Why TikTok Is Like Blue's Clues For Adults

00:00:00.000 | All right, let us keep rolling. Who do we have next?

00:00:02.000 | All right, next question is from Allison, 30 year old lawyer. This year, Facebook and Instagram

00:00:08.000 | have started flooding their users feeds with suggested posts from accounts they don't follow.

00:00:12.080 | Many users are frustrated and angry about these changes. What impact do you think these changes

00:00:17.680 | are going to have on the future of Facebook and Instagram? All right, well, Allison, I've talked

00:00:23.120 | about this before, so I'll be short, but add a new twist to it. The source document to look at here

00:00:30.000 | is the article I wrote for The New Yorker on TikTok. This probably came out,

00:00:35.200 | God, I don't know when this was, the summer, early fall. I don't know when that was, Jesse,

00:00:39.360 | but you look it up. Okay. Anyways, and I talked about it on the show, I believe at some point.

00:00:43.520 | In fact, it was an article that came out of ideas we first introduced on the show. And basically,

00:00:48.320 | my premise was Facebook and Instagram following TikTok's lead to having more and more information

00:00:56.560 | selected algorithmically and having no connection to people that you follow or to the things that

00:01:01.680 | people you follow shared. I said, ultimately, this is going to be the doom of those services.

00:01:08.400 | So I'll briefly recapitulate my argument why. The way I think about TikTok now, my shorthand

00:01:16.000 | for TikTok right now is that it's Blue's Clues for adults. So Blue's Clues is a children's program

00:01:26.320 | that became really popular in the 1990s. And I know about it because Malcolm Gladwell wrote a

00:01:32.880 | chapter about Blue's Clues in his seminal book, The Tipping Point. And what he argued in The

00:01:38.480 | Tipping Point is compare Blue's Clues to Sesame Street, and you see something very different.

00:01:44.960 | I mean, Sesame Street is legible to adults. You see what they're trying to do. It's educational

00:01:50.480 | content. It has these interesting puppets. There's some in-jokes for the adults. It's funny. There's

00:01:56.400 | some good writing in it. And so they're trying to help children learn, but it's kind of an

00:02:03.360 | interestingly crafted thing. You can have it on as a grownup and not hate it. And it's a well-done

00:02:08.960 | show. Blue's Clues, if you've ever seen this, baffles adults. It's repetitive. It makes no

00:02:15.680 | sense. The characters will just look to camera and repeat themselves four or five times. They'll

00:02:20.720 | just pause for a while. It seems insipid. It seems arbitrary. It seems almost nihilistic in its

00:02:28.160 | incoherence. And it was incredibly popular. And what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in The

00:02:32.800 | Tipping Point is what they did for that show was they basically studied kids and worked entirely

00:02:41.200 | off the metric of what grabs their attention and what doesn't. And so they built a whole TV show

00:02:46.800 | around just the simple goal of how do I keep kids' attention on here? And the result was

00:02:53.920 | this incoherent to adults audio-visual assault mishmash. And there was actually a lot of this

00:03:00.880 | that arose in the '90s. Barney's gave way to Teletubbies, these shows that were so weird to

00:03:05.760 | adults. Sesame Street was funny. It'd be like, hey, here comes, you know, Stalker Channing is

00:03:12.480 | going to come on and do a skit with garbage, whatever his name was, Oscar the Grouch. And

00:03:17.040 | it's about letters. And it's also kind of funny. And there's some good writing. And it's kind of

00:03:20.240 | winking at the audience. And then it's Teletubbies, your eyes are melting. It's Blue's Clues, like,

00:03:26.000 | what's going on? Why is it just staring at the screen, waiting for the kids to repeat a word

00:03:29.520 | or whatever? And it's because it was engineered to be a simple metric, what's going to keep kids

00:03:33.600 | looking. In the world of social media, Facebook and Instagram is Sesame Street. TikTok is Blue's

00:03:40.880 | Clues. They got rid of any of the potentially good stuff, the connection to other people,

00:03:47.120 | the seeing what people you know are up to, the expression, the discovery of interesting things,

00:03:52.880 | and made it just what gets your eyes affixed to this as long as possible. And the result is this

00:04:00.320 | format that, again, to a non-TikTok user is incoherent, is mind melting. It's these weird,

00:04:06.320 | short videos with cuts and movements. And all it is is Blue's Clues. It is what happens when you

00:04:11.840 | push a content to its logical extreme in the context of attention maximization. And so just

00:04:19.360 | like adults look at Blue's Clues, like, this feels just, I think a lot of adults look at TikTok,

00:04:24.960 | like, we're not even pretending anymore that this is unlocking the power of the web. It's just

00:04:31.440 | the logical terminal space of when you're saying, let's just maximize eyes, eyes, eyes.

00:04:36.480 | Okay, so TikTok is Blue's Clues for adult. If Facebook and Instagram follow that path,

00:04:41.520 | they're getting rid of all the stuff that's quality. They're getting rid of all the potential

00:04:45.840 | value proposition of connecting the people you know, discovering things from people like you,

00:04:50.320 | and it just becomes what's going to keep my toddler slack jawed at the screen while I'm

00:04:54.560 | trying to get something done. Once they move into that arena, they have lost their main competitive

00:04:59.520 | advantage, which is their social graphs. As I argued in that New Yorker piece, it is too hard

00:05:04.560 | at this point to build a social graph of the same size and of the same value as a Twitter, Instagram,

00:05:09.920 | or Facebook. So any service that's mainly based on one of those social graphs is not able to compete

00:05:16.960 | with those. But as soon as they move away from their social graph, here's friends and links,

00:05:20.560 | and just to algorithmically select the content, they're just in the competitive mosh pit with

00:05:25.280 | everything else is trying to grab your attention. And Blue's Clues isn't on TV anymore, because

00:05:29.920 | there's other cartoons that came along or even more insipid and even more attention capturing.

00:05:34.240 | So that's why I think Allison, the move of Facebook and Instagram towards a Blue's Clues

00:05:40.560 | TikTok model, maybe is trying to stave off some user, user loss in the short term, but is going

00:05:47.600 | to expose them to competition that they can't hope to win at long term. When they left the advantage

00:05:52.240 | of their social graph, they left their protection. And I think that's going to be the end of them,

00:05:56.240 | ultimately of them as some sort of giant culture shaping monopolistic platform that everyone uses.

00:06:04.000 | Your article came out July 28.

00:06:05.760 | July 28. Okay, so that's the TikTok. What's it called?

00:06:08.720 | TikTok and the fall of social media giants.

00:06:12.400 | TikTok and the fall of social media giants.

Why TikTok Is Like Blue's Clues For Adults

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