Now, before we get into those two parts, though, I'd like to start the shows when possible reacting to what's going on in the news. Uh, in particular, I have an article I want to talk about that we didn't really get around to talking on the last episode, but we should have because it's by me.

So when I publish new things, especially new things in the New Yorker, I like to try to discuss them on the show in a little bit more depth, let you know what I'm thinking, maybe give you some more angles on it. So a couple of weeks ago, I published my latest for the New Yorker.

It's titled Tik Tok and the fall of the social media giants. If you are watching this episode instead of just listening. So if you're at youtube.com/calnewportmedia, you'll see the article on your screen as well. Now, why I thought it was important to talk about this topic is not that I haven't talked about it before on the show, but because of the opposite of that, I've talked about this topic a lot on the show.

That's kind of what makes this cool for us. This is one of the first instances, I would say, of an idea whose birth was this podcast. I began bouncing these ideas around here with you, my listeners, and it evolved into a more polished form, the New Yorker. So here we are, Deep Questions podcast impacting the world of news.

So you've heard these ideas before, but they're a lot more polished now. So let's go through it quickly. So I begin the article quoting Blake Chanley, Tik Tok's president of Global Business Solutions, talking about competition from Facebook. This is where he said, look, we're not worried. Facebook is a social platform built on a social graph.

Tik Tok is an entertainment platform. These are two different things. Zuckerberg needs to stay in his lane. We have our own lane. That name should sound familiar. Blake Chanley, I talked about him on the show because I discovered this interview from one of you, my listeners, sent it to me at my interesting@calnewport.com email address.

So then I went deeper into this. So here's the next point I want to make. So in the article, I make this point that Facebook is trying to shift to be more like Tik Tok. Instagram, owned by the same company, shifting to be more like Tik Tok. And the way they are doing this is by moving towards video, moving towards short video, but most importantly, as I'll soon elaborate, moving towards recommendations that have nothing to do with the social graph, moving towards feeds that are generated purely by algorithms, not by who you follow, not by people you know, sharing it.

So here's the quote from the article. This shift is not surprising, given Tik Tok's phenomenal popularity, and it has been very successful, but it's also short sighted. So the whole thesis of the article is the following. I say, platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon which they built their kingdoms.

So this is the setup to this whole article. Tik Tok's really popular. Companies like, platforms like Facebook, I should say, are trying to be more Tik Tok like, to stave off the competition and try to have faster user growth. This could, however, doom them. All right, so let me elaborate this argument.

What I'm getting at in this, the original take on this point is there's real advantages to having an online company like Facebook or Instagram, or as you'll see, Twitter, that relies on a social graph. And to be clear, by social graph, I mean, all of these individual friend requests, all these individual follow clicks, this topology of connections that human users built up, click by click, decision by decision over months and months and years and years of use, these really rich networks, these give a real advantage to the early mover platforms who have built them up.

One is a network effect advantage. So I'm highlighting these here. So I mentioned, for example, once Facebook had 100 million followers, active users, I should say, which it got by 2006, it became hard for anyone else to compete on a model of the people you know are here. And so you can see what the people you know are up to.

Once you have 100 million users on one platform, how do you start from scratch and say, well, we only have 10,000, but we're growing. So that's a huge network effect advantage. There are also other advantages to these topologies. I talk a little bit in this article about the introduction of the retweet button to Twitter.

I think people don't understand the degree to which the introduction of the retweet button not only made Twitter into a lasting company of cultural influence, but also really transformed social media. So here's what happened when they introduced the retweet button. The friction required to send a link or tweet to your entire follower base went down to almost nothing.

Before we had the retweet button, people in Twitter would have to copy tweets and they would put RT. So you remember this, if you're old enough, you would put RT in caps colon, and then you would quote, just copy and paste quote, the tweet that you're retweeting. And then you would put at the original person who retweeted it below it.

That's a pain. Retweet button, you see something you like, click a button and it spreads. That reduction in friction made all of the difference. It unlocked what I call a fierce viral dynamic. So now a tweet that was catching the attention of the zeitgeist in the right way, could spread through the power law topology of the Twitter social graph at frightening speed.

Tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people could see something within an hour or two. And this all was based off these individual user decisions to retweet or not retweet. They see it from a few people, they retweet it. This turned out to have two hugely powerful effects. One, it attracted more interesting people to platforms like Twitter, because there's potential here.

You had the potential of reaching millions of people if what you wrote caught on just right. So now more interesting people came to Twitter. That's another big network effect advantage. If all of the interesting people are on Twitter, when a competitor came along like Parler or Gab, they didn't do as well because there wasn't as many interesting people on there saying interesting things.

Perhaps more important, these fierce viral dynamics also gave way to a frighteningly effective distributed curation mechanism. So what happened is all these individual decisions that are tweet and retweet, created this human powered curation algorithm that was really, really good at figuring out what's the most interesting, controversial, outrageous, funny, off the wall, but perfect meme, whatever it was.

It did a really good job of selecting for these things and amplifying it so millions of people could see. So that was very effective. So suddenly Twitter not only had interesting people on there, but it had this really good human powered curation, distributed curation algorithm that meant when you went on Twitter, you were going to see interesting things or funny things or outrageous things.

And again, this is not sophisticated machine learning algorithms at play here. This is just the epiphenomenon of a lot of individuals clicking retweet or not. That's very powerful. So then as I get into it, Facebook noticed this retweet thing is working. So then by 2012, we get a share button added to the mobile app of Facebook.

It's exactly retweet. They too wanted to take advantage of that distributed curation. All right, so here's my summary. Both Facebook and Twitter are built on the same general model of leveraging hard to replicate large social graphs to generate a never ending stream of engaging content. A strategy that proved to be robust in the face of new competition and incredibly lucrative.

So it's the social graphs and those three advantages I just summarized, the people you know are on there, the interesting people are on there, and you have the distributed curation effect of the share and retweets. That made the small number of companies who got there first. Facebook, Instagram, Instagram, I took this out of the article, but I had a piece in there before about how Instagram basically, they were able to make a run at the castle that Facebook was building, because Facebook didn't understand image.

And Instagram made it much easier to have these beautiful images filtered, perfectly sized for iPhones. That was so powerful, that media, that they were able to build a new audience from scratch before Facebook squashed that by buying them. So you have Facebook, you have Instagram, you have Twitter, these big social graphs that can produce a non-stop stream of engaging content of a style that no one else can compete with.

So if I want to go start my own social network tomorrow, to compete with those giants doing their same game, as many pretenders to the throne have encountered in the past five to 10 years, good luck. Because until I can get a hundred million people, including a lot of people you know, and a lot of really interesting people with all these intricate friend and follower connections that allow retweets and shares to become a really effective distributed curation mechanism, until that's all there, this is useless.

It's not that interesting. I'd rather just go on Twitter. I'd rather go on Facebook. I'd rather go on Instagram. So they had this readout, this digital readout that was almost impossible for anyone to raid. And so that's why these pseudo monopolies grew bigger. It's why their influence on our culture became stronger.

It's why we began to get really worried starting around 2016, 2017, about just how much power these small number of companies had because they were immune to competition. And in my opinion, we're strangling the potential of the interactive web 2.0 by taking the democratic weirdness of the internet, the distributed homespun eccentricities of the internet and capturing it all into a small number of walled gardens.

All right. Then you get tick tock and tick tock is the, is the weird night that came out of the bog that suddenly threatening all the castles. It's the, I don't know game of thrones well, but the, uh, the woman with the dragons who comes out of nowhere and suddenly the Lannisters.

Do I have the right chest? I don't know. I don't know. Game of thrones. I don't know, but there's, you know, there's these people in charge and then there's this, this woman who had dragons and kind of came out of nowhere and tick tock was tick tock is that.

Um, okay. So why is this the second part of my article? So what I, the case I make is the effectiveness of the tick tock experience is found in what it doesn't require. So tick tocks brilliance. Is it, it's the same sort of user generated content to stretch and experience, but it does not leverage a social graph.

And this was the point that Blake Shanley was making in that very important interview. It tick tock does not care if people, you know, are on tick tock, tick tock does not care if famous people are on tick tock, tick tock does not care who you follow or what you can share.

There are some social features in tick tock. No one uses them. It is purely algorithmic. It looks at the total pool of available videos. And by they, I mean, this. Brutally effective machine learning loop and says, what should I show you next? What should I show you next? And as far as I can tell, I really went deep into this.

I tried to understand what was happening with this algorithm. It's all proprietary, but there is some hints. I think the best hints probably come from the wall street journal, which did a big study where they created hundreds. Well, I should speak the New York, New York, New York fact checker corrected on the, on this more than a hundred fake accounts, um, which they, they tweaked very carefully and observed to try to understand how the recommendations were happening and what, what seems to be happening with the, the tech talk algorithm is that it's, it's a, for you statistical optimizational people, it's essentially a stochastic multi-arm bandit reinforcement optimization machine learning loop.

So go look that up if you want to bore yourself. But what it does is it's showing you a lot of different things at first, somewhat randomly. And the main thing it looks at is how long did you watch the video before you swiped up to the next one?

That is its best indication of the rewards you got from that video. It then uses statistically shows you statistically similar videos to that one. And again, it's trying to optimize, Hey, this one that's in the same universe you watched even longer. So let's, let's focus in on this as a constellation of type of videos you like.

That's basically it. Plus some careful tuning about novelty to make sure that, you know, you're, you're being exposed to different things. You have a chance for your interest to wander. It's not super complicated, but within as short as 40 minutes, this is what the wall street journey found. It took about 40 minutes until the experience was almost eerie.

How well this machine learning loop had honed in on a small number of types of videos that really push your proverbial buttons. So it's not evil genius. You know, how from the movie 2001 is sitting in a hollowed out volcano somewhere where we're light years ahead. It's actually a pretty simple machine learning loop, but no social graph.

Just we need a bunch of videos. Anyone can create videos. It doesn't matter if they're famous. It doesn't matter if you know them, just get enough people creating videos that our algorithm can go to work. And so TikTok can make a move at Facebook and Twitter because their castle walls are built around their social graph.

And everyone who was trying to attack their castle with a similar strategy, couldn't get over those walls. TikTok was the woman with the dragons and they flew over. They didn't use the social graph. Okay. So what's going to happen? Well, here's the key. I think the key thing going on in social media, digital news is that TikTok success.

These developments put traditional social media companies like Facebook in a perilous bind. They're losing users right now to TikTok because TikTok again is in the same cognitive space as far as a user is concerned. User created content, I want distraction on my phone and they're doing a better job of it.

So people are going over to TikTok and what happened? Meta found that their new user growth slowed and they lost over $200 billion in market capitalization in a single day when they released that report. So this is public companies. There's huge investor pressure. We can't lose, we can't have our revenue go down.

We can't lose this many users to TikTok, which got to a billion users in just a couple of years. It's just really exploding. So they have to do something. So what are they doing? They're trying to be more like TikTok, which may be in the short term makes sense.

They're like, okay, if this is what people like, we need to do the same thing. But this is where I think they accidentally destabilize their entire foundation of all of their protection. So here's what I wrote. If companies like Facebook, so they instead move away from their social graph foundations to concentrate on optimizing in the moment engagement, they'll enter a competitive landscape that pits them directly against the many other existing sources of mobile distraction, not just TikTok, but also more bespoke and specialized social networks, streaming services, et cetera, et cetera.

So as soon as you are offering entertainment, that's not based on the social graph, you are competing with every other source of entertainment and distraction on the phone. I don't think that's a battle that Facebook or Instagram or Twitter can win long term. Once they leave the protection of their social graph, they will be chipped away from by this other competition until eventually their role of dominance is going to wane.

And that's my conclusion. This all points to a possible future in which social media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They'll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs and in doing so, eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces.

Now, last time I talked about this idea on this show, some of my listeners, some of you came wrote back to me and said, "Oh, so you're saying like TikTok is better or like it's somehow we're in a better world if TikTok just dominates everything? Isn't that just as bad?" So here's the key nuance, which by the way, based on your feedback as listeners, I knew to really hit this point in my New Yorker piece.

TikTok of course is subject to the same pressures. So in this future, it too will eventually fade. So no, I do not think TikTok is going to be some 20 year long cultural force. I don't think TikTok is going to be a four year from now, be a cultural force.

It's entirely shallow in the sense that it has no network effect foundation. It's just purified distraction. It's incredibly shallow foundation. The Zeitgeist can change on TikTok like that in a way that it couldn't on Facebook and it couldn't on Twitter because all your friends were already on Facebook and all the interesting people were on Twitter and all of these connections and those social graphs were there.

And even if you soured on Facebook because you didn't like their role in the presidential election, or even if you soured on Twitter because you don't like Elon Musk, there really was no other game in town that could offer you that. TikTok has none of those advantages. It's just me look pretty screen, me like, me swipe.

Other things can serve that purpose. So if the Zeitgeist changes against TikTok, it could just fall out of people's favor almost immediately. So no, I don't think TikTok is going to last as some replacement force of dominance. I think it's going to, it's coming in hot Twitter, maybe, but definitely Facebook, definitely Instagram chases it, destabilizes their competitive advantage, leads to their downfall.

The only reason why I say maybe with Twitter is it has investor pressure, but as we saw with the Elon Musk bid, they're small enough. They could be taken private. So if Musk had taken them private and you got rid of that investor pressure, he could have just said, and someone else could still do this.

Let's just lean into what we do well. I don't care if we lose users in the short term, no one else can do what we do at this distributed curation of interesting things said by interesting people. So let's just keep doing that. We're not going to disappear. Let's just fire a bunch of people, focus, become profitable.

Maybe that's a way to stick around. Facebook, Instagram, way too big. When you're a $600 billion company, you can't go private. You can't let users fall. So I think they're, they're essentially doomed. So that's the future I see. And that's how I summarize this article. I think the social media giants, their dominance is going to wane.

I think TikTok is going to come and go. Its main point will be at help to stabilize those. And all of this could be good because it opens up the territory. You get rid of the warlords who were keeping everyone else down. It opens up the territory for more innovation, more interesting services, bespoke services, more fragmented services, more distributed or nonprofit services, crazy services that are homespun and eccentric.

And only so many people use them, but they love them. There's more room for all of this when you get rid of these giant a hundred billion dollar BMS that had these pseudo monopolies. And so that is the conclusion, how I conclude the article. In the end, TikTok's biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world conquering success, which will pass and more about how by forcing social media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social internet.

So that is the polished form of my thoughts about TikTok and its impact on the internet. I think I've now talked about this enough so we can retire the topic for more, read the article at the New Yorker. You can just find my contributor page. You'll find it. It's called TikTok in the fall of the social media giants.

If you don't subscribe to the New Yorker, well, you should, but if you don't, I also wrote about the article and added some extra points in my newsletter. So go to calnewport.com/blog and you can see the article I wrote about this. And while there, you should sign up for that newsletter so you can get sent straight to your inbox, this type of thinking.

So there we go. Good summary. The podcast, man, podcast made without the podcast, this idea might not have existed. It was riffing on the news stuff that listeners sent me that I would not have seen. I would not have seen that article about Blake Chan, Lee and CNBC, et cetera.

If a listener had to send it to us and then since I wouldn't have seen it and then we were riffing on it, you and I on the show and that sort of set the wheels in motion. So that's cool. Yeah. It's podcast. There was some vocabulary in there that I didn't even know.

So I learned something for sure. Welcome to the New Yorker world. Yeah, you got out with the source. You got out with the source handy. By the way, speaking of New Yorker and then we'll move on. But I read the, you told me about the article from last week, Tad Friend's article about the door-to-door salesman.

Oh yeah. I haven't finished that yet. It's really good. Yeah. Yeah. So Jesse told me, I always, if people, people ask me, how do I read, what's my New Yorker reading habits with the magazine? Um, because it's hard, it's long and it comes every week. So here it is.

So here's my New Yorker reading habits. So you can, you can follow suit if you subscribe. So you get the daily email and that points out like what's going on, what was posted on the web that day. What's interesting. So I would say 50% of the daily emails will point out an article that I ended up reading on the web because they published like a new article every day on the web.

Uh, for the magazine, my rule is like, you always have to read one and if there's more, sometimes you'll read more than one, but you always have to read one. And so that forces you, even if it's a day where the five articles, none of them are right in your sweet spot.

You read about door-to-door salesman or something else. It's really interesting. And so that's my role. Read the daily email to see what catches your attention. That's where a lot of my stuff is featured. So definitely read that. And then you got to read one, one per week, at least.

I have a similar rule too. Yeah. I just look at the table of contents and then circle two. And then if there's two I like, then I read them. And then otherwise, and then it breaks the seal and then you end up reading more a lot of times, but like, you always have to read at least one.

Oh, and then the third rule is you have to leave the magazine out kind of prominently in your house or apartment and like, Oh, when people come over, Oh, sorry, let me just clean this up over here. I just was, you got to put it next to your copy of the Harper's and the Paris.

Do you recycle them a lot quickly thereafter? Yeah. It was just when the pile grows, I suppose.