All right, let us keep rolling. Who do we have next? All right, next question is from Allison, 30 year old lawyer. This year, Facebook and Instagram have started flooding their users feeds with suggested posts from accounts they don't follow. Many users are frustrated and angry about these changes. What impact do you think these changes are going to have on the future of Facebook and Instagram?

All right, well, Allison, I've talked about this before, so I'll be short, but add a new twist to it. The source document to look at here is the article I wrote for The New Yorker on TikTok. This probably came out, God, I don't know when this was, the summer, early fall.

I don't know when that was, Jesse, but you look it up. Okay. Anyways, and I talked about it on the show, I believe at some point. In fact, it was an article that came out of ideas we first introduced on the show. And basically, my premise was Facebook and Instagram following TikTok's lead to having more and more information selected algorithmically and having no connection to people that you follow or to the things that people you follow shared.

I said, ultimately, this is going to be the doom of those services. So I'll briefly recapitulate my argument why. The way I think about TikTok now, my shorthand for TikTok right now is that it's Blue's Clues for adults. So Blue's Clues is a children's program that became really popular in the 1990s.

And I know about it because Malcolm Gladwell wrote a chapter about Blue's Clues in his seminal book, The Tipping Point. And what he argued in The Tipping Point is compare Blue's Clues to Sesame Street, and you see something very different. I mean, Sesame Street is legible to adults. You see what they're trying to do.

It's educational content. It has these interesting puppets. There's some in-jokes for the adults. It's funny. There's some good writing in it. And so they're trying to help children learn, but it's kind of an interestingly crafted thing. You can have it on as a grownup and not hate it. And it's a well-done show.

Blue's Clues, if you've ever seen this, baffles adults. It's repetitive. It makes no sense. The characters will just look to camera and repeat themselves four or five times. They'll just pause for a while. It seems insipid. It seems arbitrary. It seems almost nihilistic in its incoherence. And it was incredibly popular.

And what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point is what they did for that show was they basically studied kids and worked entirely off the metric of what grabs their attention and what doesn't. And so they built a whole TV show around just the simple goal of how do I keep kids' attention on here?

And the result was this incoherent to adults audio-visual assault mishmash. And there was actually a lot of this that arose in the '90s. Barney's gave way to Teletubbies, these shows that were so weird to adults. Sesame Street was funny. It'd be like, hey, here comes, you know, Stalker Channing is going to come on and do a skit with garbage, whatever his name was, Oscar the Grouch.

And it's about letters. And it's also kind of funny. And there's some good writing. And it's kind of winking at the audience. And then it's Teletubbies, your eyes are melting. It's Blue's Clues, like, what's going on? Why is it just staring at the screen, waiting for the kids to repeat a word or whatever?

And it's because it was engineered to be a simple metric, what's going to keep kids looking. In the world of social media, Facebook and Instagram is Sesame Street. TikTok is Blue's Clues. They got rid of any of the potentially good stuff, the connection to other people, the seeing what people you know are up to, the expression, the discovery of interesting things, and made it just what gets your eyes affixed to this as long as possible.

And the result is this format that, again, to a non-TikTok user is incoherent, is mind melting. It's these weird, short videos with cuts and movements. And all it is is Blue's Clues. It is what happens when you push a content to its logical extreme in the context of attention maximization.

And so just like adults look at Blue's Clues, like, this feels just, I think a lot of adults look at TikTok, like, we're not even pretending anymore that this is unlocking the power of the web. It's just the logical terminal space of when you're saying, let's just maximize eyes, eyes, eyes.

Okay, so TikTok is Blue's Clues for adult. If Facebook and Instagram follow that path, they're getting rid of all the stuff that's quality. They're getting rid of all the potential value proposition of connecting the people you know, discovering things from people like you, and it just becomes what's going to keep my toddler slack jawed at the screen while I'm trying to get something done.

Once they move into that arena, they have lost their main competitive advantage, which is their social graphs. As I argued in that New Yorker piece, it is too hard at this point to build a social graph of the same size and of the same value as a Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

So any service that's mainly based on one of those social graphs is not able to compete with those. But as soon as they move away from their social graph, here's friends and links, and just to algorithmically select the content, they're just in the competitive mosh pit with everything else is trying to grab your attention.

And Blue's Clues isn't on TV anymore, because there's other cartoons that came along or even more insipid and even more attention capturing. So that's why I think Allison, the move of Facebook and Instagram towards a Blue's Clues TikTok model, maybe is trying to stave off some user, user loss in the short term, but is going to expose them to competition that they can't hope to win at long term.

When they left the advantage of their social graph, they left their protection. And I think that's going to be the end of them, ultimately of them as some sort of giant culture shaping monopolistic platform that everyone uses. Your article came out July 28. July 28. Okay, so that's the TikTok.

What's it called? TikTok and the fall of social media giants. TikTok and the fall of social media giants.