Paul Frazee

on a technical level because it is, yeah, because it's, you know, it's a more sort of nuanced, like we were at that point doing a at runtime request out to a third-party service, which in and of itself, I think, is going to be an interesting thing to kind of see how that plays out because, you know,

Anytime you're doing that, you got to talking about like out to these services that are not under, you know, we have no SLA with them or anything like that. They're like, how's the performance going to hold up things like that. So far, it seems to be actually working. But that definitely was a little bit more of a swing.

And then once we got it in and saw it working on a kind of design of the technology side, we were like, yeah, okay, this feels pretty great. And that side of it, the compositional side, that felt good right from the get-go. I think we still have some open questions about how we can really make the experience of using them as good as we want them to be. We have this like...

sticky problem around the management of them where there's more feeds that are interesting than you can stick onto your home tabs. And how do we find the right way to surface them to like easily like, oh, right, right. I've got this great feed over here. I want to go to it, especially on mobile. So we're still, I think, picking through the right UX to really make these things shine.

But I would say that somewhere around maybe a year ago, we were starting to kind of realize like, no, this is like pretty solid though. Like even though we had gripes about it, we were pretty happy with the outcomes that we were getting out of them.

Yeah, yeah. Every time somebody comes in with... There are two critiques that feel really personal. And they're not really critiques, observations. And that is that it's elder millennials and then it's theater kids. And seeing as I'm both of them, every time I'm like...

You know, so to your point, our biggest problem is that we have too many ideas about what we want to do with them. And it's hard to pick about like where to take it next. We finally started to make some progress once we like broke it down into like bite-sized chunks. But yeah, I agree. There is a lot of really cool ideas that we're kicking around about what to do with feeds.

You do have to think about that stuff, especially when you have other people making this thing. You want to think about what the incentives are. If they can make money, that'd be great. We want to make sure that the whole thing sustains itself.

Yeah, this one is hard, and it's going to be probably a very, very long time before I'm willing to say, yeah, we totally nailed that one. There's going to be a lot of trying different things to find out where it can go. We've gone, I think, we've taken some interesting steps

stabs at it and i'll kind of get through uh all that in a second but the uh but i think there's probably many more uh things that we have to play with probably speaking the core of it i think the thing you just got to realize is that you really you cannot make the world happy with a one-size-fits-all moderation at this point It just can't be done.

And I think a big part of it is that people come into the world with different values and expectations about how those values should be upheld. And I think it's very painful to see those values not being reflected back in the spaces that you're in.

And it's, you know, I think it's quite important that we find a way to get there so that communities can, you know, I kind of really feel this is really at the heart of like why social media can be so painful for in general is that we just haven't found the right way to do this for large scale, you know, public spaces like this and what you might, you know, kind of public square mentality about social networking.

So anything we can do to get us closer to that is, I think, kind of the right sort of challenge to be trying to dive into with this sort of stuff.

Where can you move forward the experience of really the internet at large would be finding a way to create these spaces that I think give people a better experience with that element of it, the moderation of it, in some ways curatorial or editorial side of things.

I mean, that's probably right. I mean, the basic thing is, first of all, we start from the assumption that even if we did come up with a really great execution of an algorithm or moderation or things like that, you have the long term to consider. And do organizations stay effective at what made them successes in the first place?

And so coming into this, we have always gone in with that belief that the answer is no, right? That you kind of have to be planning for...

when our organization or any other organization starts to uh wither from its original purpose or or just maybe not be fit for the time anymore and be ready for for like the world to be able to change without too much loss right that's really deeply embedded in everything that we do from the application side of it to the you know the hosting side to the moderation of the algorithms so

Uh, as much as we do our best to try to create good versions of like algorithms and good versions of moderation, uh, we just kind of know that first of all, long-term systemically, you gotta be ready for that to not always be the case. Um, But beyond that, I think it's just quite clear that people have very different tastes when it comes to both algorithms and moderation.

And people have different needs for this stuff. And so how can we get everybody to a place where they are experiencing the life that they want to live on the internet? And that's only going to happen if we start to allow... A company like ours, we're in this kind of challenging position of balancing a lot of different voices. Users don't have the same challenge.

They can just choose to be parts of communities that actually are more connected to what they personally want as opposed to what an organization wants. So we should enable those groups to be able to get that specific with what their communities are like online. That's the basic mentality of it.