The Drafts

Tesla, Dyson, Apple, and the gamble every tastemaker makes. Why the Tesla Cybertruck keeps losing sales while Tesla's own touchscreen dashboard became the industry standard. Why Dyson's bladeless fan never changed how anyone thinks about a fan, while the Dyson Airwrap built an entirely new category of hair tool. Why Apple could kill the iPhone keyboard in 2007 and get away with it, while Samsung's foldable phones never earned the same trust. A look at UX design, Jakob's Law, and the ten usability heuristics that explain which risks pay off and which ones just make a company look bold. Every design choice that breaks a convention asks someone else to relearn it. This episode is about who decides that trade is worth making, and who ends up paying for it.

All music by Madhumita Prasad.

Why your For You Page stopped surprising you, and what recommendation algorithms are actually optimising for.

Serendipity is not something recommendation systems stumble into. It is a measurable objective that researchers have been engineering, tuning, and writing algorithms for over close to twenty years, and most platforms have the dial turned down on purpose. This episode is about what that costs you, and about the second thing these systems manufacture, which is the feeling that you built your feed yourself.

In this episode: the beyond-accuracy research showing that optimising for accuracy damaged recommender systems, degenerate feedback loops and why a personalised feed narrows over time, infinite scroll and the deleted stopping cue, why short form video and dating apps run the same variable ratio reward mechanism, the difference between an epistemic bubble and an echo chamber, why exposure to unfamiliar ideas has a documented cognitive benefit, and what the "I built my algorithm brick by brick" comment gets right and gets wrong.

Host Diya is a UX designer and the founder of Arro Studio, a UX consultancy. The Drafts is a weekly essay podcast about design, UX, technology, and the messy middle of creation. New episodes every Thursday.

All music by Madhumita Prasad.

References for this episode:McNee, Riedl and Konstan (2006), Being Accurate Is Not Enough. Kaminskas and Bridge, Diversity, Serendipity, Novelty and Coverage. Kotkov, Wang and Veijalainen (2016), A Survey of Serendipity in Recommender Systems. Jiang et al. (2019), Degenerate Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems. Aza Raskin on stopping cues and the attention economy. Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design (2019). C. Thi Nguyen (2018), Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. González-Bailón et al. (2023), Asymmetric Ideological Segregation in Exposure to Political News on Facebook, Science.

What happens when you work hard, produce genuinely good things, and feel almost none of it?

This episode is about the gap between achievement and the experience of achievement - why obligation-mode work produces real results that somehow never feel like yours, how that pattern forms, and what it costs over time. Diya talks through machine mode, the imposter syndrome you build yourself, and what a career break and a Toronto cafe taught her about the difference between a want and a should.

Research referenced: Edward Deci and Richard Ryan on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; Carol Dweck on mindset and identity; Erik Erikson's concept of identity foreclosure.

Music by Madhumita Prasad.

The AI boom, Carlota Perez, and what happens when the wrapper comes off. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude are converging in capability while thousands of products are built on top of them and own none of the infrastructure underneath. Using economist Carlota Perez's framework for technological revolutions and the 1840s British railway mania as a guide, this episode looks at the fault lines running through OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, the "tokenmaxxing" cost crisis hitting companies like Uber and Amazon, and why AI "wrappers" built on someone else's API are structurally fragile. The turning point in every tech boom isn't the crash. It's the moment the hype quietly separates from the foundation holding it up, and this is that moment for AI.

New episodes drop every Thursday. Full show notes at thedraftspodcast.substack.com. A rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts genuinely helps.

All music by Madhumita Prasad.

Paula has a line that comes up more than once in this conversation: I can't create at the pace of the algorithm. This episode is about what that actually means, and what it costs to protect your creativity when the platforms are designed to reward something else entirely.

In part two of this conversation, Paula and I get into the influencer dream and why she let it go, what happens when social media tips from connection into marketing, why niching down does a disservice to the complexity of being human, and what she would tell a 19-year-old who wants to post more like themselves.

If you haven't heard part one -- Episode 15, "Sincerely Online" -- start there. But this one holds on its own.

Find Paula on Instagram at @143lements.

New episodes drop every Thursday. Full show notes at thedraftspodcast.substack.com. A rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts genuinely helps.

All music by Madhumita Prasad.

Most people online are doing one of two things: posting cryptically enough that no one can read them too clearly, or building a personal brand polished enough to sell. My guest Paula does neither. She posts as herself, specifically, legibly, nothing held back, and has for years.

In this episode, the first ever guest conversation on The Drafts, Paula and I talk about the documentation impulse that's driven her since childhood, what it actually means to post a full version of yourself versus a held-back one, and why the response to a held-back version doesn't land the same way.

This is part one of two.

Next week: what happens when platforms stop rewarding connection and start rewarding performance.

Find Paula on Instagram at @143lements.

New episodes drop every Thursday. If today's episode resonated, a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts genuinely helps. Full show notes at thedraftspodcast.substack.com.

All music by Madhumita Prasad.

After an accidental upgrade on one leg of a trip and a return to economy on the other, Diya runs an unplanned A/B test on herself and unpacks why the airport experience is not poorly designed at all. It is designed extremely well, just not for you.

This episode covers Tim Wu's concept of "calculated misery," the 2016 air rage study on physical and situational inequality, Bruce Schneier's "security theatre," the design of the check-in desk and the boarding queue, the truth about airport lounges, and what airports like Tokyo Haneda and Singapore Changi prove is possible when the passenger is the actual design objective. A reflection on cognitive load, who design really serves, and why the friction we blame on each other is usually a design problem in disguise.

Theme music by Madhumita Prasad.

I left my job a month ago with one plan: do less. It's been one month. I have nine projects on the go. Nobody asked me to start any of them. This episode is about what happens when you finally get the freedom you've been craving and realise you have no idea what to do with it. I talk about how hustle culture shaped my ambition and my inability to stop, a question my therapist asked that I still can't answer, the fact that I literally made an Episode 7 about rest and still couldn't take my own advice, and Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's seven types of rest framework that's helping me understand why sleep isn't fixing anything. No tidy ending on this one. I'm still in it.

References mentioned: Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. Episode 7: Perfectionism and the Art of the Pit Stop.

Theme music by Madhumita Prasad.

What happens when the person who taught you to see clearly asks you not to look at them?

This episode is about two creator-turned-founders who built massive audiences on expertise and education, then crossed into making products - and how differently they handled it when things went wrong. Linus Tech Tips and the Lipstick Lesbians both had public stumbles on the product development front. One responded with directness. One responded with deflection. And the gap between those two choices tells you everything about what it actually costs you when you forget that your audience was paying attention.

We get into parasocial trust and why influencer product failures sting differently than corporate ones, why the Lipstick Lesbians handed their community the exact rubric they were eventually marked on, what a good crisis response actually looks like versus what happened, and the design school lesson that applies to anyone who makes things for other people.

All music by Madhumita Prasad.

Nothing on the Internet Lasts (And That's a Decision)

Have you ever said "my Instagram" or "my Twitter" without thinking twice?

In Episode 11 of The Drafts, Diya breaks down the uncomfortable truth about every social platform you have ever built your life inside: you were never the owner. You were always the tenant. And the landlord can redecorate, sell, or demolish the whole thing on a Tuesday with zero obligation to you.

From Vine's archive being quietly deleted, to TikTok refugees fleeing to a censored Mandarin app because the algorithm was worth more than data sovereignty, to one company owning every register of how you express yourself online. The platforms we used to call home were never ours. And the question of who was reading our mail all along has a much more complicated answer than we were told.

In this episode, we cover:

• The Vine Demolition: What actually killed Vine, why the archive disappeared, and what it means that virality decided what was worth saving.
• The TikTok Migration: Why 700,000 Americans fled to a heavily censored Chinese app, and what that choice reveals about who was reading the mail on both sides.
• The Neighbourhood Problem: How X was bought and redecorated overnight, and what it means that one company now owns the buildings where you connect personally, visually, and publicly.
• The Co-op That Took VC Money: Bluesky promised a different architecture. Then it raised 100 million dollars, replaced its founder, and forgot to tell anyone for a year.

All music in the show has been made and produced by Madhumita Prasad.

Support the show: If you enjoyed Episode 11, please take 10 seconds to leave a rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show grow. <3