John Collison: recommendation

Transcript context

…I think we have to be careful to differentiate a social network from a messaging service. So at its core, because Snapchat is a messaging service, you can get the vast majority of the value even by having like one friend, two friends, three friends. Those are the folks you talk to the most, and that connection is really, really important to you. I think, as I mentioned, one of the big challenges of social networks was that in order to have enough content to drive enough engagement to grow the advertising business, there was a need to add more and more and more friends. Because the newsfeed was really reliant on new content. I think one of the things that we did very, very early on, and we could argue about how well we executed on this, but one of the things we identified very early on, was that we needed to open up to non-friend content. Publisher content, content from creators very, very early on. Rather than driving people to add friends, they could watch content from publishers when they ran out of content from their close friends. We moderated that content. We were one of the first companies to actually rank that content with AI, with our service called Discover. The fundamental thesis was like, let's not force people to add friends so they can watch more content. Let's just show them content from publishers or from creators. Oh, that's very interesting. So your view is that the mistake would be one should add more people. You should get more connections on LinkedIn so that there is content in your feed and your view is that you should separate out the people you want to interact with and having stuff to do in the app. Those are actually pretty separate concerns, and it's very dangerous to mix them. I think back in, it may have been 2016, 2017, we said the most important thing you need to do is separate social from media. The biggest mistake was combining them, and it creates a lot of perverse incentives. Instead, just add the friends that are important to you who are close to you. Use a service for messaging. Share with them if you want to with stories or things like that. Then, if you want to watch more content, great, we've got this whole world of content available to you from publishers and creators, et cetera.…

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