Rage Against the Dying of Critical Thinking

PostHog recently published a newsletter titled "Collaboration sucks." It made some people angry, so they commented on it, and some shared it. Which means the post worked great, just not in the way you think.

I also have to say I am a big fan of their product and what it can do, but this has nothing to do with it.

Rage baiting as a distribution strategy

When someone's blog post tells you to "crush collaboration" that's not what they really mean, it's just a headline designed to make you react to it.

Every time you disagree with them in the comments, you're simply feeding the algorithm. Substack, LinkedIn, and X all reward engagement, and outrage is the cheapest form of engagement. Arguments generate threads, and threads generate reach.

The math is very simple.

I'm not saying the PostHog team doesn't believe what they wrote. They probably do, within the very specific context of their own company. However, that title, the sparkle emojis around ✨ collaboration ✨, are designed to trigger you and make you respond.

Basecamp has been doing this for years

Basecamp has been doing this exact thing since 2004.

Here are some of their hits:

• Meetings are toxic

• Planning is guessing

• Workaholism is stupid

Jason Fried and DHH built an entire publishing army out of contrarian one-liners about how everyone else works wrong. Rework and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work are beautifully packaged hot takes.

This strategy worked, it turned a project management tool, with a small team, into one of the most-discussed companies in tech, without them investing a ton of $ into marketing.

"Collaboration sucks" bait is a growth tactic - take a thing everyone agrees is good, declare it bad, and let the comment section do your marketing for you.

There's nothing illegal about it. Whether it makes you cringe is a whole different question. However, you should be familiar with what you're reading.

Your company is not PostHog

Here's where it stops being entertainment and starts being harmful.

PostHog's advice makes sense for PostHog. They explicitly hire for extraordinarily high ownership. Managers don't tell people what to do, they don't have deadlines, but they do have marketers who ship code, and a public handbook that documents how everything works.

In that environment, sure it works. They can tell their employees: "You're the driver, you decide", because they've spent years building the systems and hiring people that make it safe.

Now imagine a founder reads that post and announces that the collaboration is canceled starting next Monday.

Except their team has two juniors who need code review to grow. Except their product touches payments and they have to deal with compliance, legal, and tech at the same time. Except half their "collaboration problem" is actually an unclear-ownership problem that no amount of going solo will fix.

Taking someone else's conclusion without evaluating your own situation is stupid. You are outsourcing your thinking to a person whose target is to get more people to react to their content.

Advice always comes with context. If you strip away the context, you're left with a marketing slogan, and slogans shouldn't be used as operating principles.

This is the same thing I tell founders about promoting their product: before you copy anyone's best practices, ask what you are trying to achieve. "PostHog does it" simply isn't a strategy.

Read more than headlines

You know what's funny? The post quietly disproves its own title.

Buried near the end, the author admits some collaboration is useful and that two colleagues edited the very newsletter telling you collaboration sucks. Another post from a product marketer was titled "Collaboration sucks, but PMs and PMMs need each other", and in it, she says:

Well, the relationship between product managers and product marketers is one of those necessary situations when you need to collaborate to successfully launch and grow your products. I wanted to share some ways I've learned to do this at PostHog.

Her entire post is about collaboration, so even inside PostHog, "collaboration sucks" doesn't sound right.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Next time a spicy take crosses your feed, before you react to it and definitely before you change how your team works, ask yourself two questions:

Who benefits from my reaction to this?

Does this advice survive contact with my company, my team, my constraints?

If the answer to the second one is "I don't know," you have homework to do before you can adopt opinions.

Rage, rage against the dying of critical thinking.