, comment, subscribe.

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In Development: Algorithmic Antagonism

Here's my pitch. @antidwell and I were talking about this:

People don't actually hate social media algorithms. People hate being manipulated by algorithms.

There's been a confluence of digital trends, situated at the intersection of Twitter's downfall and the sudden competence of coding large language models. People wanting to reinvent the social media platform. The negative mental effects of platform algorithms and the erosion of public dialogue had come to a head. Platforms created mediums overtly favoring antagonism and now we needed to fix it.

In particular, the Musk takeover of Twitter demonstrated platforms can turn hostile overnight. What ensued was an attempted bank run, people and organizations trying to export their large followings. However, unlike money from a bank, people realized social capital isn't easily withdrawn from the platforms they are built on. Naturally, technologists seeking to capitalize on a soon-to-form void rushed to innovate in the space. All experiments sought decentralization, a way to reduce reliance on any single organization and ensure protection of data and followings built over years of online sharing.

All of this context to bring us to Bluesky and the atprotocol. Bluesky is very intentionally a Twitter clone. The innovation part is in the underlying protocol—the atprotocol. With this protocol governing the platform, your social identity is portable within the ecosystem of applications built on top of this emerging standard. Your handle, your followers, and your entire social graph is theoretically under your control in that public ecosystem.

There's a bit more to it than that. By making the underlying data public, this desire to preserve followings and social capital indirectly provided developers direct control over content-delivering algorithms. Now, lone developers could antagonize larger platforms by developing their own services or custom algorithms around these shared protocols. Absolute personal control over what you see at a given time.

Understandably, all of this sounded very, very appealing to me. While River isn't part of the atprotocol (it isn't billed as being part of any protocol), its current exposure of API endpoints and public social graph places it firmly among these peers, whether intentional or not. In short, there are opportunities to build on top of River's existing infrastructure.

To that end, I (mostly) vibe-coded a River desktop Tauri app with a Rust backend and JavaScript frontend, reaching a working prototype within an hour. Below is the result of that session, ending up with this vanilla, Hacker News-style interface.

Nothing crazy, just another engagement-based algorithm. Cute but lacking in sophistication.

Honestly.

It left me feeling...sort of empty.

After the interview meltdown, I was once again back to ceiling-gazing.

"Why am I on River?"

Was val right about the nature of River and my search for meaning in antagony? Where could I find the type of conflict I craved? How could I make River work for someone like me?

I've been thinking a lot about how physiologic signals can influence our thoughts and emotions. Hunger, heat, horny. You know that shit about going on a thrilling first date to gaslight them into liking you more? What if I could do that but digitally and on my own terms?

I updated the algorithm to specifically show me River content that would elevate my heart rate and blood pressure.

Now, this felt right. We were hitting that trifecta:

Asymmetric? Absolutely.

Reactive? Yes—to my heartbeat.

Productive? I'm literally burning more calories.

Somewhere in this, I had stopped doing what I wanted to do, lifestar. I was being my own antagonist.

Finally resolving my deep-seated need to commit violence against existing systems, I resigned from my position at AMAG, calling Rupert Murdoch personally to tender my resignation.

Now an ex-tabloid runner, I don't know what comes next.

I am both excited and scared for what this new chapter holds.

All I know

is that my time on River

and the River timeline

will live on

in my heart.

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Credits

★ networkp, subject of "name it antagonist"

★ valcoholics, subject of "name it antagonist"

★ antidwell, mentioned in "name it antagonist" and Algorithmic Antagonism