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i suppose they either tricked 2 billion people to use an app that does nothing for them or you're wrong and the value prop is obvious
by djohnston 8y ago
i suppose they either tricked 2 billion people to use an app that does nothing for them or you're wrong and the value prop is obvious
- Barrin92 8y agohow many people on the planet do you think smoke cigarettes? I mean sure you can argue, in circular fashion, that everything people do provides net value to them or else they wouldn't do it, in which case there's no actual way to falsify that claim, but in a more genuine sense it's not at all clear that social media consumption has long term, net individual or social benefits. It is an extremely new technology that has entered our society without much oversight and there's no reason to believe we have a good grip on its mid and long term effects. The evidence we have, for example concerning mental health of adolescents, in particular girls, is quite devastating.
- djohnston 8y agomy counterpoint would be that cigarettes also have an obvious value prop: they give you a nicotine high that users find satisfying. having a value prop doesn't imply an absence of negative consequences, otherwise cars are also devoid of value prop.
- asdff 8y agoPeople get addicted to social media too. Next time you get in an elevator notice how many people immediately whip out the phone and start scrolling the minute they are standing still. It's completely subconscious, like what are you going to read in the 20 second elevator ride, yet people do it all the same because there's a dopamine hit.
- djohnston 8y agowell.. imo also because 20 years ago they just would have been staring into corners or something
- asdff 8y agoThere's value in staring into corners imo. Try forgetting your phone at home one day. No longer are you instinctively reaching for it the minute you have 20 seconds to spare, you allow yourself to daydream again. I ended up being way more focused that day just from cutting out those >30 second moments on the phone. Instead of my brain just shutting off and tuning out, I was actually thinking about my day and what I'm working on. I felt like a Buddhist monk!
- ionised 8y agoThe high from cigarettes comes from satisfying an addiction. The actual high from nicotine in cigarettes is very slight. Satisfying an addiction is not the same thing as providing value.
- ionised 8y agoIt's engineered to be addictive in order to keep people on the platform handing over data. Facebook has employees whose entire job is to make this service addictive and to keep people posting. In that sense, the 'value' is hard to differentiate from a dopamine-driven compulsion to continue posting and hitting 'like'.