So the deep question I want to tackle today that will uncover this point is given all of the advantages of controlling your own digital press Why does so many creatives? rely on Twitter Communicate with their audience I I'm Cal Newport and this is deep questions the show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world I'm here in my deep work HQ joined as always by my producer Jesse Jesse I found a way To against all the promises I've made to our listeners to work baseball back into the show Opening day next week opening day next week.

We will be a podcasting live from that spark No, we're not we should though we could possibly podcast live from the bullpen. It's still my yeah, that's right You have the connection there It's still my dream that Mike Rizzo at some point is going to get connected to this general manager of the Nationals to this podcast and say what we need is like Cal to come talk to our front office and I just come in there talk about role without email talk about deep work next season world series And there they are the trophies being handed out and I'm kind of sort of on the field, you know But I'm not up there on the dais and Rizzo just gives me the finger point and I just give him like the thumbs up it's like a real emotional and he's sort of acknowledging that the front offices embrace of Deep work and non context switching collaboration process processes was really kind of at the foundation of the next World Series run.

I Think the reasonable dream, but anyways what I wanted to what I wanted to show you I'm working baseball in here subtly I want to show you something that The Washington Post did in their coverage of a spring training game national spring training Spring training game from earlier this last week actually, so if this is airing on Monday, it was early last week the Nationals were playing the Yankees with actually most of the Yankees lined up - Aaron judge and Well Kinsey Gore pitch six innings two hits pretty good.

But here's what I wanted to talk about So I have this up on the screen now So for those who are watching at youtube.com slash Cal Newport media, this is episode 241 You can also find this at the deep life comm so here's the Washington Post is up on the screen What they did Was they switch to a live blog format to cover the game now what they would normally do up until this point This is considered an experiment up until this point Coverage of the games as they unfolded happened on Twitter So the two beat reporters Jesse Doherty and Andrew Golden would just tweet Throughout the game to give their updates about what's going on or what they've what they've heard and they were experimenting this time with well Why don't we live blog it?

That's what's on the screen now so you can see Jesse Jesse Doherty not producer Jesse Having various length updates on this page at the Washington Post about what's happening some of them longer than others So they were considering this to be an experiment So here's the thing It makes so much sense to cover Your games this way as compared to on Twitter.

Here are the advantages. It's a nicer format Tweets are short and you have to do tweet threads with these one out of n where you have multiple different threads that go together it's cumbersome unrelated tweets intersperse Between the tweets you're doing about the game It's not a great Visual or reading format on a live blog they can spend as much time as they want so I have up here one post is a few paragraphs too long for a particular tweet all of the Live blog updates disappear all on the same page one after another formatted nicely No distraction doing it this way also creates new permanent content for your site So this now is an article right with a strong start for McKenzie Gore Nationals top Yankees at spring training where you have some summary at the top and all the live blog below So this actually becomes a permanent piece of content that actually has quite a bit of information in it So you get new content for your site?

You also control the eyeballs right when Jesse Dorothy is tweeting about the game on Twitter the Washington Post does not control the eyeballs of people who are keeping up with these game Updates Twitter controls the eyeballs Twitter can show them its own ads Twitter can push them towards other tweet threads When you're on the Washington Post now we can Show you other content Related to the Nationals now we can show you our own ads now We have the ability to funnel you towards subscription or towards email newsletter products I mean it just makes so much more sense for a company that produces content for a living to have full control over the eyeballs that's reading their content and Perhaps most importantly for the reporters like Jesse Doherty To be able to do this work on your own site and not on Twitter Saves you from the anxiety distraction machine that is Twitter Because when you are on there, and I'm posted on Twitter.

You're getting the reactions. You're getting the weirdness You're feeling the pressure to comment on other things that are going on you get obsessed with well Is this thing spreading how many people are reading this I see a lot of baseball reporters in particular This is a microcosm of the broader issue that Twitter creates for Journalists getting obsessed about being first on various types of scoops and and can I get John Heiman to?

Quote tweet me and say I was first on it And there's all these weird incentives in it and none of this work is actually directly helping your home publication build up an audience or build up eyeballs want to tackle today that will uncover this point is Given all of the advantages of controlling your own digital press Why does so many creatives?

rely on Twitter to communicate with their audience Now I want to dive deep into this question today because I think in answering this question. We're gonna find out that the Incentives that are drawing us to these platform monopolies like Twitter are actually not as strong as we think so we can get an intimation of a more healthy relationship with the digital world After we do that deep dive on this question I have a collection of questions from you my listeners that all orbit around this general issue of grappling with social media and its role And you being a creative professional and how important it actually is And then we will switch gears at the end to do something interesting Alright, so that's our goal.

So let's dive deeper on this question. Why are people especially creatives using Twitter? The obvious answer is going to be virality There's this idea that Twitter has this virality engine because of their retweet mechanism It is possible for things you write if it catches the attention properly of the cybernetic curation Organism, which is the combination of individual people making retweet decisions Plus the fact that the follower graph is has power law expansion the cybernetic curation algorithm has the capability of Spreading your tweet to a massive audience all at once perhaps even unexpectedly so their sense is I want to harness this potential virality to very quickly Grow a large audience this large audience is then something I can monetize or will give me a lot of influence That's the promise of Twitter Its virality can build you an audience much faster than any other method But is this supposed benefit of Twitter worth giving up all of the other advantages of controlling your own Platform the type of advantages we talked about with the Washington Post examples I want to give four reasons why I think the answer to that question is no Four reasons why I think the supposed benefits of Twitter virality are not as strong as many creative professionals who rely on that platform actually believe So here's my first reason Most people don't end up building a Twitter audience of any notable size The average creative professional who is tweeting never builds up a big follower account But you do not need a big follower account to reap the full negative impact of being on Twitter So you reap that full negativity of the distraction and the anxiety of even without a lot of followers if you say the wrong thing That could spread you have negative virality that hangs over your head Then there's also the the addictive distraction of what's catching on what's not am I getting retweets?

When we had the comedian Jamie Kilstein on the show He really talked about that from the perspective of a comedian this experience of you're obsessively Checking after you tweet to see if someone famous retweeted it So you have all of those negatives even if your audience is small and most people have small audiences So this idea that Twitter is going to spread your genius to the world and build you this audience.

It's actually very rare The second reason why I think this virality explanation is not so strong is that Twitter followers are much less valuable than an organically acquired follower So let's compare a Twitter follower to let's say someone who is Interacting with you on your own site or through your own podcast who say subscribes to your podcast or signs up for your email newsletter Because they have over time come to really trust you or appreciate you and your point of view that organic follower is significantly more valuable Than each digit that clicks up on your Twitter follower account Twitter followers are not that powerful Writers have known this for a long time Twitter followers do not convert well for example to book sales and I think this is a great natural experiment because how else did How else is better to test the loyalty of a follower than actually asking them to invest $15 on your behalf?

book authors know this email newsletter subscribers They will buy books You can get up to a 10% even plus conversion rate on number of subscribers in your email list because those are organically acquired Followers who over time grew to trust you Twitter followers convert at a miniscule rate You can have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and when you start tweeting about your new book coming out it might generate Minuscule relatively speaking sales whereas a 10,000 person mailing list can actually make a dent in getting your book Noted so even if you can build up this large Twitter follower count it doesn't actually mean that you have a powerful audience a 30,000 person mailing list I would argue is As useful as a high six-figure maybe even million Twitter follower count on Twitter So even if you do get the followers due to virality It's not necessarily that valuable The third objection I want to bring up here is that when you look at specific examples of People who have grown large Twitter followings Typically the forces that drove that audience growth were not internal to Twitter external exposure external fame is What actually brought them to the attention of a lot of people and people came to follow them on Twitter because that's where they happen To be producing so it's not that Twitter virality is for a lot of people how they got discovered It's that Twitter is where the people who discovered them elsewhere Came to follow them because that's where they happen to be.

Let me make this more concrete with a specific example I think Conan O'Brien is a great example here So after Conan O'Brien took the tonight show as fired from the tonight show sort of was in the wilderness One of the things he started doing was tweeting and he did one tweet every day and it's this document there's a good documentary about this called Conan O'Brien can't stop and For a while the conventional wisdom was this is what got Conan relevant again he was interacting with people directly without TV and Doing these funny tweets and people were retweeting and following them and it kept him on everyone's mind and it kept him relevant, right?

So sort of a case study of of Twitter being this great creative platform But here's the thing Conan realized What was valuable here was his pre-existing? fame his pre-existing talent as a comedy writer and on-screen comedic presence and his massive national exposure that he's had on TV and on radio and he's on Stern all the time and on Going on other people's shows.

He's an incredibly well exposed person So yes when he went and said I'm gonna put my attention in the tweeting every day people went over there and said we'll follow Your tweets, but it wasn't that Twitter built of his audience. He had a big audience He just said this we're gonna hang out so they came over there Now speaking of our last point that Twitter followers are not that valuable Conan eventually figured out Having my audience follow me to Twitter is not useful to me.

I Can't do much with Twitter followers So he stopped the tweeting every day and instead put his energy into making his own home online a home he owned which was his podcast and Now again his pre-existing fame and talent and massive exposure, which is what's generating all this attention That could now aim this attention to a home he owned Which was his podcast?

Now what's the difference in value between these two things? well tweeting every day on Twitter got him a couple million followers and Maybe it helped some ticket sales when he was touring or maybe not The bringing that attention to his podcast they signed a I don't know the whole magnitude of it But it was tens of millions of dollars deal for his production company So taking this pre-existing fame and aiming it towards a platform He owned forget about the raw number like how many people download your podcast versus how many Twitter followers you have?

No, he turned his pre-existing attention to a platform He owned that was worth tens of millions of dollars when he put that attention instead towards someone else's platforms Twitter Maybe he got 20% higher ticket sales when he did live shows so the reality of many large Twitter audiences is Those audiences are there not because Twitter went out and found them but because the person was already famous and that's where they're hanging out Barack Obama doesn't have a large Twitter account because he's good at Twitter It's because he's Barack Obama All right.

The final objection I want to bring up here to the idea that Twitter virality is so critical to any creative professional is that Twitter virality is best harnessed on your behalf as opposed to on your bequest So there's really two broad categories of information going viral on Twitter One type is that you know You actually tweeted something yourself that was smart or funny or outrageous And it caught the attention of the cybernet curation algorithm and spread really far.

That's actually not that valuable I mean it can help attract more people to want to follow you But that does not actually directly translate necessarily to you being more successful at what it is You do the second type of virality on Twitter is where something is really good Something has been constructed or done that is very good a book is excellent an article is excellent a movie is excellent a video game is excellent and Twitter is spreading the word.

This thing is great. You got to see this thing. You got to read this thing Let's debate about this thing that type of virality is incredibly valuable for a creative professional because it's not just raw attention It is attention on you and your skill and what you can produce It's the type of virality that will allow you to actually grow and cultivate new loyal organic audience members Now here's the thing That virality does not require you to be on Twitter In fact that virality is actually impeded if you were the person trying to tell people look at my article Look at my my movie I made that's a really bad way to kick off That isn't this great virality that type of virality is much more effective when it's third-party Look at this article Cal wrote is gonna do much better than me saying look at this article I wrote and you see this with creative professionals on Twitter They have this huge elaborate dance of self-deprecation to try to kick off the second category of virality and they'll be they'll say, you know I'm so blessed just to have such great editors and just to be noticed like this to have this article out So they're trying to find a way to make it palatable that they're the ones talking about it But in the end actually the best type of virality is people talking about you so you being on Twitter and Having to pay those prices of anxiety and addiction and distraction at the same time losing out on all the advantages of owning your own Platform controlling the eyeballs building up your own organic audience having that nicer format all these advantages To give all of that up to try to create this much weaker form of virality when Twitter can do this on your behalf if you're producing something good the trade-off really doesn't make really doesn't make a lot of sense All right, so what I'm trying to say here is there's a lot of advantages to releasing content on your own platform The main reason people do this instead on Twitter is virality But as those four virality myths I just talked about emphasize that reason really is not that attractive anymore So what is the alternative if you're a creative professional who wants to embrace the online world?

Create the absolute best stuff you can released on your own platform Be this a web-based text platform or an audio based podcast Build a fiercely loyal audience slowly But steadily when you get a new member of your audience is because they've heard your stuff enough. They love it They really want to read it.

It's not just a Twitter follower When your work occasionally goes viral on your behalf, which it will if it's good Enjoy the fact that you're now going to capture some more Listeners or readers or audience members in your own ecosystem and then get back The producing work too good to be ignored That I think is the right way to approach content production on the internet not to get Lured by the siren sound of these platform monopolies that basically just chew you up chew up your attention chew up your vanity and Make you into grist for their attention economy money-making mill.

I Think this type of discussion is important for a broader reason as well. Let's move beyond just Twitter and content producers I think it's really easy when we think about the downsides or the excesses of the internet To get stuck in a hopeless feeling They get stuck in this hopeless place where you say well, of course, I have to use these platforms But I'm not liking the way what they're doing in the way they make me feel So if we can only just have the right laws passed Maybe we can fix this or if we can only have the right person by the platform And then they can fix it and make it better and these type of discussions show.

There's another alternative You don't have to be that involved with these platforms in the first place. You can be cutting-edge online Growing your audience in 21st century ways without having to worry about What's happening with Twitter? What's happening on Instagram is tick-tock is going to be banned or not?

I just hope we're moving past this age where we feel like platform monopolies are somehow a Critical piece of being a creative professional and if you somehow avoid those you're in trouble. You're not those advantages are overblown It's okay to move on So, there you go, I don't know that Connor O'Brien had such a big audience Yeah, so that's what I mean the tweeting every day was supposedly how he sort of Reengaged, you know refound relevance and regained his audience, but my argument is like actually that didn't lead to much What was important is when he started the podcast, right?

Because then he had an actual thing he was creating that was very high quality and the audience he attracted there was actually valuable I don't know what the size maybe could look it up look up team Coco co co podcast deal So he has a couple other podcasts it produces but Conan O'Brien needs a friend as the main podcast And I know they just bought a big building in Los Angeles So there was some deal one of the network says like a the headline says 150 million dollar deal.

So this is the verge Yeah, so Conan O'Brien's fame aimed at something he owns Generated 150 million dollars his fame instead generate aimed at Twitter generated a Lot of likes and maybe you know slightly more attention when he was trying to sell tickets. I think serious XM bought it And I think we can just explains why he's on Stern But he's all but that's true But he's been he went on Stern a lot like in that period right after he left a tonight show He was on he goes on Stern a lot.

So I think I think he's done that for a long time But you can just scale that down. Okay, so most people are not as famous as Conan O'Brien so you can scale it down But the key thing is there's this that difference like let's say your notoriety is a tenth of Conan O'Brien's but like whatever you're still out there you're you're You're known you're on like some big podcast a lot.

You had some big books or something You get to scale down those numbers. It's like Twitter will give you you know, an extra hundred people showing up at a show Only putting that attention towards the thing you own the scale it down by a factor of ten is maybe worth You know 1.5 million dollars a year in revenue.

It's it's aiming Audiences come from you earn audiences by doing things notably Twitter this idea that I mean there are some viral influencers But it's a dark Faustian world. You don't want to be a your whole world is just being viral on Twitter No one really wants that these audiences are coming from other things you're doing So why take all that juice and basically give it the Twitter in exchange for peanuts?

Alright, so I want to do some questions that all roughly orbit this topic before we do first Let me mention one of the the sponsors that makes this show possible and that is our friends at cozy earth Cozy earth bedding is made using only the finest premium vis cozy via SC o se from highly sustainable bamboo Top designers choose cozy earth.

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There we go. Nice just 30 minutes ago. I have a Encounter with Zoc Doc my dentist uses Zoc Doc my primary care doctor uses Zoc Doc And I love it So it's a app you can use first of all to find doctors who are near your area take your insurance see reviews from real people Once you sign up for a doctor if they use Zoc Doc, they handle your paperwork through there You can do the paperwork in advance.

They do Reminders about your appointment you can confirm what's going on You don't have to sit there with a clipboard and fill out all the same information every time it just makes a lot of sense Why just randomly look up a local doctor on Google or ask a friend using Zoc Doc makes it more consistent The other thing we like about Zoc Doc is we like saying the name Zoc Doc comm So sometimes Jesse and I joke about other products that could have an even longer sequence of those rhymes well, I want to briefly read a submission along these lines from Elliot So here is Elliot doing his His attempt to get an even better URL than Zoc Doc comm.

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That's good. Yeah What we need is a a Poland spring Sponsorship Jesse keeps me my seltzer water addiction well served with our Poland spring Let's do some questions. What do we got? I sounds good First questions from will a 55 year old economist What do you think about Twitter's decision to put the number of views on tweets?

I hate this change it adds an extra layer of stress before you can get that dopamine hit or like or reply Well, well I wrote something about this dynamic in my book digital minimalism where I was talking about Facebook and this is a very important Technological moment that explains a lot about our current relationship to social media especially the more compulsive use and the way the story unfolds with Facebook is that engineers at Facebook last decade Wanted to put the like button into the Facebook product for a very pragmatic Sort of nerd optimization reason they were seeing that under a lot of Facebook posts Many of the comments were very similar and low information.

There's a lot of like great exclamation points good Congratulations, and you had to scroll through all of these low information single-word Exclamatory content comments to get to the interesting comments where people are actually adding information So the engineer said let's just add a like button This way if all you want to do is like yeah great.

I love it You can just click that and there'll be a count of how many people liked it And then we won't have comments clogging it up. So the actual comments on the post would be more informative It's an engineering thing. They saw an inefficiency. They wanted to fix it It turned out however as an unintentional side effect of adding that like button to the Facebook platform engagement time went up and What was going on is that this like button though?

This was not its original intent this like button was adding in an intermittently reinforcing indicator of attention You could now after you posted something on Facebook go back and check Are there likes how many likes and then you can come back and check an hour later? Has it jumped up or is it really as it really?

Plateaued and different posts would generate different likes There is a slot machine aspect to it that maybe something about this post would break out to a wider spread and you might have A massive jump of likes on the post and this was very exciting and you never knew if that was going to happen We are wired to love that type of reinforcement.

We are going to pull that virtual slot machine lever again and again and again So once Facebook stumbled into this innovation other platforms did the same thing So Instagram which at the time had not yet been bought by Facebook They came next and this became integrated into many other platforms There's an accidental mechanism of moderate behavioral addiction these type of stories by the way They fall into the wayside because I think a lot of the media narrative on social media right now is from Journalists who are obsessed with social media.

They just want it to be More focused on what they like and fixing it. They want to fix it But they don't want to fix the issue of using all the time They don't want to fix the use it the issue of being addicted to it They just want to make sure there's not bad things on it Or if you're on the right, you want to make sure that people aren't being kicked off, but but we've lost track of this original thread But just not wanting to be on these things so much in the first place and these type of addictive intermittent reinforcement Mechanisms is a big driver of that engagement.

So back to your question will By adding a view count to Twitter. You're adding a more highly dynamic highly salient intermittent reinforcement indicator Replies are a little bit slower on Twitter Retweets happen, but again, not that often for most posts. So this is an engagement issue for Twitter Most people most tweets didn't have a big audience get no replies and very few retweets By putting in the views though.

You have a finer-grained number that can rack up higher even for relatively small accounts Now you have a more salient feedback mechanism You're gonna get people who are minor Twitter users and producers to come back and check more often to see what's going on There's other reasons that I've been given for why the view feature was added But I think this is one of the key implicit reasons why you want to add these type of feedback into it One of the reasons why tick-tock is so successful, by the way is They just go straight for the jugular on these mechanisms Right.

So the the likes on Facebook the favorites on Instagram the views on Twitter is still Driven by actual humans and actual human interest it gives you intermittent Reinforcement because some stuff you post is better than others. Tick-tock doesn't really trust people I mean we already see this with their recommendation algorithm.

They say I don't need someone to Favorite something. I don't need someone to spread something I don't even need someone to tell me who their friends are our algorithm will just tell you what you should look at Well, they do the same thing with views. So tick-tock will Artificially make your view counts go up and down Specifically to create the slot machine effect of you never know Which your tick-tocks might take off and because everything is just algorithmically recommended There's no human in the loop tick-tock can do this with incredible precision.

They their algorithm can basically say, you know Jesse hasn't had a tick-tock get a lot of attention in a while We're worried that you know, people are gonna stop watching Jesse's tick-tocks so let's just take one of his tick-tocks and we can just show it to 10,000 people and Now if you count on that jumps to 10,000 now, Jesse is like, you know I wasn't gonna quit tick-tock but this last thing I did got 10,000 views like maybe I'm on the cusp of Emerging as a tick-tock influencer.

And so they just cynically and Cynically directly manipulate your attention with the exact same precision as someone putting in win-rate tables to a Las Vegas style slot machine That's part of the reason why they're so popular If you don't believe this talk to any young person who uses tick-tock I overhear these conversations on a regular basis And they will talk about their one big hit or their two big hits.

That's all you need That's all you need to use it all the time. You know, I had this one thing and it got a hundred thousand views You know, I bet if I just tweak things a little bit, you know, Jesse's thinking like if my dance moves were a little bit sharper I'm gonna get that more regularly And so it's if they're just cynical about it.

So anyways, it's it's a good question No, I don't like any of those features. But again, the answer to all this stuff is guys get off these platforms Get off these platforms do whatever your equivalent is of The Washington Post's live blogging instead of live tweeting baseball games I heard a conversation at Bevco Jesse the other day Or it's like I think was a date Young people first date you're in line or you're sitting at a table sitting at a table.

Okay. It's trying to write and it was a two young people and they're on a date and He was getting see he was seriously getting points by talking about his one viral tick-tock he's like yeah, I was uh, you know, like It was a you know complicated hat on and all the young person stuff He's like, yeah, I got it.

You got like a million views on that and she was impressed like he was definitely Sort of peacocking his tick-tock numbers, but you know how effective that is like that guy is Going to tick-tock now Constantly, I mean think about this feedback. He's a man sometimes things go big and it's like impressing the ladies and and Like I don't know why that guy over there sighing so loudly all the time.

I wonder what's wrong with them, but I Don't know to be like depressed or intrigued or I mean my main issue was I was trying to write and they were right next To me and when you're on a date you're talking all the time and I was kind of frustrated by that but That's really funny.

Yeah, I was gonna we're talking about is getting mad credit. Well because and also oh man So the dynamic of this conversation She opened it by being like, you know, one of my tick-tock Scott I forgot the number was but five thousand views and you could see he was Dusting off his glove like ready to throw his fastball.

I was like, well, you know, I had one they got a million views It's so good, yeah the tick-tock knows what it's doing. I'll see what we got next year All right. Next questions from Adam a 43 year old furniture maker I find it sad that along with tweens teens and average adults some of our world's thought and business leaders are Similarly more concerned with playing in the attention economy than focusing on a deep life.

I Mean, I agree with you Adam There is a sort of vanity Run amok thing going on here crossed with a insidious addictiveness Multiple people I've talked to for example who personally know Elon Musk are Baffled by the way that Twitter just took over his life. It makes no sense For him and what he's working on in his companies and his goals in life for him to spend so much time on Twitter is some weird combination of addiction fueled vanity no, I think there's a there's a a Key point to make here that distinguishes Twitter from other platforms So most of these platforms do play in part one of the many things they play on to win in the attention economy game One of the many things they play on is Personal vanity Twitter does it in a different way than the other platforms?

So in deep work, I again I looked at Facebook. I Said Facebook in circa 2014 to 15 when I was writing deep work Had a collectivist attention model. So back then Facebook was still pretty heavenly driven by Friends, you know, I post things on my friends walls. They will check me They'll post thing on my post things on my walls and I argued that look Facebook was in part a response to the hostile Attention landscape of the web so early web 2.0 allowed almost anyone to post information online.

You could have a blog Where you could just post whatever you wanted to post But it was a hostile attention regime because let's be honest most things that most people have to say is boring. It was rough You would start a blog you put things on there and no one would read it Because it was just your random stuff and no one cared.

I had my very first blog. I started in college. It was called inspiring moniker zero readers Because why would people care so that was a very hostile? Attention environment and people said why am I just gonna keep putting stuff out there? And that's actually like a completely reasonable reactions like yeah, like most people actually shouldn't just be putting stuff out there But people who really have you know something to say it's like a young Ezra Klein doing his Political blog where he was posting nine times a day in 2004 like there's people who emerged they took advantage They had something to say they were skilled.

They did the work and it was a great but for most people it's like yeah This you know, you don't have anything interesting to say Facebook said no. No, I have something for you attention collectivism You will have these friends. These will be people, you know, you will befriend them digitally They will befriend you digitally and the agreement will be I Will pay attention to whatever junk you put up there if you pay attention to whatever junk I put up here I'll put up some random photo You'll say oh so cute and you'll post some thought about something I'll be I'll come over and say ah, you got it right and we'll just give each other attention It's nice to feel it.

You know, it's nice to get attention. Most people don't get attention and In most parts of their life, you know, people aren't paying positive attention to them So it monetized in some sense this desire to have people pay attention to us It reacted to the the hostile attention landscape of just the bare-bones web 2.0 and said no No, we'll just all agree to talk to people.

We know and pat each other on the back And I thought this was a little bit shallow, but whatever it worked pretty well Twitter is doing something different here. It's offering sort of a similar dynamic but for actual what I would think of as higher tier thinkers And leaders, right?

So it actually is its model is not focused on Anyone will post something and other people will come and comment on it. It's actually brutal like that It's brutal like web 2.0 for the average average user if I tweet something nothing happens People don't come and like it because they know you that's just not the dynamics of how Twitter works.

It spreads virality It doesn't connect people to their friends anymore but if you have some sort of actual expertise if you're a journalist if you're a creative of some type if you're a politician of some type Twitter is offering you much more access to attention that you then you could get before through traditional media channels because they were just way more narrow and way less numerous and so Twitter is playing on the attention vanity not of the average user but of the above average user and That's their whole business model.

So if you're a professor with some expertise You're drawn you're saying man I could I could Wait until I get citations on a paper or I could go on Twitter and I have something to say here if I'd everything To say no one cares My tweets will just go and disappear But I actually have something to say if I make the right takes I could get on a day-to-day basis This retweet and share and like and reply attention every once in a while Someone really famous might retweet my thing and I feel like I'm a part of this and so Twitter says we're gonna play on the attention Vanity of above-average users and by doing that they attracted a lot of above-average users people who actually were unusually creative or had a specific expertise is to share That is the whole core of what makes Twitter a compelling place for everyone else just to sit and read what's going on Because you have interesting people Since spending all their time Writing on there and so we talked about before earlier in the episode is one of the things that attracts content producers is I want To build an audience virality.

This is the other thing that attracts especially these sort of no notable personalities. They're attracted it's it's attention and vanity and It's really good at that. And I think was a really smart move by Twitter to say Forget making the average user feel like people care about them What we need to get is the unusually clever comedian We need to get when there's a pandemic a bunch of credentialed virologist.

What we need to get is You know contrarian political thinkers who have a funny streak like we need these type of people who actually have some talent Do not focus that talent into Articles and books and occasional TV appearances and lectures put it into our platform so by focusing on the attention vanity of above-average users, they created a Constantly refreshed pool of above-average quality information that then the cybernetic curation algorithm could play with and now as the average user You're seeing all these things going by that is very engaging and very compelling It's why Twitter clones have not done nearly as well, even though the algorithmic and digital Architecture is the same then on the same pool of people so Twitter did very well there So anyways, Adam, I think that's what's going on Is Twitter very consciously said?

We need to make above-average users feel like they're getting more attention than they could otherwise get and then we're gonna get a lot of Above-average content pushed into our system and that's different than almost any other platform Most other platforms they play more on your own personal attention vanity people, you know paying attention to what you do I mean, that's not completely true Instagram has some Twitter vibes to it, but it also has some Facebook vibes to it TikTok really doesn't lean heavily into we need above-average users It's just we need a giant pool of content and we'll use algorithms to figure out what's going to just press your Reptilian brain buttons and make you keep looking Twitter is doing this almost uniquely and said part of what makes it so sticky All right, this is great a lot of Twitter bashing and discussion, yeah, I wasn't Twitter bashing I'm just that's just actually explaining.

Yeah, this is why Twitter is effective. Yeah, I'm not I'm not just You know put it on my Twitter is bad hat. I mean, there's a reason why this is an effective platform All right. What do we got next? All right. Next questions from Bo a 38 year old teacher I'm not big on social media, but as an independent researcher in the humanities I use academia dot edu and research gate mainly to get access to papers I also have a Twitter and a LinkedIn account mainly to share my blog posts and see if I can find an audience Is this the right balance?

Right. There's a good case study of our discussion from the deep dive earlier in the show So not knowing too much about specifically what type of research you do or your career. Let's just give some random recommendations here Paying for access to academic articles is a no-brainer if you are an academic who's not associated with an institution That gives you that access.

So of course Twitter I don't think you need to be there We just talked about this Twitter gives you this illusion that it's going to grant you a Virality that will grow your audience bigger than if you hadn't had Twitter. I would say forget it just produce really good work Twitter may work on your behalf People may share your work on there and you need to have a platform you own to capture that attention but putting your attention in the content production on Twitter is going to Open you up to all these negatives and dilute the positives you get from your own platform LinkedIn I guess it just depends what you're doing on it So for LinkedIn to be effective a you have to ignore The sort of increasing social features streaming distraction features and just focus on the core original Ability to use it to look at tertiary network connections.

I mean the value of LinkedIn the unique value proposition of LinkedIn is I can look at people who are in the network of people I know It's not secondary but tertiary connections. That's really useful Right. So you say okay. I need a Connection to the movie industry. I don't know anyone in the movie industry but I probably know someone who knows someone in the movie industry that person can make a recommendation on my behalf and So it opens up contacts and because you have an intermediary who knows both ends of this link That's actually a high quality contact if you go out One more layer it doesn't work anymore So if it's I know someone who knows someone who knows someone in the movie industry That connection doesn't work because there's no person in common between you and the ultimate person you want to talk to So remember my longtime friend Ben Casanova who used to be Reed Hoffman's chief of staff I remember him at the time when LinkedIn was really taking off Explaining this network theory to me.

It's it's all about this sweet spot of your friends friends is the sweet spot of opening yourself up to a huge amount of Potential connections while still having the ability to make those connections strong So if your work is such that as an independent researcher You need contracts or engagements with clients and various type of industries and you need Connections to people in those industries that aspect of LinkedIn could be very valuable So I would summarize this I guess as saying Yes to paying money to gain access to articles.

No to Twitter. Maybe yes to LinkedIn if you really need it Now there's a bigger point here that I made in a New York Times op-ed that came out in 2016 and it actually generated a lot of fewer at the time but I wrote this New York Times op-ed where I said we overestimate the value of social media presence in Getting noticed and succeeding in your career And I say we are forgetting the fact that these platforms are very new and most industries have been around for a very long time Twitter was not used at a high rate until 2012 to 2014 So I was writing it up at is like this is a few years ago Before that all these industries still existed people still got noticed got hired grew reputations Grew really big careers and they did this all without Twitter followers and they did this all without being an influencer on Instagram so presumably These bespoke methods by which your work is noticed and rewarded Still exist in most fields that have been around for more than just a handful of years So don't ignore those in fact If you ignore those and say I'm going to invent my own way to get noticed and succeed in my field based on social media You're taking a huge risk You need to pay less attention to your Twitter followers and say in my particular field I'm this independent researcher and humanities who makes my money this way How do people traditionally get noticed and succeed almost all those channels are still there Social media's rise Which is only still just a decade old at this point of any sort of widespread adoption has not gotten rid of Existing channels of getting noticed and succeeding and so I keep coming back to that with people What how do people traditionally get noticed and succeed in your field and usually it involves?

Producing really good stuff and it's really hard and has nothing to do with virality or having large follower counts And it's almost always that's going to be the answer And so until you have a really good answer that question forget about like new tools are gonna somehow give you a shortcut Now when I wrote that op-ed in 2016 that caused a lot of problems.

This was right before the Mainstream had turned against social media So the the political right in America had turned against social media at this point because they were worried about being censored But the political center and left in America was still very laudatory Towards social media at this point when that came out and so me standing up and saying Social media is not as important as you think for your career.

You should maybe ignore that and focus on the fundamentals. It was considered a heretical almost Certifiable thing to say it really upset people It was whoa. No, no social media is the key. It's how you get noticed. It's how you circumvent all of these gatekeepers It's how you build up movements.

I mean there was so much Push back really really surprised me and I've talked about this on the show before but the New York Times Commissioned the next week a response op-ed. They got the social media manager of monster.com Patrick someone Patrick Gilroy to write a response op-ed to mine and say this is crazy.

Don't listen to this A lot of articles were written in response to mine. This is crazy. Don't listen to this I had hostile radio interviews like how can you believe this now? I understand this mechanism because we see it all the time in 2022 2023 we see this all the time.

Where is the fiercest pushback? Generated this sort of when you get these type of big pylons generated. It's not when someone comes from left field From the completely other team and throw some rocks. You're used to that It's when someone who you feel like is in or close to your tribe Pushes a little bit to the edge Then it's seen a little bit more like heresy and that has to be policed so if you know 2016 Jaron Lanier stands up and says Social media is nonsense people like that's Jaron Lanier I mean, he's like kind of crazy and brilliant and this is what he's been saying for a long time and we know it It's not a big deal But if a computer scientist Comes out and says that someone who is in sort of mainstream thought someone who has some influence with an audience someone who's sort of A part of that sort of mainstream centrist or leftist inner tribe comes out and says I don't think that's that important You have to fiercely At the time you have to fiercely police that to prevent the Overton window from shifting away from the direction you wanted the ship so it was a it was an interesting example of what became much more prevalent in the years that followed the sort of policing of views and This became a increasingly political after a while So the left and the right would do this on political hot topics, but this was less political but it was just more there's this mainstream intellectual thought that social media was this Powerful force that toppled dictators and helped Barack Obama get elected and it was very meaningful important And so if you're involved in this sort of mainstream intellectual life They did not like someone starting to veer off the reservation now.

Everyone's like a course Yeah, everyone agrees with it now, but it was interesting So there's like an early mild pile on but it showed a general internet dynamic that I think has really strengthened ever since then So you wrote that before the like button got introduced, right? Like now the like button actually got introduced earlier.

Okay. Yes the like button got introduced Like 2007 or eight or something like that. All right, right. Yeah. Yeah the interesting thing was when I wrote that it was right this at the turning point in the mainstream intellectual Thought on social media was Donald Trump getting elected and that's ultimately what turned it is the shift from Facebook helping Barack Obama to Facebook helping Trump Shifted I think the reception of social media and it opened up like a lot more skepticism Hostility towards a platform from the center and left the the hostility from the right was already there.

I started hearing that like 2015 so that was already there But from the center and the left that was after the Trump election, but it wasn't immediate because that op-ed That op-ed came out the in the Sunday in the New York Times in the week in review the Sunday after Donald Trump was elected Mmm, so it wasn't an immediate response.

I mean it was a week in review section. That was That and like a bunch of political stuff and then the next week they had the follow-up Right. So in the first the last months of 2016 early months of 2017 There still was a general positive Consensus on social media.

It wasn't really told the Cambridge Analytica and the Russian disinformation stories when those really took off Which was more to thought after Trump was in office in 2017. That's when he began to see the shift So I know it's an interesting time point So really the shift towards universal negativity towards social media was probably first or second quarter 2017.

Mm-hmm If not all the way around it, you had to get all the way to like 2018 really before Yeah, but then by the time I was promoting digital minimalism in 2019 the pushback I was getting from reporters is like why aren't you pushing for even harder, you know?

Regulations and shutting down these companies. So yeah, man that thing flipped nothing flipped hard All right, let's uh, we have time. Let's do one more question here. All right Next questions from Alta a 22 year old software engineer Do federated social media networks such as Mastodon stand a chance against centralized ones such as Twitter?

We don't we don't need Mastodon. I mean, I'm fine for Mastodon to exist, but the part of the premise of Mastodon is We want Twitter, but just without stuff. We don't like I mean, it's the it's the same interface as Twitter. It's the same Paradigm of Twitter these short tweets that go to people who?

Follow you and my bigger argument is this Twitter format is not that fundamental. I Mean we have websites. We have blogs. We have WordPress we have Podcasts we have the ability to independently produce and post video and host and have it be watched on all these devices we have all these other means of producing Content independently without it having to live in a massive ecosystem where we don't control it anymore So we don't actually need a Twitter clone That's fine.

If like there is a Twitter clone of Mastodon takes off, but we don't need it to I Think we became so myopic in Recent years because we got so used to the dominance of these platform monopolies that our vision of what the internet mean Means became confined to it means Instagram and it means Twitter The Internet was a lot more than that So getting away from these platform monopolies, it's not just let's just have Twitter but not have it be owned by one person It's we don't need a Twitter clone at all.

We we are already Developing independent alternatives to this that are way more successful than the Mastodon. That's why I mentioned podcasting That's why I mentioned individual WordPress. I think email newsletters all of these are examples of independently produced Media content being produced where you control much more of the eyeballs you control your audience And this is all working a lot better Mastodon.

It's not working that well because you know Twitter turns out that why does that format work? It works if you have a massive retweet network That can be very good at Virally spreading information in the cybernetic curation paradigm that we've been talking about and you have a really huge amount of above-average users Constantly pumping information to be evaluated by the cybernetic curation algorithm.

That's what makes Twitter interesting Not that you can post short things and see it on a timeline And so this is why a Mastodon federated server doesn't really do so well. It's because you don't have that massive Network that does the really effective curation You don't have all the best comedians and thinkers and politicians outrageous people all these people putting all this attention into it to generate really good Content so you end up with 70 guys on a Mastodon server saying boring things and then they get bored and just ban each other So we have alternatives to the platform monopolies But they don't look like the platforms and I think that's actually I think that's actually good All right, well what I want to do is Move on now to our something interesting segment before I get there.

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That's mint mobile comm slash deep cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mint mobile comm Slash deep and that's mint. M. I n T I'm thinking Jesse about you know, I wrote this whole talk for my kids school, but I'm thinking I put a lot of work in These slides maybe we'll record a version of the talk right here in the studio Yeah, just put it up on you know YouTube for because people care about this What should I do with my kids and?

Smartphones and I've gone deep into this research and have a lot of thoughts on I know some of these researchers who are involved in It and I have this sort of big slide that goes all these slides to go through it all So if that's of interest let us know I think I might at some point record a version of that talk and just put it out there in the world for anyone to See yeah, that'd be cool.

It's interesting topic Alright, so let's switch to something interesting This is where we take interesting things that people sent to my interesting at Cal Newport comm address We like to just look at these two in the show on something cool. So I actually have two things. I want to mention today The first thing is a new podcast That just launched it's a pushkin industries podcast that's hosted by podcaster extraordinaire Justin Richmond Justin Richmond is one of these Super pros in the industry.

He came out. He came up through the NPR system working on some of their major shows and NPR podcast and came over the pushkin where he's a producer he also co-hosted a music podcast on pushkin with Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin anyways, he has a new podcast out called Started from the bottom and I thought it was a really cool idea.

So I just wanted to mention it here So what he does on this show Justin interviews people with humble origins Who managed to scale the summit of success people who are outsiders? People not part of the old boys network people who grew up in a world where almost nobody went to college and he asked how Did they beat the odds?

Lets you to hear their stories in their own words I'm fascinated as you know about this topic about how people Succeed in various endeavors and I think by focusing on people who had very few advantages You're distilling in some sense some of the necessary core drives that goes behind success.

So it's a really cool show some of the early episodes feature people such as Charlemagne the God Susie Orman and the MFA champion Francis and Gano You know, I've actually crossed paths with Charlemagne a couple times I've been on his radio show the breakfast club Or I think I still hold the record for the whitest geekiest person to ever be on that show But Charlemagne worries a lot about the impact of social media on young people.

So there's a cool interview I also went on his comedy central show. He had a TV show I've been a guest on that show as before very thoughtful really interesting guys Francis and Gano, I don't know but I just know he's terrifying A terrifying MFA fighter. So Francis all I can say is I incredibly respect you.

Please don't kill me You know, it's sound like a cool show started from the bottom. You can find that wherever you get your podcast The other cool thing I wanted to talk about It's something that's happening in Australia But I think it's reflecting More a broader trend. So I'm gonna pull up an article here on the screen.

It's just loading. Okay, Jesse Yep. All right. This is an article from the Guardian Labor and Greens senators back four-day Work week, so I have it on the screen if you're watching at youtube.com slash Caliper media episode 241 so what's happening here is you have Australian senators Beginning to back legislation that would make a four-day workweek at full pay something like a standard This topic is coming up a lot in a lot of different places all throughout Europe.

For example similar discussions are Happening and I just think the four-day workweek in general is something to keep an eye on And it's interesting. I think that Australia is starting to get more serious about this. It's something to keep an eye on My feelings about it are mixed They're they're mixed, you know I just did an interview with reporter on the four-day workweek and I was relatively actually negative because I was the mood I was in I did that interview, but I think mixed is the right way to describe how I'm thinking about it.

So pros and cons on the con side, I think it is Stepping aside because you don't want to deal with complexity the real issues And the real issues is not that people think that there's too many days during the week in which they're going to work It's the nature of their work itself and for knowledge workers in particular it is overload Overload is creating all these problems There's a lot of psychic damage that's done by having too much work on your plate and just saying Friday is no longer Officially a workday doesn't get rid of that overload doesn't get rid of that psychic damage You end up still working that day Anyways, you still are paying that tax of all the overhead of all these all these different tasks on your plate That means you can spend less time on the actual work itself and it piles up more and all these negative things Don't go away by just turning the knob on the number of days in the week that you work This is different.

Of course the industrial sector where the main knob you had Was the number amount of time you work if I am putting steering wheels on a car in a Ford plant? the only variable that is going to now affect that experience is just how many hours am I doing that and So in the early 20th century when we get something like the Fair Labor Standards Act From the 1930s that put in place to five day workweek.

It made a lot of sense. This is the knob we need to turn What is the reasonable amount of days in the knowledge sector in the 21st century? It's not the not the issue the issue some it's not so much how many hours is your workday? It's how much work is on your plate.

So that's my that's my trepidation Around the four-day workweek is it's kicking the can to the side. It's not actually tackling with what matters on The other hand we have an interesting data point That comes from the company base camp who switches to a four-day workweek for part of the year every year And it's an interesting data point and what they found is Reducing the total number of days at least temporarily Creates a scarcity mindset that does actually reduce time wasting it reduces long meetings People are less likely to call a meeting people get a little bit more focused on what's important because it creates a sense of scarcity We don't have as much time.

So, you know what? Let's not do this. Let's remain more focused. So actually It created a better working environment There was a lot of negative feedback when base camp first did this experiment And I document this and I think this is maybe in deep work I talked about this or potentially world without email there was pushback at first.

It said oh you're just gonna make people take five days of work and squeeze it into four and The co-founder CEO Jason Fried responded. That's not what's happening. People are actually reducing their work when there's less days, so it's possible that the four-day workweek will Directly improve things it will be an indirect side effect because of a sense of scarcity People will actually pull back what they think is a reasonable amount of work to assign there's also some other obvious benefits such as if Friday is not a workday, even though you still might be answering emails all day and Feel like you have too much to do.

It'll become socially acceptable not to have meetings. That's another day without meetings. That's useful There's a flexibility benefit Of course any day you have off in an official sense is a day where you're more flexible to do things like go to the doctor Take your car to the shop go to your kids school.

So there's these sort of smaller direct benefits and perhaps a larger indirect benefit on work But I still think the conversation we have to have is about the details of the nature of knowledge work The what makes knowledge work hard what's burning out knowledge workers today is not as Simple as a question as it was a hundred years ago Where you had two things to make sure the conditions were safe and the hours were reasonable Knowledge work is different and we have to introduce more knobs to turn but it's really hard and we don't want to do it So we focus on the simple things.

So I'm just mixed on this. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing There might be some benefits. There might be some drawbacks But it's not getting at the heart of what I think is actually causing problems in the knowledge sector today, but it's interesting So I want to show you that article These links of course are in the show notes.

You can also find a summary of all the questions and everything else in there But let's wrap it up. So thank you everyone who sent in your questions. Thank you for listening We'll be back next week with a new episode of the podcast and until then as always Stay deep (upbeat music)