How Social Media Competes for Your Attention

One of the things that Jack Dorsey has been pretty adamant about is that they really never saw this coming when they started Twitter. And they didn't think that they were ever going to be in this position where they were going to be really the arbiters of free speech for the world, which is essentially in some ways what they are. I think it's important to roll back the clock for people because it's easy to think that we just sort of landed here and that they would know that they're going to be influencing the global psychology. But I think we should really reverse engineer for the audience. How did these products work the way that they did? So let's go back to the beginning day to Twitter. I think his first tweet was something like, checking out the buffaloes in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Jack was fascinated by the taxi cab dispatch system that you could send a message and then all the taxis get it. And the idea is could we create a dispatch system so that I post a tweet and then suddenly all these other people can see it? And the real genius of these things was that they weren't just offering this thing you could do. They found ways of keeping people engaged. I think this is important for people to get that they're not competing for your data or for money. They're competing to keep people using the product. And so when Twitter, for example, invented this persuasive feature of the number of followers that you have, if you remember, that was a new thing at the time. You log in and you see your profile. Here's the people who you can follow. And then here's the number of followers you have. That created a reason for you to come back every day to see how many followers do I have. So that was part of this race to keep people engaged as we talk about in the film. These things are competing for your attention that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. But the thing that is the product is your predictable behavior. You're using the product in predictable ways. I remember a conversation I had with someone at Facebook who was a friend of mine who said in a coffee shop one day, people think that we, Facebook, are competing with something like Twitter, that one social network is competing with another social network. But really, he said, our biggest competitor is YouTube because they're not competing for social networks. They're competing for attention. And YouTube is the biggest competitor in the digital space for attention. And that was a real light bulb moment for me because you realize that as they're designing these products, they're finding new, clever ways to get your attention. That's the real thing that I think is different in the film, the social dilemma, rather than talking about censorship and data and privacy in these themes. It's really what is the core influence or impact that the shape of these products have on how we're making meaning of the world when they're just hearing our psychology. Do you think that it was inevitable that someone manipulates the way people use these things to gather more attention? And do you think that any of this could have been avoided if there was laws against that? If instead of having these algorithms that specifically target things that you're interested in or things that you click on or things that are going to make you engage more, if they just allow these things to, if someone said, listen, you can have these things, you can allow people to communicate with each other, but you can't manipulate their attention span. Yeah. I mean, I think the, so we've always had an attention economy, right? And you're competing for it right now and politicians compete for it. Can you vote for someone you've never paid attention to, never heard about, never heard them say something outrageous? No. So there's always been an attention economy. And so it's hard to say we should regulate who gets attention or how. But it's organic in some ways. Like this podcast is an organic, I mean, if we're in competition, it's organic. I just put it out there. And if you watch it, you don't, or you don't, I don't, you know, I don't have any say over it and I'm not manipulating it in any way. Sort of. So, I mean, let's imagine that the podcast apps were different and they actually, while you're watching, they had like the hearts and the stars and the kind of voting up in numbers and you could like send messages back and forth. And Apple podcasts worked in a way that didn't just reward, you know, the things that you clicked follow on, it actually sort of promoted the stuff that someone said the most outrageous thing. Then you as a podcast creator have an incentive to say the most outrageous thing. And then you arrive at the top of the Apple podcast or Spotify app. And that's the thing is that we actually are competing for attention. It felt like it was neutral and it was relatively neutral. And to progress that story back in time with, you know, Twitter competing for attention, let's look at some other things that they did. So they also added this retweet, this instant resharing feature. And that made it more addictive because suddenly we're all playing the fame lottery. Like I could retweet your stuff and then you get a bunch of hits and then you could go viral and you could get a lot of attention. So then instead of the companies competing for attention, now each of us suddenly win the fame lottery over and over and over again and we're getting attention. And then, I had another example I was going to think about. I forgot it. What was it? Good job if you want. Apple has an interesting way of handling sort of the way they have their algorithm for their podcast app is it's secret. It's kind of, it's weird. But one of the things that it favors is it favors new shows and it favors engagement in new subscribers. So comments, engagement, and new shows. There you go. And that's the same as competing for attention because engagement must mean people like it. And there's going to be a fallacy as we go down that road. But go on. Well, it's interesting because you could say if you have a podcast and your podcast gets like let's say 100,000 downloads, a new podcast can come along and it can get 10,000 downloads and it'll be ahead of you in the rankings. And so you could be number three and it could be number two and you're like, well, how is that number two? And it's got 10 times less, but they don't do it that way. Their logic is they don't want the podcast world to be dominated by New York Times. The big ones. Yeah. And whatever is number one and number two and number three forever. We actually just experienced this. We have a podcast called Your Undivided Attention. And since the film came out in that first month, we went from being in the lower 100 or something like that to we shot to the top five. I think we were the number one tech podcast for a while. And so we just experienced this through the fact, not that we had the most listeners, but because the trend was so rapid that we sort of jumped to the top. I think it's wise that they do that because eventually it evens out over time. You see some people rock it to the top like, oh my God, we're number three. And you're like, hang on there, fella. Just give it a couple of weeks. And then three weeks later, four weeks later, now they're number 48 and they get depressed. So that was really where you should have been. The thing that Apple does that I really like in that is it gives an opportunity for these new shows to be seen. Where they might've gotten just stuck because these rankings and the ratings for a lot of these shows are so consistent and they have such a following already. Yeah. It's very difficult for these new shows to gather attention. And the problem was that there were some people that game the system and there was companies that could literally move. Earl Skakel, remember Earl, became the number one podcast and no one was listening to it. Earl has money and he hired some people to game the system and he was kind of open about it and laughing about it. Now, isn't he banned from iTunes now or something? I think he got banned because of that because it was so obvious he game the system. He had like a thousand downloads and he was number one. The thing is that Apple Podcasts you can think of as like the Federal Reserve or the government of the attention economy because they're setting the rules by which you win. They could have set the rules as you said to be who has the most listeners and then you just keep rewarding the king that already exists versus who has the most trending. There's actually a story a friend of mine told me. I don't know if it's true, although it's a fairly credible source who said he was a meeting with Steve Jobs when they were making the first podcast app and that they had made a demo of something where you could see all the things your friends were listening to. Just like making a news feed like we do with Facebook and Twitter. Then he said, well, why would we do that? If something is important enough, your friend will actually just send you a link and say, you should listen to this. Why would we automatically just promote random things that your friends are listening to? This is how you get back to social media. How is social media so successful? Because it's much more addictive to see what your friends are doing in a feed, but it doesn't reward what's true or what's meaningful. This is the thing that people need to get about social media is it's really just rewarding the things that tend to keep people back addictively. The business model is addiction in this race to the bottom of the brainstem for attention. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. Free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere, but after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.