what is Social Media doing to us?

Who are you really writing for?

Regardless, what becomes important is the ability for *any* media to find the humans to enjoy it. And so, there’s likely a future inflection point where having more humans on your project is actually beneficial because it means you start off with a higher likelihood of it being shared. If the extreme becomes that we may be able look at anything for... See more

The media has propagated a new definition of what it means to be a good consumer of information. They want you to read high-velocity content from multiple information streams and be constantly plugged into what’s happening. They can sell the most advertisements this way.

Shitty retention is ubiquitous

First, perhaps obvious, but no wonder retention in mobile products is terrible. I’ve often written about these benchmarks for retention:

• daily retention of consumer apps: D1/D7/D28 of 60/30/15


• the % of active users — that is, DAU/registered — should be 25%


• or, for consumer/SMB subscription: M12 of >30%

When you reflect... See more

Yet, the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms are engineered to exploit our primal instincts for validation, status, and mimetic desires (adopting or pursuing preferences and aspirations based on the influence of others rather than our intrinsic motivations), morphing into a manipulative force that feeds... See more

In the 2010s many of our public spaces started to be molded, physically and literally, by the market advantage of luring patrons looking for highly Instagrammable shots. Businesses that once paid large sums of money to have photographs taken for advertisements that cost even more to run now had access to an army of free labor, taking pictures for... See more

Head of Facebook App: "Building the Discovery Engine" April 27, 2022