I spent a day with EX-SOCIAL MEDIA EMPLOYEES

social media computer-based technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of ideas thoughts and information through virtual communities and networks the first public online chat system known as talk-o-matic was invented in 1973 and allowed up to five users at once to type messages paving the way for the rapid growth of internet-based social communication and platforms such as facebook youtube instagram and tick tock today 45 of the entire earth's population are active social media users giving about three hours of their time consuming free information services and entertainment on these platforms every single day with data now considered the most valuable commodity on earth ahead of tangible resources like fossil fuels these platforms generate billions of dollars a year by harvesting immense amount of data about their users and selling their active attention to advertising my name is anthony padilla and today i'm going to be sitting down with former social media engineers and employees to learn what this world is really like behind the scenes do those who have worked in social media praise what these platforms have become or do they feel responsible for contributing to platforms that have been said to exploit their users for financial gain with carefully crafted addictive functionality at the cost of their users mental health and emotional well-being [Music] hello bailey hey how's it going patrick hey leah hi thank you so much for coming on here and teaching me about the world of social media glad to be on here what do you consider yourself an ex-social media employee uh someone who contributed to what social media has become i'm an ex-google x facebook tech lead i worked at both of these companies i think of myself as a former technologist more generally someone who happened to work on social media i often think that i worked in technology but i'm not sort of of it you know it's not it's not necessarily the culture that i want to be in my whole life can you explain which social media platform you worked on and what your role was so i was working on the youtube ios application i was the technical lead for application architecture and then on facebook i was working on the video as a tech lead maximizing the amount of time spent on these mobile apps one part of that was redesigning the entire ui to modernize it in a way that would try to get more people to use the app i started working at instagram and i was on the community team when there were less than 10 employees our team's job was basically to be a conduit like a tube between the people designing and building the app and the people using it i worked for facebook i was a product manager so that means i worked with the tech team the engineering team when i worked there the products that were most known now today were the like button that didn't exist the idea for the like button which we initially actually called the awesome button the idea for the awesome button was bringing together a bunch of people's different needs and it was solving a lot of problems at once let's say somebody posted something like we got engaged i didn't want to just say another congratulations because that felt boring to me so i realized i was withholding my appreciation of someone because i just didn't want to repeat what everybody else already said were there any shocking takeaways or realizations that you had since working in that specific field i had no idea that the like button was going to be what it was because it's actually i feel like synonymous with what facebook is today i don't think any of us were trying to make something specifically world-changing we were just trying to adjust our feature a little bit i had no idea the potential costs of creating a number associated with you know the worth of something you're sharing how do you think social media and the internet has changed most since then we first had the web and that was funny and then after that we moved into a mobile first era yeah into something that is always in our hands we always know where our phone is at all times if we have one because we feel empty without it so then that link between you and the tech company becomes extremely strong and then the second big movement which is more recent is with machine learning they figure out exactly which points to track about you that are going to be most relevant and then to use that to increase the amount of time spent that you will be using on these social media networks so they can track every single thing that you do and how much time you spend doing any single thing in their apps there's two primary metrics that these tech companies really care about for example youtube really tracks the amount of watch time spent right facebook video also tracks the watch time span and then there's also overall time spent on the social media networks and these are the two big metrics and no feature launches without increasing the amount of watch time spent so over time it's really a battle for your attention i felt like instagram in the early days was almost like going to the met museum in new york where you're like oh there's like this crazy artifacts and also maybe some cool paintings and now i kind of feel like it's going to a mall where you're just kind of being sold stuff all the time it's like a transactional dynamic and there's a kiosk with a person yelling at you everywhere you walk yes that's one of my biggest disappointments was i i started working there because i was passionate about creativity and now it doesn't necessarily feel like the place for creativity i feel like the biggest change that i've seen on the internet occurred around 2013 2014 when algorithms started becoming the the thing that was first and foremost how you would receive your information and how these platforms would deliver the their information it was no longer curated it was no longer a list of what people actually liked it was what they spent the most time on what they clicked on most everything changed it was no longer of how do i make something that people like it's how do i encourage people to spend more of their time to click more and i feel like the type of content just completely changed whatever value that the users get right now is not aligned with the business models of these companies and so they're trying to like jam two things into the same space and it's working well for companies i think it's not working so well right now for us for people who are using the platforms do you feel social media has been inadvertently designed to make us feel isolated and inadequate if we don't give them our constant attention van repeller who's a fashion writer said this a couple years ago but she said we're all addicted to a drug that doesn't get as high anymore that is what it feels like you know it doesn't give me much meaning anymore it feels like a black hole i'll log in and log out of twitter or whatever and if you asked me in 10 minutes what i saw i probably wouldn't be able to tell you which is interesting you almost feel more empty afterwards which makes you keep wanting to reach for more because maybe i won't feel empty after the next time i lost yeah yeah yeah yeah can you define what the algorithm is that we speak of the algorithm is the math that decides what will be shown to me when i'm looking for something given all the possible data and all the things that i could see time relevance how close people are my social network how popular the things are that they're posting the things i seem to be interested in does all this fancy math and then gives me the thing it thinks it's going to engage me the most in a perfect world everybody's goals are aligned i want to be satisfied they want me to have a great experience and use the site and so it delivers me the best content and therefore i'll be there because i'm happy not because i've been manipulated the tool that allows ads to land in front of your eyeballs that's the only reason they exist right need a way to understand where to insert the ads how to make sure that they're seen how to make sure they're spaced out correctly and you need to be able to manipulate the feed i even see that personally youtube when i first got started they a view was a view and you know we could make three minute sketch comedy videos and it would just get pushed like any other piece of content but as youtube started implementing this algorithm saying no no no we want higher watch time we want a higher click-through rate and the reasoning isn't just that they want more of your time which they do but really in the end it's because the longer the video's watch time is the more ads they're being displayed throughout the video so the more profitable these companies become but like even for this video for example it is no coincidence if you look down at the length of this video that this video was pushed out to more people than if this video were only three minutes long it's true sorry i just needed it i just need to get that off my chest let it out i support this i can be here for you dude before we continue learning about the world of social media yeah addiction is totally real of course it's real right this is how these tech companies are built right how they optimize every algorithm is because they can measure these changes are going to increase the amount of time you're going to spend on the sites i wanted to take a moment to encourage everyone watching to acknowledge the way using each social platform actually makes you feel most of us feel the need to stay up to date on everything happening in the world at all times because it's our natural inclination to feel a sense of responsibility to be as aware as possible and also to avoid fomo but try to keep in mind that this is the first time literally in all of human history that people have had access to this much information so we're constantly scrolling and refreshing and consuming but at this point in time we cannot physically ever be completely up to date on everything that's going on in the world and separately it's also natural to feel the desire for people to interact with us and what we put out into the world in a positive way and it's natural also to feel disappointed when these interactions aren't as positive as we'd hoped i know i still have to remind myself and i have a lot of work to do in this area as well but it's okay to take a moment away from our devices if they're having a negative effect on our mental health and i can't tell you exactly what to do once you log off but just know that you're not alone and i personally feel these feelings all the time as well now back to the world of social media how do you think social platforms define their value engagement goals which is how much are people doing on the site and then also growth goals which are how many people are coming in who are new and registering for an account it's how much attention did we grab from this user and how long did we keep their attention how much did we make them feel like coming back often it's around like the actions that you take right so did i post did i comment sort of things that are active on the platform it's like are you engaged are you participating in the space and the algorithms are actually built for creators to feel like if they don't keep posting then they will be negatively affected because they didn't keep up their streak and then the other piece is you know we're past this point of like you thinking about opening your youtube account but these companies are also trying to still grow you know the instagram has 1 billion accounts there are how can you grow past 1 billion i guess i guess you could grow seven times over but ceos you know promise to shareholders that they will do everything that they can to increase the profit of the company but i feel like what many of them are turning to now is really trying to increase that engagement time and the amount of engagements per log on or you know log in or whatever but what that's really doing is it plays into uh our basic human needs and kind of manipulates those needs to make us feel like we need to keep giving it more and more of our attention and more and more of our engagement our attention is is what they make money off of whether or not we're looking at their billboard you know they're the billboard in our hand and so they're always because they're chaste with always growing they're always trying to find out ways to expand that how does all of this influence the products that these platforms create so these products i think they're going to be great users are going to love the products because it's almost like giving candy out to people right the better they make it the more you will not be able to resist this thing that they give you right like maybe it's the ability to do online shopping to communicate with your friends send funny pictures emojis and all of that is to get you to open up an account with them and start using it at which point yes then they will be able to influence you right because the more time you spend with a certain company the more they'll be able to influence you by giving you advertising what kind of psychological effects do you think social media has on an average user the news feed often features people's best moments so my mind can draw a conclusion that ah everybody in my world is doing these amazing things or is always this happy and then when i compare myself to them which is also another human natural thing to do i can feel inadequate the way social media is splicing our experience and we're only showing the stuff we most want people to see it gives a really skewed uh picture to each other and i'm someone who's accomplished a lot of things in my life and when i look at my facebook news feed i can feel really insecure i don't know though how you look at some of the statistics saying that their findings are that the average american teenager spends nine hours on social media every day that's more than a full-time job i have no idea how that could be called anything but addictive i i that baffles me and i'm not saying that that's necessarily the word or the goal that people are using but that is the effect that it's having on a lot of us and i in very simple terms the way i think about it is i'm like carrying around almost like a brick all day every day in my hand my phone it's in my pocket it's in my hand i always know where it is i definitely worry about addiction and i i definitely worry about anxiety and i feel like i've experienced anxiety and and that's part of what motivated me to also just try to take in less information and live in the three-dimensional world i feel like many people feel that they can't be addicted to something that isn't a physical substance do you think more people are addicted to using social media than might realize it yeah absolutely right for example gambling right it's also a gambling is not physical substance but it can be very addictive it's a dopamine hit in your brain right and that can be triggered very simply through social media by showing you something that you may find relevant or interesting or fascinating and speaking of gambling some of the functionality has been designed specifically to kind of give you that same hit of dopamine that you get from pulling a slot machine for example scrolling down and how many different apps like twitter and you know youtube feeds you you pull down like a slot machine you get that little refresh button and then you have a new page which is updated and it can kind of give you that hit if your numbers go up if you have a new thing there that you really want to see you can kind of sit there and keep scrolling up and down on it to see what might give you that dopamine hit yeah addiction is totally real of course it's real right this is how these tech companies are built right how they optimize every algorithm is because they can measure these changes are going to increase the amount of time you're going to spend on the sites and what kind of effects do you think this has on the content creators on each of these platforms content creators may be more likely to push out clickbaity type of content right things that maybe don't have so much value but have a lot of shock value emotional value something out of nothing in order to get you to sit there and continue watching stuff right because they're being rewarded for that extra watch time that higher click-through rate so when they put something very dramatic maybe even they stir up something within the content and they keep people around they make videos that are extremely bloated with you know very emotional content because that's what keeps people's attention for longest and then they're rewarded for that i think it's interesting that nobody is out here really thinking is it even good for us to be manufacturing emotions and getting people to care about things that maybe they don't really need to care about just to maximize the amount of time they're spending watching this content because i know for me personally i've been doing this for 15 years and it's just become exponentially worse as the algorithms have become stronger and i've went through many periods of my life where i've felt inadequate my self-worth was just in the toilet because i'm like i experienced this level of success and now it's a tiny bit less what am i doing wrong is it on me am i doing something wrong does that mean that people don't care about me or you know it's almost difficult to be like oh it's just the algorithm or whatever it's it does really feel like it weighs on each individual's shoulders yeah and i think that public figures like you and and also movie stars and musicians they're also burning out on social media you know what it means to be an entertainer is will smith has to be on youtube now and all these different things and i just don't know that it's sustainable even though you're aware of the inner workings of how social media has been designed and maybe inadvertently designed to make us feel addicted to them do you find yourself falling victim to any of them i tend to try to avoid social media when i don't need it so i use it more on the business level even a lot of the facebook engineers i worked with did not actively use facebook for example do you think that was because they knew the inner workings they knew how it was designed to want to capture more of their attention maybe they knew how the sausage was made perhaps yeah don't look it up there were even a lot of engineers i spoke to who would they would be senior engineers designers working on these products and they would say they they were mostly enough for the paycheck right they didn't care so much about the product actually one of the the old engineers on instagram built a vintage version of instagram for his friends to privately use and i'm using it looks just like it it has yeah you're living in the past i'm living in the past and it's great because there's no algorithm and i think there's something about not having an algorithm where you know that the people who are following you 95 if you wanted to share an experience with them they saw it but actually these tools are really great if you a lot of them are really great if you could just yank the algorithm out but they don't work really well for selling ads i actually don't look at it i have a i have a blocker i don't use really you use a blocker to just to prevent you from even feeling those feelings of comparing yourself to others and things like that yeah i feel it enough anyway in the world there's no reason to like bombard myself what kind of effects on your mental health do you feel like blocking out those feeds have done for you i find the information i need gets to me anyway and then i have a lot more quiet mental space to be with my own you know inspirations or my own emotions or something really touches me deeply i have time to feel that all the way through rather than just going on to the next thing that makes me feel a different thing so i really get to process my emotions and integrate information as it comes in i feel like many of us are constantly scrolling i think there's a term for it that many people are using now called doom scrolling where you're scrolling looking for the next good thing that helps you feel a little bit better but in fact you're finding all of these dreadful things about how bleak our world is and how many devastating things are going on and you're you're always just one step away one scroll away from finding that thing and it's you're almost never really quite getting that sense of satisfaction i feel like i have one responsibility in life which is to be as honest and kind and helpful as i can anything that takes me away from that ability is not in service of who and how i want to be adele wants to know if you know if social media employees have access to view people's private conversations the answer is yes and no if there's an issue with someone's account something that might be life-threatening for those people or there might be some form of like a crime being committed there are teams of people who have access that we need to look at you on the individual level they can do that so technically they can look at someone's account for whatever reason they need not likely but they could technically it actually takes a fair amount for them that it did when i was there for us to like ever turn over there might be again certain cases of things that are scary enough or high enough risk say maybe you're threatening to kill someone those things might get triggered and passed proactively to certain kinds of law enforcement we had to make sure we had all the official paperwork and a lot of times they we wouldn't turn over what kind of long-term effects do you think social media will have on society as a whole all of your attention and time will be sapped away until you really have no time for anything else i think a lot of people are already feeling that way in fact people are so busy all the time everyone's busy right doing what exactly consuming social media that's what everybody's up to and there may be a time when we will look back on this age as kind of how people look back on the age of opium and only later on do people look back and say oh yeah i can't believe people were on this sort of digital drug that sapped away a lot of their lives sapped away their productivity and they just spend hours doing this stuff there's not going to be any one person or government who's going to come and say hey we need to start getting this under control this is something that's up to you as an individual right to protect yourself or your children or your family all right you got five seconds a shout out or promote anything you want directly in a camera go check me out over on youtube.com techlead and i just want to remind you that i am an ex-google x facebook tech lead if social media is not making you feel good don't stay on it you don't have to make a decision for what makes you feel good find me at www.dharmacomics.com wasn't this video great i don't know if i was but anthony was awesome please if you if you subscribe to this channel more people will see anthony's awesome videos and hear from more weirdos like me so please yes subscribe and we got to please the algorithm yeah there we go an algorithm like subscribing a little bit thank you so much leah i feel like i understand the world of social media just a little bit more thank you i really appreciate your thoughtful questions after spending the day with these former social media engineers and employees i've come to understand that not one single person is responsible for the positive or negative side effects of these platforms unless companies take responsibility for changing the way these apps work all we can do is accept that most of these platforms have been inadvertently specifically designed to make us feel addicted to giving all of our attention and we should be more conscious of these effects on our emotional well-being see you later bye guys you did help invent it so take it from [Laughter] her i feel like i've had like pink email me that she lost her her address justin bieber real quick no i mean it would happen you'd be like uh we're just a small team answering emails like can you send me your id this can't actually be pink and then all of a sudden you're like that's pink i was like pink this is cool my mom loves you like great to meet you but big fan i can't believe your password is doglover25 but big fan

Channel: AnthonyPadilla

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Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020