Vaughan Davis

Having said that, to stay true to my own philosophy, I should go back and have a look, shouldn't I?

Facebook is many churches, I think.

If you sit down in a cafe next to someone and have a look at their Facebook feed and your Facebook feed, it's like it's not the same app, right?

Yeah.

So there is a risk and a current reality that for some users, they're being served and they're self-selecting a fairly putrid feed of awful opinions.

A mixture of anger and righteousness.

Yeah, but equally there's people who are really just seeing kittens and cheesecake recipes.

So all Facebook cares about is your time on platform.

And if you are finding that the content you're seeing, the opinions, the conversations are not rewarding to you, if we were to all spend less time on platform, then they're not stupid.

They'll try and understand why that is and chase that audience.

But, you know, that's an easy thing to say, but it's a hard thing for all six billion of us to do.

Yeah, exactly.

Self-reported attitude versus actual behavior.

Fair of missing out.

Yeah, absolutely fair of missing out.

I mean, the reason Facebook and all these things are so addictive, coming right back to that behaviorism, is the reinforcement schedule.

If every post you saw on Facebook was great and you enjoyed it and you went, yeah, I like that, you wouldn't stick around forever.

If every lotto ticket you bought returned you $1.10 on your dollar, you'd never buy another lotto ticket, right?

But it's the losses that make the wins feel more visceral and enjoyable.

So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok operate on what's called a variable ratio reinforcement schedule.