One of my personal hobbyhorses is that the problem Matt is outlining – use of AI and ML to optimize for people's short-term desires, overriding their longer-term goals and ethics – is exactly how I think a hypothetical AI takeover is going to go. Not Skynet terminating us all, but a soft obliteration of most people's ability to function meaningfully, outside of maximizing whatever engagement metrics were calibrated last before they became too powerful for the average person to resist.
Sure, a few people will complain loudly, but they'll be written off as cranks. And a few people will profit mightily, but hasn't it ever been thus? And the rest of us will drown in customized, optimized, individualized food and entertainment, in between whatever shift work we do that's too expensive to automate.
Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I view this as a much more likely outcome of failure to align AI than being turned into a paperclip.
I actually think it takes quite a bit away from Matt’s point that TV seems as addictive and more destructive than Facebook in so many ways, that so many good thinkers already delivered this critique about TV, and that few of us actually have any real experience of life without such a supposedly pernicious soma.
Doesn’t deal it a fatal blow by any means but I don’t think these previous generations of ‘old man shouting at cloud’ cast the argument in a favorable light.
There is certainly a potential role here for some social shame. And, by the way. we could also make some individual and collective social choices (not taxes) to help people eat less or ‘better’.
Well, were all the critiques of TV wrong? I think that, for instance, Fox News has probably done more harm than the golden age of television has done good. Generally speaking, if you heard that a family watched significantly more TV than average, you would assume that to be unhealthy, right?
No, I didn't mean to imply that the TV seized hold of them out of nowhere. But the fact that the TV is addictive (we don't think there are as many families who deal with their problems by playing music or reading, say) suggests that it wasn't clouds the people in the past were yelling at.
Yes. Not a particularly groundbreaking post, although I think generic TV has been less harmful than the combo of Murdock / Facebook / smartphones. I’m reminded of the quote from AO Wilson about society having Stone Age emotions, mid evil institutions and god like technology.
While TV may have been "less harmful than the combo of Murdock [sic] / Facebook / smartphones" that is not a particularly high bar. TV is no slouch when it comes to damaging society and weakening societal norms. The average slow boring reader probably eschews the most damaging programming and thus underestimates the pernicious impact of TV on American society. "Cops", a particularly dangerous program, has survived for an astonishing 33 seasons!
I believe some research shows cable and network news still ultimately have an outsized impact on public perceptions over primary internet sourcing on social media, etc. IMO, Social media's main influence on the public is second order via it's converage decision impact of journalist on those platforms.
In light of that, i ask folks to consider who spread misinformation about Q Anon more. Folks logging onto 4Chan or Facebook...or snoody newscatsers going to Trump events hunting for "crazies" to spar with so they could highlight that "good tape" on the evening news.
Engagement with a fringe topic to "fact check" or "debunk" it ultimately spreads it and the viewer can (and often) chooses to ignore your additional context or commentary added to the source.
TV was great at this given its limitations - but algorithmic media isn’t limited by the availability of only a few channels of airwaves and fixed broadcast schedules that had to work for everyone. Instead each of us gets our own channel that streams exactly when we can get it.
It seems to me that you are presenting many of TVs strengths as weaknesses. It was quite powerful for the medium that a small number of channels were so dominant and held up as making it ideal for example at ‘manufacturing consent’
Yes different things are different and it’s possible this old saw could find new purchase in our current feared medium (or one element of it in particular, algorithmic content service). But I am wary.
my main criticism of Postman is that he nostalgicly romanticizes the pre-television era in such a way that he presumes all to most those folks sitting at the fair watching Lincoln and Douglass debate were "critical thinkers" about the content, rather than just folks picking sides based on oral cadance, looks, and overall performance (or how many where just there because they had nothing better to do...like reading a shampoo bottle label when trying to use the bathroom in the pre-mobile phone days). Seems awfully presumptuous.
Stuff like this really gets me too - that famous Henry Ford quote about giving the people what they want.
"If I had asked people what they want, they would have wanted faster horses."
It feels like the innovative promise of the connected Internet has given way to algorithms optimized to give people small drip hits of dopamine.
Where the internet as a whole used to be a billion small parts loosely joined now it is concentrated in these monoliths that cater to our short term desires.
The internet can be a wonderful magical place, but not when it's concentrated on these platforms, especially when these platforms turn out instinctive desires against our long term goals.
I dunno, doesn't seem like the ML and AI are all that powerful if Facebook and Instagram are basically on the decline after one settings change from Apple....seems premature to bring up the paperclips again.
I don't mean this mean-spiritedly, but it is notable to me that the person who regularly advocated for honest-to-god open borders is also the person who doesn't have a problem with mindless short-term-focused hedonism without concern for the long-term.
Those two things seem to go together pretty well. =)
Interesting - I would have assumed the opposite connection. Closed borders seem to be the thing that make short term sense because they hold back the long term concern for everyone and keep it out of sight. But I haven’t thought much about a potential connection here.
If the only options are completely open or closed borders, then I'd say neither is a good long-term option.
I'd say that open borders relative to our current system is more short-term oriented because it would undermine social cohesion in exchange for temporary economic gains of an expanded labor pool.
The original comment had the flavor of brave new world to me. It seemed quite fair to the algo ‘god’ and much better than a wire. Dissent is possible and tolerated. If in some far flung future a minority of humans stand out and feel the majority is wasting their lives on an endless sea of personally tailored distractions, that’s really not so bad. Actually kind of hard to see many better outcomes that leave ‘humanity’ as we find it. An imperfect creature, to be sure, and quite likely to be spending time either trying to stay alive or wasting it on some pursuit a talented minority considers unworthy.
Ehh, you can find that future palatable all you want, I think it's pretty clear that most people don't and would prefer that this "minority" of which you speak work to head it off at the pass.
US brands (even in this era of highly strained Sino-US relations) are unbelievably dominant in the PRC. Truly no other country's even come close. Mind you it's the case that most of it gets produced over here (in China) so it doesn't do much for our trade numbers. But it does plenty for our current account.
Many times the thought has occurred to me that there'd be a lot less support in the US for trade wars in general if Americans had a grasp of just how well their country's firms do internationally. I get the impression (and Trump seems to have thrived on spreading this BS) that a lot of Yanks believe virtuous, innocent US companies are being badly bullied overseas by mean, duplicitous foreigners, while America in turn is the platonic ideal of a nation that always welcomes foreign companies and their products to our shores with open arms. What a crock.
Not many Americans have lived abroad, and a week in London or Aruba doesn't really convey the full picture. We should amend the constitution to require presidents, cabinet heads and members of Congress to have spent at least six months living outside North America. We'd be a better country for it.
While I agree that for a society as a whole to function optimally the people in it need to feel bound to each other by a common sense of responsibility and community, I'm very skeptical of takes like this that say the solution for regulating a particular industry is for the people in it to be better and more "ethical", rather than trying to write neutral, clear laws and making compliance with them the standard -- or use the old common law approach of building up the legal standard incrementally, case-by-case (which section 230 short-circuited here). Ethical scoldings aren't a realistic substitute from the standpoint of competitive dynamics within the industry, or of overcoming self-justifying, motivated reasoning. People are very good at convincing themselves that what they're doing is right.
As a example, look at the double standard our own host applies to Meta and Twitter. Perhaps even more than Facebook, Twitter is a noxious dump that has damaged and coarsened our public discourse. It rewards shallow, snarky, tribal patterns of thinking and behavior, and exacerbates rather than ameliorates incivility and division, suspicion and distrust rather than extending good faith and the benefit of the doubt. But it's very easy for those who gain the most from Twitter to overlook it's net bad effect and justify it.
This take is basically “we as a society should stigmatize working for meta unless they change in certain ways.” I think that is a reasonable thing to say if you’re not sure what tweak to the legal code would address your concerns.
Interesting piece. Thanks. This quote seems to be relevant:
"Third, employees in vilified industries are often in a position to do valuable things. Swapping from cigarettes to risk-reduction products is a net gain for people’s health. Widespread suspicion of genetically engineered crops ignores the copious evidence that they are safe and useful. And a rapid decline in the number of new petroleum engineers in America will seem less desirable if a shortfall in expertise holds back carbon-sequestration projects."
This would suggest Meta employees would be well positioned to make positive changes, which will only happen if people talk about what changes need to be made.
This is why I don’t love this article. Obviously FB is junk food and would love one of the most prominent opinion writers in the country to lay out public policy thoughts on how this could be mitigated but he doesn’t do that he gave us an article that is like “FB is junk food and the executives should recognize this and guess what the people that work there should go work somewhere else to be more ethical.”
I think this is directionally correct - laws are better than scolding. But as the crypto folks keep learning, you can’t build a functional society on laws alone; not even crypto supporters are willing to excuse hacks as “working as intended”, even though the hacks are “legal” according to the code. IMO ethics are becoming a bit underrated these days relative to incentives.
Well, the reason to write about being ethical is not just to encourage reflectiveness on the part of Meta employees (though I think you underrate the potential of moral awakening), but also to make a certain sort of social point.
As a talented software engineer in 2022 I might have a few options. I could go work for a social media giant and make a ton of money. I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me but I get to work on cool systems. Or I could go into video game development and make still less money and have worse working conditions, but everyone I know will think I'm cool.
The general perception of whether a particular job is socially valuable and desirable factors in heavily to the internal utility function of a laborer considering competing options. So if that first social media option suddenly comes along with social stigma, it doesnt seem quite so attractive.
“ I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me” this is very annoying. Our fellow liberals can be idiotic sometimes. One would have hoped that Ukraine would have woken some of them up to notice that History is still happening. *sigh*
As someone who works for the Department of Defense, I think contributing to establishing credible deterrence of our adversaries is much more beneficial than optimizing the Facebook news feed. But obviously YMMV
Incidentally, and they didn't pay me to say this, for anyone that's a SWE working at Facebook, consider working for Microsoft or even AWS instead. They are both an incredibly important component of the defense industrial base.
I entirely disagree. The continued military supremacy of America and her allies relies on overwhelming technological advantage, and the peace and prosperity of the entire world rest on that continued supremacy.
Hegemonic power for a totalizing autocracy that's actively engaged in genocide pretty much out of sheer pique at foreigners daring to ask what's going on, in this case.
If you thought Iraq was bad, just wait until the multipolar world you're functionally advocating for arrives and a true great power conflict or proxy war breaks out because China no longer feels credibly deterred by American prowess.
Whoever manufactured chemical weapons for World War I killed a few million people. Whoever manufactured fentanyl for the drug cartels is likely going to end up killing far more. Giving people the addictive means to harm themself is likely worse than giving them the means to attack each other, in terms of actual harm done.
I don't think chemical weapons killed millions in WWI (more like 1% of that number). Unless you treat the Nazi gas chambers in WWII as an extension of that
Yeah, I was trying off the cuff to guess what was the right number there. I knew that some individual battles in WWI had millions of deaths, and the total number was quite large, and I figured chemical weapons were likely a significant fraction of that. If my initial estimate of chemical weapons deaths was an overestimate, then the fentanyl thing has already exceeded it, rather than having to wait a few more years at current rates.
Not necessarily related to the point you are making, but this is a good video about the man you are referring to in your first sentence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvknN89JoWo
Not in IT but really find Matt’s take on people (not just executives from my reading) at Meta making some sort of yukky decision by having their career there rather than, say, Tesla. Don’t want to get into a back and forth and high level logical argument about but IMO he’s being condescending and sanctimonious with this line of thinking. Smugness factor a little too high on this.
Agree. Matt reasonably takes a “blame the system, not (just) the people” approach to overeating and/or Facebook binging, but paradoxically takes a “blame the people, not the systems of culture or capitalism” for people choosing to work in high-paying, high-prestige positions at Facebook.
(And as I wrote below, I agree that Twitter likely has a much larger toxic effect on the fabric of society, despite its smaller user base, because its power users are in positions of exponentially higher cultural power than the heaviest Facebook users. Twitter rots their brains and the rest of media as we know it goes down with them.)
I don't think I see a paradox. It's of a piece with his work on charities and EA. Obviously we can't mandate that everyone give a certain amount to charity, and while some people think that we should do away with charity entirely by just taxing more, I think few people here would share that view. Given all that, it's perfectly coherent to write a piece encouraging people to give more of their income to charity and to particularly give to the charities likely to help people the most. Sure, there are systematic things we could change—we could make certain not-very-helpful donations no longer tax deductible, for instance—but we're talking about a zone where the law will be of limited use to us so we need to rely on norms and social pressure. Similarly, while there are regulations we could impose to put more of a cost on Meta and Frito-Lay for the harms they do, there's nothing incoherent about encouraging people who have the choice of different careers to choose one that they can reasonably be proud of.
I’m skeptical that Twitter has caused comparable harm to FB/IG, partly considering how many fewer people use it and partly because I think that, while your critiques have a basis, there’s more good going on than you think. But I certainly could be wrong.
Mainly, I think that the “if it’s bad, make it illegal or stop wasting our time” approach (apologies if that’s not a fair depiction of your point!) is too limited. As a society we’re not going to be able to handle everything through the legal code. A huge amount of what steers us towards the good and away from the bad is going to have to be principles and norms. People who try to help those principles along are doing society a service, if they’re good principles.
I'm skeptical how much any of these things cause genuine "harm" in any meaningful way, but I'd submit that any negative impact from Twitter considerably exceeds what one would expect given the comparative size of its userbase because Twitter has uniquely infiltrated and influenced media and political elites in a way Facebook and other social media outlets don't seem to have come anywhere close to approaching.
I agree re: relative impact of Twitter. Twitter-style discourse and Twitter-generated us-vs-them animosity spills over heavily into professional spaces.
But I think, as our host exemplifies, Twitter is more heavily used by people in highly influential media positions. It certainly has an amplified effect on the tone of media writ large, much more than FB.
I'm certainly not suggesting that people shouldn't feel free to preach and proselytize their preferred vision of morality and virtue, and there's a long tradition of preachers and social reformers criticizing purveyors of vice and other in-their-eyes-sinful industries.
But particularly in a pluralistic society as diverse and large as the US, the law *is* our public moral, ethical code. America's whole schtick is that it's a land where individuals can do, be and believe whatever they want, within the bounds of the law. So even leaving aside questions such as competitive pressure and motivated reasoning, a lot of people just genuinely don't see eye-to-eye on many moral questions. The law is a lowest common denominator public moral code for our society, and if there isn't enough consensus on how a particular industry should conduct itself for it to be encoded into law, there's probably not enough of a consensus for moralizing that isn't written into law to really matter either, unless/until that view wins enough converts to be written into law.
Which, to your point, is not to say it doesn't matter; but public moralizing that isn't linked to and aimed at building support for some proposed legal change seems empty, if not downright sanctimonious. If I wanted to hear preaching I'd go to church.
I made this analogy elsewhere in this thread, but did Matt's posts on effective altruism strike you as preaching? He wasn't calling for a law banning donations to rich colleges, and I'm sure he'd think such a law would be a bad idea. He was suggesting that donors, as individuals, should try to direct their donations to where they will clearly improve people's welfare. If that strikes you as sanctimonious, fair enough; to me, trying to influence individuals is an obviously appropriate use of a public platform.
As a liberal, I was dismayed when, starting in 2014 or so, I started seeing liberals and progressives say that "free speech" only refers to the First Amendment, and that anything that isn't about government restrictions isn't about free speech at all. I was dismayed because the principle that it's basically wrong to suppress speech even when it's legal has been a cherished one of mine, and I thought of my political movement, all my life. You can say that, if there's no national consensus that suppressing speech is wrong (and boy, is there not!), then any normalizing to that effect isn't going to matter. But if Matt decided to ban you from this comment section for implying that he was being preachy, I think a lot of us would be angry on your behalf and would maybe even question whether we wanted to keep subscribing, even though there's nothing in the law or Substack's policies prohibiting him from doing that. Protecting that norm matters a lot on the margins.
Then there are laws that are on the books but very hard to enforce, and thus depend on norms anyway. I read a New Yorker article about how in Moscow, the norm is (or was at the time) that you always go into an intersection when you have a green, even if you're going to get stuck in the intersection and block traffic when the other light turns green, and that partly as a result of this Moscow has impassable traffic. In the US, we mostly stick by the norm of keeping the intersection clear, with the consequence that our traffic problems are less bad than they would be. Where I live, the norm used to be that dogwalkers bag up their dogs' waste; now that seems to be eroding. I can say "scoop your dog's poop," or I can say "scoop your dog's poop—it's the law," but either way I'm really relying on the norms, on getting people to agree that making this sacrifice will contribute to a better society overall. The line between what's permitted and what's not is not only enforced by law, in other words.
If the discussion of personal responsibility, virtue, morality, or whatever is tied to some to theory of good citizenship, ie, republican citizenship, and what personal attributes citizens should have and be inculcated with to promote the functioning of a self-governing democratic republic, that's a discussion I think fits and is worth having in a publication on politics and public affairs.
But generalized theories of what it means to be a good person, whether couched in the language of EA, Catholic social doctrine, or what have you, are something else, and not something I'm particularly interested in. People are of course free to discuss and proselytize their preferred ideas in that area, but it's not the kind of publication I'd be inclined to support.
I agree. The Headline of MY's post should have been "A Case against Meta" because if it is "The Case" then history shows it isn't likely to do much. MY brings up the food industry and animal production in particular as analogy. I know a great many people in those industries, I've never met one who thinks themselves evil. It has nothing to do with showing them your evidence, either. Both sides can debate and argue until they are winded enough to join Blue Man Group. But in food production or meta, I can only see change happening when either consumers demand change or when the industry itself demands change (this latter is not as uncommon as one may think. Federal food regularity grades and standards, for example, were initially proposed by the industries themselves to guard against poor products sullying the market for everyone). There needs to be more than *The* case against Meta and MY's particular case may very well be the most desperate as I do worry our starship is unknowingly headed to Talos IV.
This kind of is consumers demanding change, right? It’s a small effort to get people to think about these companies and their goals in a negative light.
I genuinely feel frustrated that social networking websites have done a ton of good for me as an autistic person at getting me to socialize and leading to events and causes to work for that I literally never would have without them and everyone treats engaging with them as a thing to be avoided.
I’m not saying they are free from problems at all, but my Facebook is full of groups and events for engaging in things recipes and pet and baby pictures by my active use of filters. I’m a bit of an addict but like my pre-Facebook social interaction was basically nothing and that doesn’t seem so bad.
This is the best promise of the socially connected Internet - connecting people who are normally isolated. LGBT, minority, other groups that aren't like their surroundings need spaces where they can meet others like them and see they're not alone. This is why you can't just burn it all down.
But with that positivity you get the Q Anons and adrenochrome people meeting each other too. It's a double-edged sword.
As an employee (a senior eng on ads) I find I actually agree with this critique. And I do not think Matt will find this convincing, but just want to make the point.
If we didn’t do it, someone else would, sure. But it’s also more complicated than that. This is a larger trend that does not originate with us and we are trying to survive. That trend is what’s interesting.
Matthewmatosis (video game reviewer) once made a point about the convergent evolution of video games, as all get leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements. This is happening as people try to make their products more appealing and borrow popular elements. Sometimes there are paradigm shifts where either consumer preferences change or are revealed, and then other products start evolving along those lines instead.
He makes the analogy that if you went back in time and released DOOM again, but with RPG elements, it would do *better* than DOOM most likely. Even though it would sully the purity of what DOOM was. Even if the developers of DOOM refused, someone else could just come along and make DOOM + RPG elements and profit.
I think that analogy works for social media. They are all evolving towards short form video, and while any one company probably would say it’s bad, *all* of them are doing it. Not just Meta. There is no world where meta saying no results in this not happening.
Think a bit about the history of this. Tiktok is not original. Vine came first, and showed everyone the power of short form video. But then it died for finance/monetization reasons, not because the format lacked appeal, and the surviving competitors in the attention space did not go full short form video (probably for a mix of principle about their original product purpose and bad business sense). IG/FB/Snapchat/YouTube all in theory took steps at the time to compete, but stopped the convergent evolution when Vine went away. Then years later, TikTok emerges to essentially complete the evolution towards people’s revealed preferences. And now here we are.
I do not think this should make Meta blameless or anything, but I do not see a world where we (now the internet using public and not the company) can internet shame the relevant companies into not reacting in the way other companies react to a moneymaking product innovation.
So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing? I am sympathetic. Try to be like Twitter and occupy our non-money making/doomed niche? Perhaps. Because I think social media will convergently evolve to be short form video selected by algorithm, whether meta is involved or not. None of this makes me feel good. But shaming individual players does not solve the revealed preference problem.
(My answer, not that I have sway, is to make it easier for people to *make* and *share* short form video to post/story but not build a whole product around it. And instead lean into more friend specific and ephemerality specific features. Try to emphasis what makes IG unique instead of chasing short form video)
How about optimize on a slightly different metric; “do humans say this is good for them?” rather than “does this increase engagement?” It’s a bit less convenient than “time on the app”, but collecting a sizable dataset addressing that question wouldn’t be too hard.
IIRC Facebook already occasionally asks me a question like that. Do those results point in the same direction as “maximize engagement”? Are they used?
Btw what’s wrong with short video? I would’ve thought the issue was more “which short videos” rather than the medium itself.
Sure, you probably wouldn’t want to completely throw out “engaging” (and the company won’t, so no worries there). But probably mixing in some “good” would be helpful. IMO the tough parts are defining “good” and “helpful” in a credible and scalable way.
Fwiw we do measure this but it does not get nearly the same billing at the end of the day. We were doing a better job of prioritizing it when the stock price was doing better.
I mean... "stop existing" is pretty damned compelling.
At the companywide level, to be clear, not on a personal basis.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly the endgame here; unless the "kids" prove dramatically better at handling this than we think they're going to be, various nation-states are simply going to kill off social media within their borders above the level of comment sections and uncurated long-form video repositories. They'll play whack-a-mole for a while and eventually almost all nations will drift in that direction.
At which point we'll have interesting headlines like "US and China conduct joint strike against Somali black-market social media firm", lol.
Technical talent is a very scarce resource, especially high-end technical talent with legal permission to work in America. On the margin, if many skilled engineers opted out of Meta and Meta-related activities, that sector would on the margin "optimize itself" slightly slower and the places they migrated to would "optimize themselves" slightly faster, to a clear net benefit to American society.
To use your analogy to video games, even if "leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements" are the entropic inescapeable end state of videogames [a big if], visionary video game creators choosing to do other things does on the margin increase diversity in the videogame industry.
Extending that analogy to Facebook -- over its short lifespan we've seen that these addictive loops seem to saturate and then start to decline unless new niches are found to expand into. Expanding into new niches takes a lot of work and talent, and depriving the sector of some technical talent on the margin slows its rate of discovery of the next addictive niche and therefore reduces the actual number of hours lost to addiction-suck.
>So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing?
Historically when a new communications technology has developed that could impact the functioning of civil society, the government has stepped in to heavily regulate it so that it broadly aligns with civic values.
For example, when television was invented the federal government controlled the airwaves, limited content production to three networks, and mandated that those networks air news programs and that the programs give airtime to all (mainstream) points of view.
So I think government regulation of all recommendation engines is what the solution will end up looking like, including some content being mandatory in an eat-your-vegetables way.
A key difference between internet content and broadcast TV is that the airwaves are a rivalrous good; two broadcasters cannot occupy the same frequency, in the same region, at the same time. In order for the public to benefit from broadcast communication someone had to regulate broadcasting.
No such analogy exists for the internet and it’s thereby going to be harder for liberal governments to justify regulating content platforms. Particularly for the US with the first amendment.
That’s a key point: The federal government most certainly had a role in regulating frequencies, broadcast power, technical standards, and the like for the purposes of ensuring radio broadcasting worked *at all.* The rest came about since those in power said, “Hey, since you guys have to ask us for a license, we should have some say in what you broadcast.”
The same thing is playing out now with social media except the excuse will be based on some novel antitrust theory or something like that. But the real reason is because people with power want more power.
My view is that that the fundamental problem is the business model for all these companies. Nothing will change until the business model is forced to change. Changing the business model requires regulation to give individuals ownership over their own information.
Matt says this pretty explicitly in his post: you should switch to a subscription-based monetization model. Ad-supported businesses must optimize for continued viewer attention, whereas subscription-supported businesses must optimize for viewer satisfaction during renewal season.
Short-form video vs. non-short-term video is an orthogonal concern.
I think it's pretty hard to credit the idea that the most powerful social media company in existence has no influence over how social media evolves. But also, you personally could make a different choice.
Even the most powerful companies in an industry don't have much control when faced with competition and low switching costs. Netscape and AOL once dominated internet access but they had zero influence over how that market evolved. Meta, similarly, has very little control over the future of social media.
Meta may individually have very little control over the future of social media, but the sector has a whole can influence how fast that future arrives. If the sector has slightly less technical talent lavished on it, the future arrives slightly more slowly and so billions of addiction-hours are not spent in the meantime.
Technical talent is a scarce resource; the scientists at the Manhattan project / Human Genome Project / Apollo project could have made more money by working somewhere else, but they chose to devote their technical talent to something that mattered.
You envision a world where Meta refuses to do short video and then survives profitably? Not even mark thinks that (hence the VR stuff that’s a whole different can of worms).
One of my personal hobbyhorses is that the problem Matt is outlining – use of AI and ML to optimize for people's short-term desires, overriding their longer-term goals and ethics – is exactly how I think a hypothetical AI takeover is going to go. Not Skynet terminating us all, but a soft obliteration of most people's ability to function meaningfully, outside of maximizing whatever engagement metrics were calibrated last before they became too powerful for the average person to resist.
Sure, a few people will complain loudly, but they'll be written off as cranks. And a few people will profit mightily, but hasn't it ever been thus? And the rest of us will drown in customized, optimized, individualized food and entertainment, in between whatever shift work we do that's too expensive to automate.
Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I view this as a much more likely outcome of failure to align AI than being turned into a paperclip.
Per Amusing Ourselves to Death (by Neil Postman in the mid-80s, an excellent book), the Huxleyan outcome...
Also a major theme of Infinite Jest
Reading it right now. While written about TV, it rings even more true for social media.
I actually think it takes quite a bit away from Matt’s point that TV seems as addictive and more destructive than Facebook in so many ways, that so many good thinkers already delivered this critique about TV, and that few of us actually have any real experience of life without such a supposedly pernicious soma.
Doesn’t deal it a fatal blow by any means but I don’t think these previous generations of ‘old man shouting at cloud’ cast the argument in a favorable light.
Slight difference: I remember our best and brightest being dismissive toward the TV hive mind. They seem much more captives of our Twitter hive mind.
There is certainly a potential role here for some social shame. And, by the way. we could also make some individual and collective social choices (not taxes) to help people eat less or ‘better’.
Well, were all the critiques of TV wrong? I think that, for instance, Fox News has probably done more harm than the golden age of television has done good. Generally speaking, if you heard that a family watched significantly more TV than average, you would assume that to be unhealthy, right?
If you give me only that info I’d say there is some other problem that tv addiction is a solution to not that tv addiction just ate this family
No, I didn't mean to imply that the TV seized hold of them out of nowhere. But the fact that the TV is addictive (we don't think there are as many families who deal with their problems by playing music or reading, say) suggests that it wasn't clouds the people in the past were yelling at.
Yes. Not a particularly groundbreaking post, although I think generic TV has been less harmful than the combo of Murdock / Facebook / smartphones. I’m reminded of the quote from AO Wilson about society having Stone Age emotions, mid evil institutions and god like technology.
While TV may have been "less harmful than the combo of Murdock [sic] / Facebook / smartphones" that is not a particularly high bar. TV is no slouch when it comes to damaging society and weakening societal norms. The average slow boring reader probably eschews the most damaging programming and thus underestimates the pernicious impact of TV on American society. "Cops", a particularly dangerous program, has survived for an astonishing 33 seasons!
very fair.
I believe some research shows cable and network news still ultimately have an outsized impact on public perceptions over primary internet sourcing on social media, etc. IMO, Social media's main influence on the public is second order via it's converage decision impact of journalist on those platforms.
In light of that, i ask folks to consider who spread misinformation about Q Anon more. Folks logging onto 4Chan or Facebook...or snoody newscatsers going to Trump events hunting for "crazies" to spar with so they could highlight that "good tape" on the evening news.
Engagement with a fringe topic to "fact check" or "debunk" it ultimately spreads it and the viewer can (and often) chooses to ignore your additional context or commentary added to the source.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539
Yeah I think there’s a richer post here both pro and con about smartphones and being ‘always online’ in general.
TV was great at this given its limitations - but algorithmic media isn’t limited by the availability of only a few channels of airwaves and fixed broadcast schedules that had to work for everyone. Instead each of us gets our own channel that streams exactly when we can get it.
It seems to me that you are presenting many of TVs strengths as weaknesses. It was quite powerful for the medium that a small number of channels were so dominant and held up as making it ideal for example at ‘manufacturing consent’
Yes different things are different and it’s possible this old saw could find new purchase in our current feared medium (or one element of it in particular, algorithmic content service). But I am wary.
It's incredible how prescient it was. I felt the same way about David Foster Wallace's essays about TV.
Yes. His longed for sincerity has returned, but mixed with postmodernism in a way that I think strips it of the appeal that it had for him.
my main criticism of Postman is that he nostalgicly romanticizes the pre-television era in such a way that he presumes all to most those folks sitting at the fair watching Lincoln and Douglass debate were "critical thinkers" about the content, rather than just folks picking sides based on oral cadance, looks, and overall performance (or how many where just there because they had nothing better to do...like reading a shampoo bottle label when trying to use the bathroom in the pre-mobile phone days). Seems awfully presumptuous.
Well this was a bummer to read on a Monday morning
Stuff like this really gets me too - that famous Henry Ford quote about giving the people what they want.
"If I had asked people what they want, they would have wanted faster horses."
It feels like the innovative promise of the connected Internet has given way to algorithms optimized to give people small drip hits of dopamine.
Where the internet as a whole used to be a billion small parts loosely joined now it is concentrated in these monoliths that cater to our short term desires.
The internet can be a wonderful magical place, but not when it's concentrated on these platforms, especially when these platforms turn out instinctive desires against our long term goals.
This seems like pretty well aligned AI idk
Seems to me we pretty much already live in this reality, or very, very close to it.
I dunno, doesn't seem like the ML and AI are all that powerful if Facebook and Instagram are basically on the decline after one settings change from Apple....seems premature to bring up the paperclips again.
I don't mean this mean-spiritedly, but it is notable to me that the person who regularly advocated for honest-to-god open borders is also the person who doesn't have a problem with mindless short-term-focused hedonism without concern for the long-term.
Those two things seem to go together pretty well. =)
Interesting - I would have assumed the opposite connection. Closed borders seem to be the thing that make short term sense because they hold back the long term concern for everyone and keep it out of sight. But I haven’t thought much about a potential connection here.
If the only options are completely open or closed borders, then I'd say neither is a good long-term option.
I'd say that open borders relative to our current system is more short-term oriented because it would undermine social cohesion in exchange for temporary economic gains of an expanded labor pool.
I would say that if it does undermine social cohesion, it would only be doing so in the short-term but improve that cohesion in the long term.
The Brain Wire is your friend, general.
You'll starve to death while frantically pressing the button to stimulate your pleasure center directly, but the Brain Wire is your friend.
The original comment had the flavor of brave new world to me. It seemed quite fair to the algo ‘god’ and much better than a wire. Dissent is possible and tolerated. If in some far flung future a minority of humans stand out and feel the majority is wasting their lives on an endless sea of personally tailored distractions, that’s really not so bad. Actually kind of hard to see many better outcomes that leave ‘humanity’ as we find it. An imperfect creature, to be sure, and quite likely to be spending time either trying to stay alive or wasting it on some pursuit a talented minority considers unworthy.
Ehh, you can find that future palatable all you want, I think it's pretty clear that most people don't and would prefer that this "minority" of which you speak work to head it off at the pass.
“…without concern for the long-term”
A society built on that will soon enough get rolled by one that focuses on the long-term.
Except continuing to delay gratification at a societal level doesn't just result in hoarded wealth sitting their uselessly.
It builds it up for following generations.
I'd say that's the main mechanism in how civilizations become great in the first place.
And -remain- great.
I'd also say that we are already too hedonistic, and it is going to result in China dominating us if it isn't addressed.
US brands (even in this era of highly strained Sino-US relations) are unbelievably dominant in the PRC. Truly no other country's even come close. Mind you it's the case that most of it gets produced over here (in China) so it doesn't do much for our trade numbers. But it does plenty for our current account.
Many times the thought has occurred to me that there'd be a lot less support in the US for trade wars in general if Americans had a grasp of just how well their country's firms do internationally. I get the impression (and Trump seems to have thrived on spreading this BS) that a lot of Yanks believe virtuous, innocent US companies are being badly bullied overseas by mean, duplicitous foreigners, while America in turn is the platonic ideal of a nation that always welcomes foreign companies and their products to our shores with open arms. What a crock.
Not many Americans have lived abroad, and a week in London or Aruba doesn't really convey the full picture. We should amend the constitution to require presidents, cabinet heads and members of Congress to have spent at least six months living outside North America. We'd be a better country for it.
"In some ways" is doing an awful lot of work here. Cockaigne's hedonism is a fairly minor strain within Utopian visions.
While I agree that for a society as a whole to function optimally the people in it need to feel bound to each other by a common sense of responsibility and community, I'm very skeptical of takes like this that say the solution for regulating a particular industry is for the people in it to be better and more "ethical", rather than trying to write neutral, clear laws and making compliance with them the standard -- or use the old common law approach of building up the legal standard incrementally, case-by-case (which section 230 short-circuited here). Ethical scoldings aren't a realistic substitute from the standpoint of competitive dynamics within the industry, or of overcoming self-justifying, motivated reasoning. People are very good at convincing themselves that what they're doing is right.
As a example, look at the double standard our own host applies to Meta and Twitter. Perhaps even more than Facebook, Twitter is a noxious dump that has damaged and coarsened our public discourse. It rewards shallow, snarky, tribal patterns of thinking and behavior, and exacerbates rather than ameliorates incivility and division, suspicion and distrust rather than extending good faith and the benefit of the doubt. But it's very easy for those who gain the most from Twitter to overlook it's net bad effect and justify it.
This take is basically “we as a society should stigmatize working for meta unless they change in certain ways.” I think that is a reasonable thing to say if you’re not sure what tweak to the legal code would address your concerns.
Unclear that this works
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/08/11/why-employees-want-to-work-in-vilified-industries
(Paywalled)
A few things I remember from reading it:
1) Industries may turn out not to be so bad later (e.g. disdain for arms manufacturers dropping with support for Ukraine)
2) Can create a bit of a rally-round-the-flag result where employees feel even prouder/more tightly knit.
Suggests that you have to be careful about the level of scolding.
Interesting piece. Thanks. This quote seems to be relevant:
"Third, employees in vilified industries are often in a position to do valuable things. Swapping from cigarettes to risk-reduction products is a net gain for people’s health. Widespread suspicion of genetically engineered crops ignores the copious evidence that they are safe and useful. And a rapid decline in the number of new petroleum engineers in America will seem less desirable if a shortfall in expertise holds back carbon-sequestration projects."
This would suggest Meta employees would be well positioned to make positive changes, which will only happen if people talk about what changes need to be made.
This is why I don’t love this article. Obviously FB is junk food and would love one of the most prominent opinion writers in the country to lay out public policy thoughts on how this could be mitigated but he doesn’t do that he gave us an article that is like “FB is junk food and the executives should recognize this and guess what the people that work there should go work somewhere else to be more ethical.”
I think this is directionally correct - laws are better than scolding. But as the crypto folks keep learning, you can’t build a functional society on laws alone; not even crypto supporters are willing to excuse hacks as “working as intended”, even though the hacks are “legal” according to the code. IMO ethics are becoming a bit underrated these days relative to incentives.
Well, the reason to write about being ethical is not just to encourage reflectiveness on the part of Meta employees (though I think you underrate the potential of moral awakening), but also to make a certain sort of social point.
As a talented software engineer in 2022 I might have a few options. I could go work for a social media giant and make a ton of money. I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me but I get to work on cool systems. Or I could go into video game development and make still less money and have worse working conditions, but everyone I know will think I'm cool.
The general perception of whether a particular job is socially valuable and desirable factors in heavily to the internal utility function of a laborer considering competing options. So if that first social media option suddenly comes along with social stigma, it doesnt seem quite so attractive.
“ I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me” this is very annoying. Our fellow liberals can be idiotic sometimes. One would have hoped that Ukraine would have woken some of them up to notice that History is still happening. *sigh*
As someone who works for the Department of Defense, I think contributing to establishing credible deterrence of our adversaries is much more beneficial than optimizing the Facebook news feed. But obviously YMMV
Incidentally, and they didn't pay me to say this, for anyone that's a SWE working at Facebook, consider working for Microsoft or even AWS instead. They are both an incredibly important component of the defense industrial base.
I entirely disagree. The continued military supremacy of America and her allies relies on overwhelming technological advantage, and the peace and prosperity of the entire world rest on that continued supremacy.
But we're an "empire", you see.
Empires are bad.
Depends on the alternative. :)
Hegemonic power for a totalizing autocracy that's actively engaged in genocide pretty much out of sheer pique at foreigners daring to ask what's going on, in this case.
This point of view is less popular in Iraq
If you thought Iraq was bad, just wait until the multipolar world you're functionally advocating for arrives and a true great power conflict or proxy war breaks out because China no longer feels credibly deterred by American prowess.
But becoming more popular in Taiwan.
Whoever manufactured chemical weapons for World War I killed a few million people. Whoever manufactured fentanyl for the drug cartels is likely going to end up killing far more. Giving people the addictive means to harm themself is likely worse than giving them the means to attack each other, in terms of actual harm done.
I don't think chemical weapons killed millions in WWI (more like 1% of that number). Unless you treat the Nazi gas chambers in WWII as an extension of that
A couple million sounded high but only tens of thousands sounded low.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiSv4-vyOz5AhVLF1kFHZ1BAlsQFnoECAkQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.opcw.org%2Fdocuments%2Fpractical-guide-medical-management-chemical-warfare-casualties-web&usg=AOvVaw0lFa5Ei5-vdbb9iSrpOs85
This source thinks it's 100,000 deaths + a million casualties in WWI?
Yeah, I was trying off the cuff to guess what was the right number there. I knew that some individual battles in WWI had millions of deaths, and the total number was quite large, and I figured chemical weapons were likely a significant fraction of that. If my initial estimate of chemical weapons deaths was an overestimate, then the fentanyl thing has already exceeded it, rather than having to wait a few more years at current rates.
Not necessarily related to the point you are making, but this is a good video about the man you are referring to in your first sentence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvknN89JoWo
Not in IT but really find Matt’s take on people (not just executives from my reading) at Meta making some sort of yukky decision by having their career there rather than, say, Tesla. Don’t want to get into a back and forth and high level logical argument about but IMO he’s being condescending and sanctimonious with this line of thinking. Smugness factor a little too high on this.
Agree. Matt reasonably takes a “blame the system, not (just) the people” approach to overeating and/or Facebook binging, but paradoxically takes a “blame the people, not the systems of culture or capitalism” for people choosing to work in high-paying, high-prestige positions at Facebook.
(And as I wrote below, I agree that Twitter likely has a much larger toxic effect on the fabric of society, despite its smaller user base, because its power users are in positions of exponentially higher cultural power than the heaviest Facebook users. Twitter rots their brains and the rest of media as we know it goes down with them.)
I don't think I see a paradox. It's of a piece with his work on charities and EA. Obviously we can't mandate that everyone give a certain amount to charity, and while some people think that we should do away with charity entirely by just taxing more, I think few people here would share that view. Given all that, it's perfectly coherent to write a piece encouraging people to give more of their income to charity and to particularly give to the charities likely to help people the most. Sure, there are systematic things we could change—we could make certain not-very-helpful donations no longer tax deductible, for instance—but we're talking about a zone where the law will be of limited use to us so we need to rely on norms and social pressure. Similarly, while there are regulations we could impose to put more of a cost on Meta and Frito-Lay for the harms they do, there's nothing incoherent about encouraging people who have the choice of different careers to choose one that they can reasonably be proud of.
I’m skeptical that Twitter has caused comparable harm to FB/IG, partly considering how many fewer people use it and partly because I think that, while your critiques have a basis, there’s more good going on than you think. But I certainly could be wrong.
Mainly, I think that the “if it’s bad, make it illegal or stop wasting our time” approach (apologies if that’s not a fair depiction of your point!) is too limited. As a society we’re not going to be able to handle everything through the legal code. A huge amount of what steers us towards the good and away from the bad is going to have to be principles and norms. People who try to help those principles along are doing society a service, if they’re good principles.
I'm skeptical how much any of these things cause genuine "harm" in any meaningful way, but I'd submit that any negative impact from Twitter considerably exceeds what one would expect given the comparative size of its userbase because Twitter has uniquely infiltrated and influenced media and political elites in a way Facebook and other social media outlets don't seem to have come anywhere close to approaching.
I agree re: relative impact of Twitter. Twitter-style discourse and Twitter-generated us-vs-them animosity spills over heavily into professional spaces.
But I think, as our host exemplifies, Twitter is more heavily used by people in highly influential media positions. It certainly has an amplified effect on the tone of media writ large, much more than FB.
I'm certainly not suggesting that people shouldn't feel free to preach and proselytize their preferred vision of morality and virtue, and there's a long tradition of preachers and social reformers criticizing purveyors of vice and other in-their-eyes-sinful industries.
But particularly in a pluralistic society as diverse and large as the US, the law *is* our public moral, ethical code. America's whole schtick is that it's a land where individuals can do, be and believe whatever they want, within the bounds of the law. So even leaving aside questions such as competitive pressure and motivated reasoning, a lot of people just genuinely don't see eye-to-eye on many moral questions. The law is a lowest common denominator public moral code for our society, and if there isn't enough consensus on how a particular industry should conduct itself for it to be encoded into law, there's probably not enough of a consensus for moralizing that isn't written into law to really matter either, unless/until that view wins enough converts to be written into law.
Which, to your point, is not to say it doesn't matter; but public moralizing that isn't linked to and aimed at building support for some proposed legal change seems empty, if not downright sanctimonious. If I wanted to hear preaching I'd go to church.
I made this analogy elsewhere in this thread, but did Matt's posts on effective altruism strike you as preaching? He wasn't calling for a law banning donations to rich colleges, and I'm sure he'd think such a law would be a bad idea. He was suggesting that donors, as individuals, should try to direct their donations to where they will clearly improve people's welfare. If that strikes you as sanctimonious, fair enough; to me, trying to influence individuals is an obviously appropriate use of a public platform.
As a liberal, I was dismayed when, starting in 2014 or so, I started seeing liberals and progressives say that "free speech" only refers to the First Amendment, and that anything that isn't about government restrictions isn't about free speech at all. I was dismayed because the principle that it's basically wrong to suppress speech even when it's legal has been a cherished one of mine, and I thought of my political movement, all my life. You can say that, if there's no national consensus that suppressing speech is wrong (and boy, is there not!), then any normalizing to that effect isn't going to matter. But if Matt decided to ban you from this comment section for implying that he was being preachy, I think a lot of us would be angry on your behalf and would maybe even question whether we wanted to keep subscribing, even though there's nothing in the law or Substack's policies prohibiting him from doing that. Protecting that norm matters a lot on the margins.
Then there are laws that are on the books but very hard to enforce, and thus depend on norms anyway. I read a New Yorker article about how in Moscow, the norm is (or was at the time) that you always go into an intersection when you have a green, even if you're going to get stuck in the intersection and block traffic when the other light turns green, and that partly as a result of this Moscow has impassable traffic. In the US, we mostly stick by the norm of keeping the intersection clear, with the consequence that our traffic problems are less bad than they would be. Where I live, the norm used to be that dogwalkers bag up their dogs' waste; now that seems to be eroding. I can say "scoop your dog's poop," or I can say "scoop your dog's poop—it's the law," but either way I'm really relying on the norms, on getting people to agree that making this sacrifice will contribute to a better society overall. The line between what's permitted and what's not is not only enforced by law, in other words.
If the discussion of personal responsibility, virtue, morality, or whatever is tied to some to theory of good citizenship, ie, republican citizenship, and what personal attributes citizens should have and be inculcated with to promote the functioning of a self-governing democratic republic, that's a discussion I think fits and is worth having in a publication on politics and public affairs.
But generalized theories of what it means to be a good person, whether couched in the language of EA, Catholic social doctrine, or what have you, are something else, and not something I'm particularly interested in. People are of course free to discuss and proselytize their preferred ideas in that area, but it's not the kind of publication I'd be inclined to support.
Fair enough!
I agree. The Headline of MY's post should have been "A Case against Meta" because if it is "The Case" then history shows it isn't likely to do much. MY brings up the food industry and animal production in particular as analogy. I know a great many people in those industries, I've never met one who thinks themselves evil. It has nothing to do with showing them your evidence, either. Both sides can debate and argue until they are winded enough to join Blue Man Group. But in food production or meta, I can only see change happening when either consumers demand change or when the industry itself demands change (this latter is not as uncommon as one may think. Federal food regularity grades and standards, for example, were initially proposed by the industries themselves to guard against poor products sullying the market for everyone). There needs to be more than *The* case against Meta and MY's particular case may very well be the most desperate as I do worry our starship is unknowingly headed to Talos IV.
This kind of is consumers demanding change, right? It’s a small effort to get people to think about these companies and their goals in a negative light.
I genuinely feel frustrated that social networking websites have done a ton of good for me as an autistic person at getting me to socialize and leading to events and causes to work for that I literally never would have without them and everyone treats engaging with them as a thing to be avoided.
I’m not saying they are free from problems at all, but my Facebook is full of groups and events for engaging in things recipes and pet and baby pictures by my active use of filters. I’m a bit of an addict but like my pre-Facebook social interaction was basically nothing and that doesn’t seem so bad.
This is the best promise of the socially connected Internet - connecting people who are normally isolated. LGBT, minority, other groups that aren't like their surroundings need spaces where they can meet others like them and see they're not alone. This is why you can't just burn it all down.
But with that positivity you get the Q Anons and adrenochrome people meeting each other too. It's a double-edged sword.
As an employee (a senior eng on ads) I find I actually agree with this critique. And I do not think Matt will find this convincing, but just want to make the point.
If we didn’t do it, someone else would, sure. But it’s also more complicated than that. This is a larger trend that does not originate with us and we are trying to survive. That trend is what’s interesting.
Matthewmatosis (video game reviewer) once made a point about the convergent evolution of video games, as all get leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements. This is happening as people try to make their products more appealing and borrow popular elements. Sometimes there are paradigm shifts where either consumer preferences change or are revealed, and then other products start evolving along those lines instead.
He makes the analogy that if you went back in time and released DOOM again, but with RPG elements, it would do *better* than DOOM most likely. Even though it would sully the purity of what DOOM was. Even if the developers of DOOM refused, someone else could just come along and make DOOM + RPG elements and profit.
I think that analogy works for social media. They are all evolving towards short form video, and while any one company probably would say it’s bad, *all* of them are doing it. Not just Meta. There is no world where meta saying no results in this not happening.
Think a bit about the history of this. Tiktok is not original. Vine came first, and showed everyone the power of short form video. But then it died for finance/monetization reasons, not because the format lacked appeal, and the surviving competitors in the attention space did not go full short form video (probably for a mix of principle about their original product purpose and bad business sense). IG/FB/Snapchat/YouTube all in theory took steps at the time to compete, but stopped the convergent evolution when Vine went away. Then years later, TikTok emerges to essentially complete the evolution towards people’s revealed preferences. And now here we are.
I do not think this should make Meta blameless or anything, but I do not see a world where we (now the internet using public and not the company) can internet shame the relevant companies into not reacting in the way other companies react to a moneymaking product innovation.
So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing? I am sympathetic. Try to be like Twitter and occupy our non-money making/doomed niche? Perhaps. Because I think social media will convergently evolve to be short form video selected by algorithm, whether meta is involved or not. None of this makes me feel good. But shaming individual players does not solve the revealed preference problem.
(My answer, not that I have sway, is to make it easier for people to *make* and *share* short form video to post/story but not build a whole product around it. And instead lean into more friend specific and ephemerality specific features. Try to emphasis what makes IG unique instead of chasing short form video)
How about optimize on a slightly different metric; “do humans say this is good for them?” rather than “does this increase engagement?” It’s a bit less convenient than “time on the app”, but collecting a sizable dataset addressing that question wouldn’t be too hard.
IIRC Facebook already occasionally asks me a question like that. Do those results point in the same direction as “maximize engagement”? Are they used?
Btw what’s wrong with short video? I would’ve thought the issue was more “which short videos” rather than the medium itself.
“Do humans say this is good for them?” doesn’t get you a sustainable product that actually displaces bad things. At best it gets you CSPAN.
Sure, you probably wouldn’t want to completely throw out “engaging” (and the company won’t, so no worries there). But probably mixing in some “good” would be helpful. IMO the tough parts are defining “good” and “helpful” in a credible and scalable way.
Fwiw we do measure this but it does not get nearly the same billing at the end of the day. We were doing a better job of prioritizing it when the stock price was doing better.
What if “what humans say is good for them” doesn’t line up well with “what gets our company money”?
This is especially true if “what humans say is good for them” is less addicting than your competitor’s product.
This is a weird comment to make when we don’t know what the optimization metric is in the first place...
I mean... "stop existing" is pretty damned compelling.
At the companywide level, to be clear, not on a personal basis.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly the endgame here; unless the "kids" prove dramatically better at handling this than we think they're going to be, various nation-states are simply going to kill off social media within their borders above the level of comment sections and uncurated long-form video repositories. They'll play whack-a-mole for a while and eventually almost all nations will drift in that direction.
At which point we'll have interesting headlines like "US and China conduct joint strike against Somali black-market social media firm", lol.
Technical talent is a very scarce resource, especially high-end technical talent with legal permission to work in America. On the margin, if many skilled engineers opted out of Meta and Meta-related activities, that sector would on the margin "optimize itself" slightly slower and the places they migrated to would "optimize themselves" slightly faster, to a clear net benefit to American society.
To use your analogy to video games, even if "leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements" are the entropic inescapeable end state of videogames [a big if], visionary video game creators choosing to do other things does on the margin increase diversity in the videogame industry.
Extending that analogy to Facebook -- over its short lifespan we've seen that these addictive loops seem to saturate and then start to decline unless new niches are found to expand into. Expanding into new niches takes a lot of work and talent, and depriving the sector of some technical talent on the margin slows its rate of discovery of the next addictive niche and therefore reduces the actual number of hours lost to addiction-suck.
>So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing?
Historically when a new communications technology has developed that could impact the functioning of civil society, the government has stepped in to heavily regulate it so that it broadly aligns with civic values.
For example, when television was invented the federal government controlled the airwaves, limited content production to three networks, and mandated that those networks air news programs and that the programs give airtime to all (mainstream) points of view.
So I think government regulation of all recommendation engines is what the solution will end up looking like, including some content being mandatory in an eat-your-vegetables way.
A key difference between internet content and broadcast TV is that the airwaves are a rivalrous good; two broadcasters cannot occupy the same frequency, in the same region, at the same time. In order for the public to benefit from broadcast communication someone had to regulate broadcasting.
No such analogy exists for the internet and it’s thereby going to be harder for liberal governments to justify regulating content platforms. Particularly for the US with the first amendment.
That’s a key point: The federal government most certainly had a role in regulating frequencies, broadcast power, technical standards, and the like for the purposes of ensuring radio broadcasting worked *at all.* The rest came about since those in power said, “Hey, since you guys have to ask us for a license, we should have some say in what you broadcast.”
The same thing is playing out now with social media except the excuse will be based on some novel antitrust theory or something like that. But the real reason is because people with power want more power.
I think the obvious lever for social media is section 230. "You can keep your liability shield, but only if you meet XYZ conditions..."
Thanks for the perspective.
My view is that that the fundamental problem is the business model for all these companies. Nothing will change until the business model is forced to change. Changing the business model requires regulation to give individuals ownership over their own information.
Matt says this pretty explicitly in his post: you should switch to a subscription-based monetization model. Ad-supported businesses must optimize for continued viewer attention, whereas subscription-supported businesses must optimize for viewer satisfaction during renewal season.
Short-form video vs. non-short-term video is an orthogonal concern.
I think it's pretty hard to credit the idea that the most powerful social media company in existence has no influence over how social media evolves. But also, you personally could make a different choice.
Even the most powerful companies in an industry don't have much control when faced with competition and low switching costs. Netscape and AOL once dominated internet access but they had zero influence over how that market evolved. Meta, similarly, has very little control over the future of social media.
Meta may individually have very little control over the future of social media, but the sector has a whole can influence how fast that future arrives. If the sector has slightly less technical talent lavished on it, the future arrives slightly more slowly and so billions of addiction-hours are not spent in the meantime.
Technical talent is a scarce resource; the scientists at the Manhattan project / Human Genome Project / Apollo project could have made more money by working somewhere else, but they chose to devote their technical talent to something that mattered.
You envision a world where Meta refuses to do short video and then survives profitably? Not even mark thinks that (hence the VR stuff that’s a whole different can of worms).