Social media isn't social anymore

This summer, I left Meta after seven years to see my passion project through. Seven years in Trust and Safety showed me all of the guardrails working to keep the platforms on track across a wide range of our products, but besides learning the ins and outs of all of the harm that we took down (and that still found its way up), my main takeaway was: social media is no longer social. But we stick around because we believe those are the feeds that keep us in the loop.

Many of us still log onto social media believing that "social" means our circle, but it hasn't for quite a while. I scrolled through my own Instagram feed recently and counted that only 2 out of the first 50 feed posts (4%) were from people I knew personally; most were not from people or businesses I followed at all. (Stories were a bit better, but with a 46% ad load based on unique accounts.) The reality is that Meta (as large platforms must) has always valued volume, but scale is inherently at odds with intimacy. So Meta leaned on businesses and creators to crowdsource media in volumes that could keep you on the platform longer than your friends could. TikTok shows this in starker contrast: many people don't follow any of their own friends or post any of their own content.

There's a popular mental model of social platforms called the 1% rule where 1% of users generate the content, 9% of users engage with that content in some way, and the last 90% passively view content. Under that light, Meta's emphasis on creators predominantly serves the purpose of sourcing primarily free media for the platform. Our feeds are not social media anymore as much as they are crowdsourced media.

But we all still have the itch to stay in the loop. It's why most of us, even after realizing we're not actively enjoying our time on social media, struggle to quit it. Despite screen time limits, deleting the app but logging in via the browser, and whatever other tricks we come up with, we usually end up back on because we don't want to miss out.

So: Ponder AI is an AI-powered feed to scan the world for you and curate what you're interested in: books, films, music, stocks, and so on. The app covers politics and the economy, but it also covers a wide range of culture because technology should push us back toward real life, not pull us deeper into the algorithm. News that matters very specifically to you, not just because it's the top headline across the globe.

This past week we launched a new personalization algorithm to further emphasize this. Please try it out – I'll take all of the feedback I can get.