Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:46:31 · Adam Mosseri
[00:46:31] S0: Maybe we'll end up in the same place, but there's a difference between marking content and marking accounts, and they're both useful and interesting. So if content was created with AI, I think you should be able to know that. That's hard, by the way, because we can detect that right now, but as these models get better, we might lose the ability to detect that. So we should also be very careful to be honest with you about how confident we are in our own sort of assessment. But I think you should be able to just ask, be like, "Hey, is this AI?" And we should be able to tell you who we think it probably is, or we're not sure, or it's definitely not, or it definitely is. I actually think we might be more practical to label camera captured content, basically non-AI content as opposed to labeling AI content long-term for a couple of reasons. But then at the account level, I think it also matters. There's definitely a new spam vector, which is these fake accounts. Which by the way, an AI creator, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But there are these spam vectors which are trying to abuse that, and they're selling bogus supplements, and it's like an AI monk, and it doesn't present it, and it's not obvious that it's an AI, and it's just trying to take advantage of a certain aesthetic or a certain sort of stereotype. We need to figure out how to crack down on that. And so I do think we should be making sure that you know. Basically you just need to know, and then you can make your own informed decision. Is the account a real person or not? Is the content a real piece of content or not?
00:48:01 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:48:01] S1: When you think about other platforms in the space, social content platforms, are there any features or ways of approaching stuff that they do well, that you're kind of jealous of or really impressed by?
00:48:15 · Adam Mosseri
[00:48:15] S0: Yeah, there's a bunch. So many people do so much. I mean, for me, one of the things that we are finally catching up with, but I've been always very impressed with is TikTok and their recommenders' ability to break small talent. In the world of ranking and recommenders, you can talk about exploitation-based ranking. That sounds terrible, but it just means using the data you have. And then you can talk about exploration-based ranking, going and trying to figure out what someone might be interested in, that they might even not know they're interested in yet. And it is much easier to move engagement by showing people stuff that you know they'll probably like because lots of people like it. It's much harder to go and figure out how to essentially test content so that we can see, "Hey, sure you like Bieber, but you might also like Afropunk. And so we're just going to show you some Afropunk and see what happens." If you do the latter, this exploration-based ranking, I think it's really good for niche creators and small creators, because you give them a chance to find an audience that either wasn't going to see on them before or didn't even know that they were interested before. So we've invested a lot over the last couple of years in ranking, not just increasing engagement, but increasing originality, increasing the number of pieces of content that break out, increasing recency to stay culturally relevant. And so a lot of that has been inspired by TikTok and ByteDance. I think we're catching up. There's actually a couple of those areas where we, I think, by best we can tell, we're ahead of them. There's a couple where we're still behind. But we have line of sight to, I think, being the best-in-class at recommendations for the first time during my tenure. So I think they get a lot of credit for inspiring a lot of that work.
00:50:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:50:05] S1: Nice job. [00:50:07] S0: Well, we'll see. Not there yet. They call me disappointed dad. My team is always like, "Can you ease up on the disappointed dad vibe?" So I'm trying to be a little bit more generous about giving people their flowers. [00:50:22] S1: Like you say that, but that's an interesting common thread across really successful leaders, is just never being satisfied. Always feeling- [00:50:30] S0: Yeah, it's a blessing and a curse. [00:50:31] S1: ... here's all the problem. It is. Yeah. On this creator piece, I think that's also ... People complain about this global algorithm not showing them all their friends, but I feel like this is a benefit of what happens when you do this, now that you can break new creators into a wide audience if you have this kind of global algorithmic feed, which is really great for a lot of people.
00:50:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:50:31] S1: ... here's all the problem. It is. Yeah. On this creator piece, I think that's also ... People complain about this global algorithm not showing them all their friends, but I feel like this is a benefit of what happens when you do this, now that you can break new creators into a wide audience if you have this kind of global algorithmic feed, which is really great for a lot of people. [00:50:55] S0: I mean, I'm out there talking about a lot of these contentious issues, and I get beat up a lot in the comments, which is fine. My main thing here is just to try to communicate that there's almost always trade-offs. You can't just have all of the things, unfortunately. You want to never see something you're not interested in, then you're also just going to see the most basic, general, lowest-common denominator stuff all the time. You want to discover new and interesting things? You're occasionally going to see stuff that was just a miss. But this isn't just true about ranking. All these major debates have trade-offs. Privacy and safety. Those two things are in contention. Do you want a company scanning your messages or not? There's some really significant trade-offs on both sides of that debate. And so generally speaking, when I argue and engage in debate with people who feel really strongly about things, I'm not usually trying to convince them. Their mind is usually made up. I'm just trying to enumerate all of the different puts and takes for the rest of the people watching the conversation.
00:52:05 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:52:05] S1: Speaking of getting torn apart in the comments, you are so in the middle and thick of all of these really hairy situations, changing the feed, you were in the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit, all this. You're in the center of so much controversy. Is that ... You're like, "Yep." Oh, man. Is that just like you, "I will lean into this. This is the thing I need to do." Or is it Zuck being like, "Adam, you got to be the front face of all the stuff, and get in there." Where does that come from?