+ Back in 2010, during my first year of Business School, I helped give a presentation entitled “Twitter 101”:
+ My section was “The Twitter Value Proposition”, and after admitting that yes, you can find out what people are eating for lunch on Twitter, I stated “The truth is you can find anything you want on Twitter, and that’s a good thing.” The Twitter value proposition was that you could “See exactly what you need to see, in real-time, in one place, and nothing more”; I illustrated this by showing people how they could unfollow me:
+ The point was that Twitter required active management of your feed, but if you put in the effort, you could get something uniquely interesting to you that was incredibly valuable.
+ Most of the audience didn’t take me up on it.
+ Facebook Versus Instagram
+ If there is one axiom that governs the consumer Internet — consumer anything, really — it is that convenience matters more than anything. That was the problem with Twitter: it just wasn’t convenient for nearly enough people to figure out how to follow the right people. It was Facebook, which digitized offline relationships, that dominated the social media space.
+ Facebook’s social graph was the ultimate growth hack: from the moment you created an account Facebook worked assiduously to connect you with everyone you knew or wish you knew from high school, college, your hometown, workplace, you name an offline network and Facebook digitized it. Of course this meant that there were far too many updates and photos to keep track of, so Facebook ranked them, and presented them in a feed that you could scroll endlessly.
+ Users, famously, hated the News Feed when it was first launched: Facebook had protesters outside their doors in Palo Alto when it was introduced, and far more online; most were, ironically enough, organized on Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned an apology:
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+ We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now…
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+ The errors to be corrected were better controls over what might be shared; Facebook did not give the users what they claimed to want, which was abolishing the News Feed completely. That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right.
+ It was hard to not think of that non-apology apology while watching Adam Mosseri’s Instagram update three weeks ago; Mosseri was clear that videos were going to be an ever great part of the Instagram experience, along with recommended posts. Zuckerberg reiterated the point on Facebook’s earnings call, noting that recommended posts in both Facebook and Instagram would continue to increase. A day later Mosseri told Casey Newton on Platformer that Instagram would scale back recommended posts, but was clear that the pullback was temporary:
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+ “When you discover something in your feed that you didn’t follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great,” Mosseri said. “You should be delighted to see it. And I don’t think that’s happening enough right now. So I think we need to take a step back, in terms of the percentage of feed that are recommendations, get better at ranking and recommendations, and then — if and when we do — we can start to grow again.” (“I’m confident we will,” he added.)
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+ Michael Mignano calls this recommendation media in an article entitled The End of Social Media:
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+ In recommendation media, content is not distributed to networks of connected people as the primary means of distribution. Instead, the main mechanism for the distribution of content is through opaque, platform-defined algorithms that favor maximum attention and engagement from consumers. The exact type of attention these recommendations seek is always defined by the platform and often tailored specifically to the user who is consuming content. For example, if the platform determines that someone loves movies, that person will likely see a lot of movie related content because that’s what captures that person’s attention best. This means platforms can also decide what consumers won’t see, such as problematic or polarizing content.
+ It’s ultimately up to the platform to decide what type of content gets recommended, not the social graph of the person producing the content. In contrast to social media, recommendation media is not a competition based on popularity; instead, it is a competition based on the absolute best content. Through this lens, it’s no wonder why Kylie Jenner opposes this change; her more than 360 million followers are simply worth less in a version of media dominated by algorithms and not followers.
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+ Sam Lessin, a former Facebook executive, traced this evolution from the analog days to what is next in a Twitter screenshot entitled “The Digital Media ‘Attention’ Food Chain in Progress”:
+ Lessin’s five steps:
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+ The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era
+ Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine
+ Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends
+ Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians
+ Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’
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+ This is a meta observation and, to make a cheap play on words, the first reason why it made sense for Facebook to change its name: Facebook the app is eternally stuck on Step 2 in terms of entertainment (the app has evolved to become much more of a utility, with a focus on groups, marketplace, etc.). It’s Instagram that is barreling forward. I wrote last summer about Instagram’s Evolution:
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+ The reality, though, is that this is what Instagram is best at. When Mosseri said that Instagram was no longer a photo-sharing app — particularly a “square photo-sharing app” — he was not making a forward-looking pronouncement, but simply stating what has been true for many years now. More broadly, Instagram from the very beginning — including under former CEO Kevin Systrom — has been marked first and foremost by evolution.
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