THE ALGORITHM
The anatomy of a Boost
You paid to be shown to people. Sit with that sentence.
A Boost is a simple product: for a few dollars, the app shows your profile to more people for a short window. Read it from the other side and it gets darker: you’re paying for a burst of the visibility the default doesn’t give you.
The mechanics
The app sets how visible you are by default, then sells more of it back. That’s not a marketplace; that’s a tollbooth on a road they built around you. And because you never see the baseline, you can’t tell whether a Boost did anything — a slow week after one is "bad luck," never a refund.
The tell
Here’s a test you can run on yourself: the moments a Boost feels most worth buying — Sunday night, late, right after a dry spell — are the moments you’re most vulnerable, not the moments it’s most likely to work. The thing being sold is hope, on a meter.
You cannot buy your way to the front of a line whose length they control.
The honest math: a Boost habit is real money for a lottery ticket in a game whose odds you can’t see. Your hours are the only stake you fully control. Keep them.