Is Social Media Doomed To Die? — With Ellis Hamburger

Ellis Hamburger is Snap's ex-head of marketing strategy, where he spent seven years before moving to The Browser Company. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his view on why social media apps inevitably move from differentiated, and at times delightful, to something where all of them look a lot like TikTok. Hamburger breaks down the cycle: start with a novel format, scale, try to justify expectations, and then capitulate to market forces. Join us for an insider's perspective on the past, present, and future of social media. --- You can read Hamburger's article here. Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 0:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Ellis Hamburger is our guest today. He works on storytelling at The Browser Company. He's a former reporter at The Verge, and he was head of marketing strategy at Snap, where he worked for more than seven years. And this week, Hamburger joins us to discuss how social media companies all end up giving into the temptation to redesign their products and move from something differentiated and at times delightful to something that looks, well, a lot like TikTok. It's his view from the inside as a once-true believer in Snapchat's mission that makes Ellis's analysis so fascinating. And after he wrote about this social media lifecycle in a recent article for The Verge, headlined

• 0:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  "Social Media Is Doomed to Die," I knew we needed to dive into his analysis and learn what really drives social media companies to this inevitable endpoint. So I'm happy to bring you my conversation with Ellis Hamburger, coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside

• 1:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 2:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hey, Alice. Welcome to the show.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Alex.

• 2:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  To start, I want to go through some of what the social media lifecycle is, at least what you've seen over the course of your career. So let's just start at the beginning. You talk about how all social media companies start with this idealized version of founders trying to bring people together and make the world better. Why don't you explain that a little bit?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  You see it every time, and it even goes beyond social. I think it's very much a tech industry thing to say, we're going to make the world a better place. And I think there's something so inherently appealing about building apps in the world of social. It's something that we've seen founders gravitate to over and over again, though. What is the failure rate for social apps? People say that venture-backed apps, the failure rate's got to be 99%. I think it's got to be even higher for social apps over the years because it is such a difficult space. And I think they all typically go through a pretty similar lifecycle where typically the best ones have some innovative new format, whether it was Instagram's photo filters

• 3:19Speaker 01

  and square photos, Snapchat's ephemeral messaging, Twitter's short-form posts, B-reals, you know, once-a-day posts. They all kind of have a trick to them, and that trick typically represents an insight about culture, society, something that people want but don't know how to ask for. And if they're lucky, it catches on. I think one thing I've noticed over the years that timing seems to matter more than just about anything else with these catching on. It's really so much luck.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Did Snap spend spread on the right high schools, on the right college campuses? Once it's taking off, it's almost too late to even clone or compete at that point. Two years later, you finally know if it's working. And that's why I think a lot of these tech industry or tech Twitter-driven bubbles around any of these new apps don't tend, in my view, to be indicative of long-term success, whether it's Clubhouse or Meerkat or anything like that. And so let's say the company takes off. They have this beautiful, pristine app for that one simple solution to a problem you didn't know you had, and everything's perfect. You've only added your good friends because it's a brand-new social graph. It does one thing. There's no ads because it's subsidized by venture capital.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And then, before you know it, at some point... The board, the VCs, the founders start to wonder about, hey, we against all odds hit our growth goals and hit 10 million, 50 million, 100 million DAU. This is crazy. What do we do next? Well, we're an innovative company. We gotta make more features. We gotta make those features through the lens of what might monetize later on. And, you know, I think this relates to when I got to Snap. So early in the company's history, did they start thinking about content with Discover? And I think the initial experience was better than a lot of people give it credit for. And we can talk about that if you want, but, um, you know,

• 5:17Speaker 01

  no doubt that was made through the lens of, hey, we're considering an IPO in the next few years. What is a product that's easier to monetize? There's obviously been a lot of Discover engagement over the years, but I don't think anyone's ever said that this is something that users asked for. Features like that come around. They have varying levels of success. And once you have something that the board can smell money through, I think I remember Casey Newton wrote a post about Discover at the time, and the image was just a bunch of money signs on top of Discover. And it's like, yeah, that's what it was, even if it was a good product. And before you know it, all the resources inevitably shift towards those new products that never really aligned with the company's initial

• 6:02Speaker 01

  proposition. The ads inevitably come in, and before you know it, you're off on this cycle of moving to thinking of advertisers first as your consumers, not your users. And it's just tragic. And I think that's the arc that I kind of wanted to trace for this story. And from a consumer's point of view, you know, that's what I've always tried to write from, and hopefully I communicated that.

• 6:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so Discover was is this tab inside Snapchat that like is not just about chatting with your friends, but gets you an opportunity to discover content. And that's like stuff that advertisers are used to buying. And so therefore they can put ads next to those stories or or videos. Is that is that the right way of looking at it?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Definitely. And, you know, a lot of people forget, but there was so much interesting stuff going on with Discover that Snap invented, like, for example, the whole swipe up to read the story. And so every single story had a cover, almost like a magazine cover, that really made the mobile web feel a lot better. It was kind of like Facebook instant articles below the fold where there were no ads. It was kind of simplistic. It was easy to read and you could instantly share it and annotate it with a friend. So, you know, it really was Snap's DNA for a content platform. But that was a pretty deliberate choice to all of a sudden put a lot of resources toward content for an app that was never about that. You know, there were a lot of other things they could have built before that.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And so I do think that monetization was in mind when the resources were focused there.

• 7:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And, you know, as we're talking, I'm starting to think a little bit about this progression from like, you know, because all these networks, right? Like you talk about Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter. They begin with this like really good connection with like friends and people you might find interesting. And that's something that's missing in social media, which is why like putting a finger on like what happened, I feel like is so interesting and important to go over. And I think we should just take a moment just to relish, like they do really get it right at a certain point, right? Like where maybe they've just started to make money. They don't have too many users or too big of a network.

• 8:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like there is that magical Goldilocks area for social networks that does seem so difficult to maintain. Do you think that there's any way possible for companies to stay in that place? Or are they just destined to leave it?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  I think part of the thesis of the piece is that once you sign the contract with venture capital, to be in the social category, there are very clear expectations on what's going to happen. And I guess it's Facebook that really started this trend of just grow. You know, if you're a social app, just grow. That's the hardest part. And it is the hardest part. You know, like we were talking about most social apps fail. And so why not focus on the hardest part first, which is just getting users. But I think as part of that contract, once you have all those users, what's the best way to monetize them? Is it something that isn't quote unquote scalable, which is charging them all a dollar?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Or is it something like advertising that automatically prices your audience exactly how much it's worth? It's miraculous how well the system works at auctioning off every millisecond how much your platform and its users are worth. That's a lot of work to try and figure that out. And especially when the last 20 years is filled with free social services, it's not so easy to all of a sudden spring this on users. But in today's day and age, I think consumers are demanding a lot more transparency with not just companies, but with creators. If your favorite creator says, hey, guys, I've been doing this for free for five years. I fucking love what I do. Sorry, I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on here.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Will you guys please support my Patreon? Or my whatever? You know, they've developed such a relationship in part because of that parasocial relationship over the years that I think people are a lot more likely to support them at that point. But if you haven't developed that relationship with consumers, which I think is one of Snap's biggest failures over the years, is not developing a real relationship through communicating, being honest, being authentic, being transparent with consumers. They're just, it's a lot harder sell. They don't know you. And there's that, that set in stone. So anyway, to answer your question, can it be done? I think if you look at Twitter today, it's not complicated.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Feel free to trash me if anybody wants to say that creating a feed of text posts is more complicated than I think, I'm sure it is. But the cost of transmitting texts, photos, videos in a feed has been going down every year, every minute since it was created. This is not an expensive thing to to offer compared to what it used to be. And I think in this day and age, you see it with Blue Sky, you see it with Mastodon. Starting up a feed similar to what you've already got with a similar set of features could be a lot harder. And I think there has to be a world where people are willing to pay for a service that helps facilitate richer connections with their closest friends and family. What could be more important? And that's where I think the storytelling really comes in.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Helping people weigh this against every other expenditure in their life, their monthly bill, their monthly subscriptions. It's tough to justify another $5 against Netflix, against Spotify, against everything else. But I mean, if you look at WhatsApp before Facebook acquired them, they were considering a subscription for what was it, like a dollar?

• 11:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  A dollar, yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Every month or something like that?

• 11:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it was a dollar a year.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  You have to believe that people would be willing to pay. I simply don't believe the argument that it deserves to be free. In this case, for such an incredibly valuable foundational part of our society, which is communicating with your friends and family. And it's clear that leaving it in the hands of private companies has led to, you know, a very specific place.

• 12:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So we're going to get deeper into the actual Snapchat story in the second half and also talk about Blue Sky in the second half. And it's interesting because Snapchat does have at least what is the most successful subscription business out of all the social media companies, although that's not saying much. But we'll get to that in the second half. What's interesting, if you think about this progression, is after that Goldilocks zone, what happens is that the companies go so aggressively toward monetization. And you kind of have this like back and forth between the users and the company, you know, imagined in your story. And it's really interesting. I'm going to read a chunk of it. And to the listeners, I just want to, you know, again, make clear that Ellis has been,

• 12:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  you know, inside these companies for, he was in Snap for, what, seven years? And so, you know, this is, this is not uninformed criticism. This is like some from someone who actually saw it happen. So you have people saying, "We want the chronological feedback," Instagram users scream into the void. "Here, have reels and shopping," said Instagram CEOs on the hunt for new revenue streams. "We want free speech," tweet the denizens of Twitter. "But then our sponsored hashtags won't be brand safe," said Twitter CEO, whoever that is, this week. "We want to show our kinky side Tumblr users blog to the heavens." "Sorry, can't do, can't do it," said the overlords at Yahoo. "It's scaring the advertisers."

• 13:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it is interesting how basically you say that the, the interest of the advertisers and the interests of the users diverge so dramatically that they, the companies end up building these, these products that people don't really want to use, but are just good for revenue. So I think that's an interesting point. Let me see if I can use the counterpoint and, and get you to respond here. The counterpoint would be that people do respond to these products that, you know, are being put out there. And so for instance, a chronological feed can become less engaged, less vital than an algorithmic feed. You know, reels can become something that's just have people spending far more time on than, you know,

• 14:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  your typical friends and family posts from, you know, people who are generally more boring than your typical reels creator on Instagram. So these companies are saying they're doing it for product evolution from a consumer standpoint, not necessarily a revenue standpoint, even though it's good for revenue. But the selection that I just read from your piece does make it seem like actually it's more driven from a revenue standpoint. So help clarify that for us.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Man, thanks for teeing me up, Alex. Um, I think the biggest myth in Silicon Valley and my biggest pet peeve is that

• 14:50Speaker 01

  If you use a product more, it means you're happier or you're more satisfied. You know, I don't want to make any weird, imperfect analogies, but I've always been a really big believer that if you feel a sense of control, you're going to be a happier person with the products that you use. And so I think the way to think about it is you're in control of your chronological feed. If someone is overposting there, you understand exactly why and you can unfollow them, or maybe there should be tools to see a bit less of them. But you have a whole lot of transparency into the world that you've built for yourself. Let's say you use that feed for 30 minutes a day. You know, everything was in chronological

• 15:33Speaker 01

  order. You know, it's exactly who you followed. In that moment, you are not thinking, what else is out there that I might want to be seeing and engage with more than my friends, who might be more entertaining my friends? You're just trying to use that product and maybe log off at the end of the day. Then the algorithmic feed comes in and they say, well, instead of using the product for 30 minutes a day, people are using it for an hour a day. So surely they must be happier. But what they don't say is that that entire feed has now been organized around popularity. And we know popularity contests make people

• 16:11Speaker 01

  feel terrible. Inside of that tension, I think, is the ego and the adversarial mindset that we know better than you, that is at the heart of why I think so many Silicon Valley companies are loathed by their consumers and by the world, is that they're saying over and over again, that we're making the decision that you are clicking. So you say that you like it. But how many products, when you eat or consume more of them, you do it even though you don't want to? So it's one thing to provide a harmful product because you can legally. It's another to pretend that because there's more engagement, your product is somehow making people happier, healthier. Um, I hope that made a bit of sense, but um.

• 16:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, of course, but let's say you put like a product that does, you know, optimize for engagement side by side with a product that doesn't. And are you telling me that you think the product that doesn't will end up winning? Because ultimately the argument would be that, okay, there's going to be someone that's, that's going to do this. And I'm only saying this because we have, and first of all, I'm not agreeing that this is the way. I think this is a good point that you make, but I'm just trying to think it through practically. That we've only had the products that, that take these shortcuts win. And the ones that would supposedly make you feel better have not succeeded. So put them side by side. Are you saying there's a chance that the one that you're talking about, the one that you would prefer does succeed?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm interested if there are examples you're thinking of, of the ones that were healthier, but um, didn't succeed. And maybe we can talk about be real later.

• 17:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  You know, you see it in content as well. Like you've gone into a very specific business where you're offering a paid product that is of a higher quality. And because it's a subscription.

• 17:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but we're no big technology is free, so.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Oh, it is free?

• 18:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, for now, we're, we're working on a paid product, but right now everything is free. But yes, the idea that it's, the idea that it's in a newsletter at least is, and not dependent on social media feeds. I think holds true with that idea of like, we need to respect the listener and respect the reader. Otherwise we're toast.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Right, and I think every creator in any industry knows that the easiest way to win is by creating a junk food addictive experience. And so I think it's not really binary between winning and losing. I think any of the social apps that were healthier that lost, I think was probably because of other extenuating circumstances. Like they hadn't reached scale yet.

• 18:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  I mean, let's put it this way. Head Instagram stayed with the chronological feed. Would their dominance over the world and social media be any different than it is today? I would argue no. Um, I think.

• 18:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  You don't think they'd be losing more quickly to TikTok?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I guess I was thinking about the feed primarily. Yeah, well, I actually think about the TikTok feed and the Reels feed as like a very, very different type of experience that was built for something different, where people are actively choosing to come in to be entertained. In that world, of course, the algorithm's better.

• 19:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  I think people, when they're sitting down at the end of the day and just want to see something fun from one of the different niches that they love from across the world, of course, you want the algorithm to tell you what the best thing is. So you don't have to create your own follow graph, find everything on your own. In that case, it is perfectly feasible or perfectly intuitive that you should get something that you don't know that you want. But talking about the last 10 years of social feeds, that's where I think the point I'm trying to make lies in that there's this shift that goes from accountability, transparency, control toward entertainment, algorithms, popularity. And that's what leads all those feeds to become entertainment feeds.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  But in that moment, let's say it's just social, let's say it's just friends, let's say it's just celebrities, brands and whatnot. I think the perceived value for consumers is higher if they have control, even if they click a few things less or use it for 10 minutes a day less. And I think that's where the loathing and the complaints and the future misalignment, grievances and concerns often come from. You know, people are saying that they want the chronological feedback for a reason, right?

• 20:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no doubt.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Like they're saying, we don't like the algorithmic feed for whatever reason, even if I use it more.

• 20:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we also talk about this like stated and revealed preference a lot of times where people will say that, you know, actually I want this, you know, they'll say it vocally, but the truth, what they really want is what they're doing.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Was that from your chat with Kevin Systrom?

• 20:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  That was part of it, yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  We've had it's come up a few times on, you know, on the show, but yeah, address that.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I found that interesting too, and I liked the way that it was framed. I think in the world that Kevin is now in, that makes a ton of sense. We all know that you put the criterion collection on your list and you look at it every time you want to sit down, but you watch the action movie instead. But when You sit down trying to ostensibly keep up with your friends and family. And all you see is brands and influencers because it's the most engaging. I think that creates a very different product and a very different experience over time. And that's where this tragedy of disappointment comes from. I think those two products deserve to exist. But the reason I wrote this piece is because everyone loved it the way that it was.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  And then it all changed to become something more entertaining, more profitable. Clearly, people like it. They're using it, right? But it's such a different thing and it makes people, I think, feel like, like I was saying, in a very adversarial relationship with these companies who just frankly, aren't transparent about this shift. Every time Adam Mosseri does a Twitter video or whatever, he frames everything through the mindset of like, well, look at what's working versus what people are telling us that that they want. And I frankly think it's it's offensive to not factor in what I'm telling you that I want. And only factor in my behavior.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  I think it's, you know, not a human way to conduct design or product development. And it's just very disingenuous.

• 22:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so you talk a little bit about this again in the story. And there's so many great lines in the story that I'll just read a little bit more. So you say, "Today, the product evolution of social media apps has led to a point where I'm not sure you could even call them social anymore, at least not in the way we always knew it." So, oh yeah. "One day, it's hard to say when a switch was flipped away from news, away from followers, away from real friends toward the final answer to earning more time from users, highly addictive short-form videos that magically appeared in numb, a chaotic, crowded brain." Oh, man, that's such a good, such a good way to put it. And, you know, when I, when I, when we speak about it and I hear you, you know, I look at your words, hear you say it, say it today.

• 23:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's clear that that social media friends and engagement with news, it's dead, right? Totally agree with you. And what we have now is effectively TikTok all the way down. And You know, the one thing that I guess is surprising to me and I think is interesting is to hear you say that, you know, the other, that form of social media before we hit all these, you know, economic incentives from within the companies, that form of social media is actually something that that people do do want. And so I guess my question to you is knowing where social media has gone today, which is TikTok all the way down, do you think there is an opening for companies to replicate the social media that once was?

• 23:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  That, you know, maybe a news, news platform for people that used to like Twitter or a friends and family photo sharing platform for people who you like, used to like Instagram, et cetera, et cetera.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  I think there is, there's a big vacuum for it and you know, there is because it makes less money than what all the big guys are doing. You know? I think if you're Facebook over the years, you clone anything that you see that seems to be working. But I honestly think they've moved on from this specific use case. But I also do think that use case has changed a little bit. I think where I ended the story was being like, you know, I feel nostalgic for the time on Facebook, posting photos and revisiting them in the morning. Everyone in, you know, my college community could see them.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  I do think that type of social media is not just kind of boring and banal these days, but we all kind of know that that it doesn't make us feel great. I think there's some sense we all have that communicating and getting daily updates from our friends and family is what makes us feel good. And that's the part about switching the app under people's feet that bothers me is that people were kind of trying to do that. You know?

• 25:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  And before you know it, the little dark patterns in the app start shifting things towards towards something else. And, you know, one of the examples I bring up in the piece is when Snapchat very controversially moves.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Celebrity influencer brand stories below friends. Obviously Snap got a ton of flack from people like Kylie Jenner. But that's exactly the reason to celebrate that move as a user centric, healthy centric move is that if that feed, the stories feed is only ranked chronologically. Whoever posts the most, like Kylie Jenner, is always going to be at the top. And that means that you're probably going to see a little bit less of your friends. So that's going to change the feeling of that stories feed. And so they kept it chronological. They just created two different sections, one for the celebrities and influencers, one for your friends. And so I was proud of that decision at the time.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And I think there was a lot of disappointment internally that there wasn't broad understanding in exactly what that meant and what the intentionality of it was. But there are ways for for these companies to try and create that small experience. Then again, one of the other things that is on my mind and that I point out is that users do do this to themselves. Everybody is susceptible to adding more and more friends until your friends become your audience. And I think that's the job to be done of these new social apps, if they're going to exist, is try and push you either through content, storytelling, features. What's the opposite of dark patterns? Light patterns that push you toward those most more positive behaviors.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I think even something like Snap streaks was in its infancy designed to try and incentivize you to talk to your best friends every day, which conceptually I love. Obviously Snap streaks took on a very different life at some point, but things like that, gamifying positive interactions, I think is where that opportunity lies. But then again, you know, Apple, as slow as a snail's pace their innovation is, they've had 10 years to catch up little by little with iMessage and these other messaging apps, adding more social features where they may be able to seize that opportunity now.

• 27:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, this is also from the story. It's such a good encapsulation of what this, the user side of it is. You say, "In our own eternal quest for social validation, we're out for growth, too. We readily give in to convenient advertiser-friendly features like stories, which prioritize broadcasting over simply communicating. We had more and more friends because it feels good, until our close friend group has become our audience." People want to be a product. Technology writer, Rob Horning, wrote to me via email. So I guess like, to think that this is an experience, I mean, this is kind of what we've been talking about over in this first half is like, you know, is it the companies or is it the users?

• 28:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the companies would make the argument, we're doing what they want. And you kind of, you acknowledge it to some extent that like, yeah, like, part of us actually do want it. So it's kind of interesting. Like, it's if, if companies go ahead and build these light patterns and build these experiences that are, you know, more nutritious, or whatever you want to refer to them as, it's still kind of an open question of whether people will go for it.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  It's true. It's true. And I think as leaders, de facto leaders of society, shaping the products that we spend, what, four or five hours a day in every day, I do think it is incumbent on them to make some moral ethical decisions, to the extent they can, you know? There is enough choice that in the market, that making some of these decisions

• 29:07Speaker 01

  is not a de facto

• 29:12Speaker 01

  rule for the entire society to live by in the event that people disagree with them. You know, there are options. And I don't think there has been enough leadership from tech, having some opinion about what a healthier, richer, more fulfilling life could be. And that's, I think, the side of the communication that I think Snap missed on over the years, was being a bit clearer and leading on that. You know, I don't know if you remember the Snap Real Friends campaign. That was something I worked on very, very closely and I'm happy with how it came out in heroing, incredible, rich, hilarious, weird, real friendships from across the globe. But all I wanted was just to take it one step further and turn it into an opinion that

• 29:57Speaker 01

  real friends matter more than followers. All of a sudden, it's a philosophy, it's a political statement, it's a rallying cry to help people make better decisions for themselves, you know? But then again, you know, as Rob said, we are in America, people want to be a product. They uh build their brands for a reason and I don't think it's fully one or the other. I just look to the tech companies and think, hey, guys, you have this opportunity to try and do what you said you wanted to do, make the world a better place and so do it.

• 30:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a great point and it's also like we like so much in American society and global society today, everything is polarized, right? So instead of having like a constructive conversation like this one, what would typically happens is you have, you know, tech builders who are, you know, oftentimes like, you know, build, baby, build and we'll just figure out the rest later and we will follow the incentives of the market, you know, to the sometimes destruction of the experiences that we're building and you see, I mean, look at all what's happened to social media. It's sort of inarguable that that's gone there, gone on there. And then you have like the Tristan Harris's of the world and there's just, you know, a lot of talking past each other and not a lot of constructive dialogue.

• 31:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I like what you're saying, like maybe there's a way to to put this in the in the hands of of tech to actually create the leadership that will bring us to the next era.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I often wonder if the CEOs even have an opinion, you know? I think that's something I've thought about a lot over the years. When I was at The Verge, I interviewed probably hundreds of founders and CEOs and, you know.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  How many of these CEOs are equipped to be society's leaders? They got to where they are by ignoring everyone in order to build their company, everyone who said it wasn't going to work. And on the one hand, you could be like, oh, that's just conviction in your idea. On the other, is there something in that personality that isn't fully weighing the feelings of the 99% of people who say that their idea isn't good? And I like that there are people who really just go and do exactly what they want to do and take a chance and build something amazing. I do think, you know, all innovation is unexpected.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  But I think the point I'm trying to make is that I don't necessarily think those qualities are always shared with people who should be leaders in society. So many of them are business people. I think certainly in my years, I've connected most with, you know, founders who are more on the product and design side. Cause I think even just a design thinking background makes you feel a little bit differently about how your products might affect people. But it's not so easy for these companies to just start doing the right thing when I don't think a lot of them even know what the right thing is. And I don't know if there is one right thing, but I think everybody in a position of power should be trying to do what they think is right for the world.

• 33:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there's, you know, it's also like the world demands and maybe like the market will open up opportunity like to build a type of technology like you say, if there's this, if there is this inherent demand among people to use products that are different from what we have today. And I imagine there will be like, I imagine there will be a, a demand for people to, you know, have more nutritious and nutrient-rich experiences with social apps. And maybe what we're seeing with Blue Sky and Saw would be real is, is a hint of that. So.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, it, it can be done. You know, like I have a toddler now and you're making just, and you're making choices about what to buy for them. And why do you buy the honest company?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Is it because the product is necessarily better? I don't know. I haven't tried all of these products, every single diaper, every single juice box. But the intent, the message, the vision is that we're trying to build something healthier and more eco-friendly. And people, people want to make the right decisions. You just got to help them see a little bit more what it is. And obviously, it's still up to them at the end of the day, and people still eat, you know, a whole bag of Cheetos. But I do think it's possible through storytelling and, and having great products too, to make something that is whatever, more social friendly, eco-friendly, mental health friendly. It's a spectrum.

• 34:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ellis Hamburger is here with us. Does storytelling at the browser company, former head of marketing, strategy at Snap, former reporter at The Verge. We've talked a lot about the evolution of social media here on the first half. In the second half, we'll talk a little bit more about what practically happened at Snap. And we'll also cover maybe some of the other social media companies that have come and gone or are still on the rise like BeReal and Blue Sky. Back right after this. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control.

• 35:17Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 35:59Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 37:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ellis Hamburger, the storytelling at The Browser Company, former head of marketing strategy at Snap. We left off in the first half talking about some of the broader philosophy. Let's talk a little bit about the path that you saw. And we touched on it in the first half a bunch, but how Snap went from this company that wanted to be healthier to one that ended up disregarding a lot of the better practices that you think might have helped the company overall?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Sure. The first thing I want to say, I think, is that I don't want people to come away from this thinking that there is a very nefarious scheme on the part of every single founder to bait and switch their product for something else. I think it's a very, very, very slippery thing. And you see it in little decisions that happen every day on a platform. You see it with the hiring of product managers who have very specific goals that they need to meet, whether you call them OKRs or KPIs or whatever. And that is the entire thing. Once you've chosen a specific metric for a group or a person to follow,

• 38:23Speaker 01

  and maybe the company gets sufficiently big enough that the CEO is maybe a bit more out of touch than they were. Certainly, when you have a billion users, it can be, it can be pretty easy to feel out of touch with, with what users are wanting. You feel that slow slippery slide toward that misalignment, I think, between the product and the users. And that's why I think it's so very important, I've learned, to have a founder, a CEO, a design leader, who is incredibly close to that product and the perception of it amongst people. You know, a lot of these companies have research teams, whether it's Snap or Microsoft or Facebook notoriously, I think, has had a huge research team. I have one of their old research books called Grouped on the Shelf.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  But it's hard for me to say that they were ever fully taken seriously, especially when so much of the pressure comes from, once you've found that growth, getting to your exit. That is the entire contract that you signed with venture capitalists from the get-go, and you don't want to fire employees. People came from other companies to join your startup for lower compensation because of hope that there'd be an exit. You want to help people cash out and live the life that, you know, you promised them. You don't want to do layoffs.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  You want to be a celebrity and grow and get richer yourself. You know, all these things play in to those little decisions, I think, that over time add up to a very differently changing product. And I think one specific thing I didn't mention in

• 39:57Speaker 01

  The article at Snap that comes to mind, because Snap had tried so hard over the years to try and do these behaviors that push people in the right direction, like how hard it was to add a friend. And then I remember, once the quick ad screen came in, that made it easier to find and add people. And on the one hand, it's like, well, we have a hunch that people are adding the people that they would have added anyway. But for a real friends network, that's actually a pretty big philosophical change. All of a sudden, with one click, you've made it that much easier to add people and turn that messaging platform, that close friends platform, into just another broadcast platform that falls victim to those popularity

• 40:42Speaker 01

  contests, the context collapse, those other patterns that, uh, that come in. And you know, that was something that was controversial internally. And it's hard to say that, you know, Snap did it for the growth, for the IPO, or afterwards, or whatever. But why else would it be? And little features like that, all of a sudden, end up, uh, pretty profoundly changing the feeling of these products, the atmosphere they kind of cultivate. And then, of course, when the little growth hack thing starts working, you can't turn that off.

• 41:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Especially if you're public.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Because that's how, yeah, especially if you're public. I mean, and that's the job of the every product manager in Silicon Valley is not to innovate, but to get little incremental gains, because that's what Wall Street demands. Um, they want incremental, straightforward growth. And taking those big stabs, once you're public, is just always controversial. And I think it's kind of a lose-lose in a lot of ways.

• 41:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Yeah. You, um, you talked about the friction, uh, at Snap and in the, um, in the story. You say, "When you're gunning for an IPO, there's simply no way to justify keeping things small. Little frictions are removed one by one. Research and development goes more into content than messaging, and low in content than messaging, and lo and behold, the growth comes." So.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Indeed. See, I think that's a similar point as before, is just like, we all know what works.

• 42:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  You know? Um, and you see it in so many industries, that race to the bottom, once these secrets are discovered. And.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  As I mentioned or hyperlinked in the first paragraph, you know, the part that bothered me about it is that we had been very clear about not wanting to do growth hacking. And I was an evangelist for that, you know? I welcome new hires every week with a presentation that was incredibly heartfelt about the philosophy at Snap, which I still in many ways believe in, the core tenets of. And then when you go back on something like that, without even mentioning it, you know, like, is there a world where as a founder, you do a vlog and are like, guys, here's what's up.

• 43:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  You know, growth is being demanded of us. I'm conflicted. There's this little thing called Quick Ed that we want to try. And please let us know if you feel like it's making the experience worse. We know it's probably gonna make the numbers go up. But we need to hear from you guys. If it's really making things, things different. I don't know if that's the best example because it's so subtle, but I, I, I think maybe you get the idea.

• 43:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  I do. And of course there's the push notification and that's kind of how our conversation

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 43:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  about this started because so BeReal, it, it, uh, it's tanked. It's done terribly. And there was a moment in October where I noticed BeReal, in October 22, I noticed BeReal spamming me with these push notifications about how like it's time to be real or whatever, or someone posted late, whatever. It was just some stuff that like did not belong at a notification level of urgency. And I tweeted, BeReal just started to push notification spam. This app is toast on October 23rd, 2022. So recently that there was this story that came out about how BeReal's apps, uh, uh, monthly downloads have slipped. And the peak was, you won't believe it, but October,

• 44:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  where it has gone from 15 million then to 6 million in March, um, the daily active users. And I tweeted, folks, it's a universal truth. When an app starts sending push notification spam, that is the end. And so it goes for BeReal. And you actually in the story have this anecdote where you started getting these notifications to message people for their birthday. And you were like, uh, uh-oh, something is clearly wrong here. Want to expand on that?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  For sure. And I take product design and app development probably too seriously. But to me, the apps we use are the forks, the knives, the chairs, the furniture, the tools, the products of our everyday life now, and they deserve to be taken seriously. And to me, push notifications, just in general, are probably one of the worst inventions in the history of technology, in that 99% of the push notifications you get aren't urgent, but interrupt you. And I think Apple has tried to, over the years, you know, limit its effect on you, group them, have summaries at the beginning and at the end of the day.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  You know, at least they're trying to help people wrestle control over this stuff that's addictive. But people have a sense that it's kind of fragmenting their mind and not allowing them to focus. And so when these products do send that first irrelevant push notification, here's the thing, the way that like digital marketing works is the exact same. Like, I don't know if most people know this, but like most ads, if they get seen 100 times, like, less than five people are gonna click on it. And if five or six do, it's considered a success. But what about the impact on the other 95? You know, like, no one really talks about that. And it's the same thing with push notifications,

• 46:07Speaker 01

  which is that, well, we know it's gonna work, to some extent, to get those incremental hashtag gains. But what is it doing for the rest of the population? And these products are so critical and foundational in our lives. I'm specifically thinking of how Facebook's notifications got utterly destroyed over the years. No one quits, because the foundational product is still that valuable. And so I think that's another perfect example of where, if you just listen to people, and they said, hey, I'm actually like getting closer and closer to quitting Facebook, because every time I open my notification pane, it's essentially just the same things in my newsfeed.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  But in another more urgent looking badge pain that that that pester's me, maybe they would know. And then before you know it, it hits a precipice and all the teens leave.

• 46:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  There isn't respect for your time and interrupting you and, you know, I think over the years, Snap experimented first with silent push notifications, ones that actually wouldn't vibrate your phone.

• 47:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And that was nice. Just a little gesture, you know? How much did that even hurt the engagement of those push notifications? Probably, probably not even that much. But then Snap started experimenting with story notifications, birthday notifications. And what's funny is I actually haven't received a birthday notification since then. Um, and so that's kind of what led me to believe it might be like earnings related. Like we're trying to get another DAU or whatever. Uh, and, and that's not a new thing. It's been reported on that Facebook and Instagram and others turn on the notifications uh, when they need it, you know, because they work.

• 47:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  They do work. Okay. So we have about 10 minutes left. I have three questions I want to ask you. Maybe we can lightning round through them if you're up for it.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 47:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  So the first one is maybe that new form of social media is actually that we were looking for. The one that like is all about interactions with friends and family and not driven by broadcasting. Maybe that new social network never emerges and it's just messaging apps.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's entirely possible. Um, I think what's missing from the messaging apps is the idea of posting to a small circle. Messaging apps too, people hesitate to post, to, to message something to friends or family, or especially a group because it's going to buzz someone's phone, right? I think there has to be a way, this is one of the nice, beautiful things when a new social platform comes out. Everybody loves Peach or Be Real or, you know, Snapchat, or any others that have come out in the last several years. When that graph is small, posting to a small graph is really fun. Because you check when you want, you get little lightweight posts, things people are thinking about,

• 48:54Speaker 01

  but they wouldn't want to bother you about, wouldn't want to buzz your phone about. That stuff is awesome and precious. And it's kind of like the stuff that you would say to a friend if you bumped into them in person, you know, that you might not hear in a text or a call otherwise. That stuff is really nice. And so I've always been a big believer in small scale social. And I think someone needs to try it. Sorry, it wasn't, uh, wasn't a quick answer.

• 49:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's good. No, we're we're tracking. All right. So you perfect segue into what you think about Blue Sky? And what will make this? I mean, obviously, like this app is taking off. What do you think will make this app work?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Blue Sky is once again in that beautiful early social period where the only people using it are the ones who love to talk and have fun.

• 49:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's fun. It is a fun app.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  It is. It's like being at happy hour with everyone in media or in tech or whatever. And a lot of the people who are negative don't want to jump in just yet because they know they'll just get roasted. Uh, which I think I've been seeing on Blue Sky like the vibes are good. Uh, on every new platform when the network is small. However, I do not see any reason to believe that Blue Sky is going to take off. Um, because I think there are a handful of very critical criteria for a platform to start working and to the extent that people have ever started using these platforms, like let's call it Instagram. Um, it starts with the cross posting behavior.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  And typically a new creative format from that platform, which something like Blue Sky unfortunately doesn't have. Uh, a new creative format, people are cross posting to the other platforms. It makes its way onto their home screen. They start checking it every day. And once they have that realization that the two feeds are more or less similar. You stop using Facebook and you start using Instagram exclusively. And I think that's what needs to happen for something like Blue Sky to succeed. Um, given that the product of Twitter is clearly not the product. The product has been slow data rate and often in shambles for a decade. The product is the network. And I think there really needs to be going back to leadership. Uh, a big movement from leaders, which may include companies.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Uh, to try and start cross posting and getting people over there. Because it doesn't have that carrot that so many other new social platforms have had in the past. With the new format that is the fun new thing to play with that keeps you there. If it's the network alone, all that matters is if you check both those apps every day. And I think the vibes of the existing moment on Blue Sky, you know, could be really good within tech and within the industry at large. But if I've learned anything about these platforms, you know, it has to go farther than that. I mean, what do we have dozens of examples of, I saw Clubhouse was unfortunately doing a layoff. You know, there was every reason within tech to believe that that was going to be a smash, and then it's not.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  You know, I don't think there's a big correlation between hits and tech and hits more broadly.

• 51:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. Okay. So like last, last one for you. Snap's business, we have to talk about it. I mean, the earnings, every quarter, it just seems like the news gets worse and worse. And this most recent quarter was a quarter where Facebook did well. And then you'd imagine, okay, well, maybe Snap gets some of that benefit with people picking up on social spending. But it missed terribly and starts getting, I've never seen this before, but getting lectured by analysts on the earnings call saying like, you don't have the luxury to invest in augmented reality. Why don't you focus on the core business? And then once you start making some money, then you can, then you could do this stuff. So what do you think about the state of the business? And do you see any bright spots?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been, it's been tough. And full disclosure, as a shareholder, frustrating to watch, you know, I think the vision for AR monetization at scale has been a vision for several years now. And I think it's yet to pan out at scale. I think, you know, there's still brand advertisers that love it, but it hasn't really taken off. And I'm not sure if if there's really been a lot of clarity on why that is and when it's going to happen. You know, it's been something that's been promised for a long time. With that said, I'm actually really bullish on the AI execution with my AI. I think in all likelihood, at the next earnings, Snap is going to be able to say, we have 30, 40 million AI DAU on

• 53:22Speaker 01

  mobile. And I don't know who else can say that. And in the world of AI right now, as you've written, no one knows how it's going to make money or how it's going to be monetized yet, but clearly money is being poured into this thing. That's exactly where growth companies like Snap like to live in the world of creating innovations, distributing them incredibly broadly. Hopefully this time though, they're thinking about monetization a little bit earlier in the process, not so that it can hurt the experience, but that the company can continue to survive and start to build hopefully very thoughtful monetization into the new things that they're building, given that early mover advantage that they now have on mobile. So I think that's really exciting. I do think the brand remains an issue for advertisers and

• 54:07Speaker 01

  also for consumers to really take it seriously. But at the end of the day, if that is where your first impression and the easiest accessibility to AI is, and you're a teenager or young adult using Snap 30 times a day, I think there's reason to believe that there can be a big business there. But as always, who knows when that's going to come. I think everybody's just trying to build the biggest daily user base of AI users they can right now. But that'll certainly get you right back into the growth category in terms of stocks. So I assume that'll bode well for them.

• 54:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  And full circle, they do have like a pretty successful subscription product, Snapchat Plus, which unlike Twitter Blue is actually being subscribed to by millions of people, three million people subscribe to it, which, you know, going back to our discussion about how advertising and all that influences the business model, maybe that's also a ray of hope.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, is it successful? I don't know. Three million out of 350 million DAU or whatever? I don't know. Maybe it is. I just wonder what metric you're thinking of it by. I certainly was happy to see it and love how much is going into it. You just wonder if they can offer a killer enough feature that it really becomes mainstream, you know?

• 55:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's, that's the tough one. Yeah, that's hard.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Right. And you see cosmetics, decorations, fun tricks, games, working in, you know, the online games like Fortnite and whatnot. But for something like Snap that didn't monetize its core behavior, even to this day, you wonder if the whole bag of tricks can really be enough to monetize the entire user base, the way I think Wall Street and investors always hoped. But I'm hopeful and

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Wishing them the best of luck on it.

• 55:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And that's the thing with messaging, right? It's just like Snap's growing so much faster than like something like a Twitter, but it's just so hard to monetize the messaging end. And that's where you end up like, yeah, like we talked about in the beginning, pushing people to discover, trying to figure out anything that can get that engagement up. And you just, I don't know, it's, it's tough sledding.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  I think WhatsApp could have done it as such a utility and so much effort on their part, put into infrastructure and speed. And it was, you know, a cultural colossus in so many countries. Would people pay a dollar a month or a year for it? You've got to believe they would. But I hate to say with something like Snap that I believe is incredibly fun and enriching to do with friends. People just don't take it quite as seriously and never have. And I've, I've pitched a lot of advertisers and written a lot of decks for them. It's like, guys, like, isn't the most fun you have in your life? Fooling around and drinking and being goofball with your friends? Yes. Okay. But that feels frivolous as an adult, you know?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  And I think for that reason, it's a tough sell to try and monetize that core messaging component. And, uh, yeah, it's just, it's tragic.

• 57:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Well, Ellis, great to hear you. I'm glad you're speaking it up. It's really good to hear your voice from this stuff. Great to read your writing and I appreciate you being here with us today.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Alex.

• 57:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that'll do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast. Thank you so much, Ellis Hamburger, for joining us. Always great to have a conversation with you. Thank you, Nate Kowatney, for handling our audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. Thanks to all of you, the listeners, appreciate you coming back. Week after week on Friday, we are going to post an episode, a crossover episode, looking at the week's news with the Tech Meme Ride Home Podcast. Brian McCullough will be joining us or will be joining him, depending on which feed you'll be listening on. I'm very, very excited about that, so please do come back on Friday. And until then, take care. We will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 58:03Speaker 02

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• 58:32Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

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• 58:45Alex Kantrowitz?

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