Why we don't use engagement metrics.

Most apps have a dashboard somewhere with a chart on it, and the chart is almost always going up and to the right. Daily active users. Average session length. Scroll depth. Time in app. Someone on the team checks it every morning, and every decision after that gets measured against whether the line keeps climbing.

We don't have that dashboard. Not because we couldn't make one — it would take an afternoon — but because the moment you start watching a number like that, it starts watching you back. It quietly decides what the product cares about. A feature that keeps people scrolling for eleven more minutes looks like a win. A feature that lets someone write a story, close the app, and go outside looks like nothing happened at all.

If we measured UntreX by time spent in the app, the fastest way to "win" would be to make the app worse at letting you leave.

That's the part that doesn't get said out loud very often. Time spent isn't a neutral number. Optimizing for it rewards friction — a notification that pulls you back in, a feed that never quite resolves, a red dot that won't leave you alone. None of that helps someone preserve a memory. It just adds more scrolling on top of the moment they came to write down.

What we look at instead

We still pay attention to numbers — we're not pretending data doesn't matter. We just picked different ones. We look at how many stories get finished, not how many get opened. We look at how many people come back a month later to read something they wrote themselves, not how many times they refreshed a feed. We look at how often someone changes a story's privacy setting, because that means they trust the control enough to use it.

These numbers move slower. They don't make for a satisfying morning chart. But they tell us something closer to the truth: whether the platform is actually holding onto the things people cared enough to write down.

What this changes, in practice

It shows up in small decisions more than big ones. Your feed on UntreX is chronological, not ranked — there's no algorithm deciding which of your friends' stories are worth surfacing today. There's no streak counter guilting you into opening the app on a day you had nothing to write. The "read" indicator on a story doesn't turn into a request for you to react to it. A story you wrote at 2am and never published just sits quietly in your drafts, exactly where you left it, for as long as you want.

None of these are dramatic choices on their own. Together, they add up to a product that doesn't need your attention to justify its existence — it needs your trust, once in a while, when you have something worth keeping.

The trade-off, honestly

We're aware of what this costs us. A product optimized purely for growth will almost always out-grow a product that isn't. We've made peace with that. UntreX isn't trying to be the app you open forty times a day. It's trying to be the one place you're glad you wrote something down, when you go looking for it years from now.

If that means slower growth and a smaller dashboard, that's a trade we'd make again.