Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:52:38 · Adam Mosseri
[00:52:38] S0: It started on newsfeed. So I used to run newsfeed on Facebook, and my take was that the debate was going to happen with or without us, so we might as well participate. And so I started being really active on Twitter specifically, because that's where journalists really lived at the time, and I thought it would show some humility to show up on their turf, so to speak. My Twitter ended up being the darkest place in my life because I just followed all of our biggest critics. That's not a dig on Twitter. That was just what I did. And that's where it started, and it kind of slowly built from there. For better or for worse, we've become a really important part of daily life for a lot of people. We touch a lot of people, we have a lot of responsibility, and there's a lot of change. And with change means there's going to be anxiety and stress and scrutiny. We've made great decisions, we've made mistakes. We've been criticized for things that I think ... We've been criticized unfairly, we've been criticized fairly. And so we just need to accept that this debate is going to happen broadly. So I just think it's better for us to talk about it, and just be clear about what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the trade-offs are. If people disagree, that's okay. We're not necessarily winning over friends when we talk about what we do. But I think over the long run, people are fundamentally more afraid of things that they don't understand and about things where people are more secretive and less accessible. And so I've tried to show up in an accessible and authentic way, and I've made mistakes, and I have enjoyed it at times, and hated it at other times. But that's kind of how it started. There was also a fun debate in Mark's senior leadership team a long time ago, where we were just talking about how we're a social media company, but we had a very sort of conventional approach to communication and press releases, and say, "Why don't we just use our platform?" So I was not in that debate, but I stuck myself into that debate trying to mediate it. But that was also a reason why I ended up getting sucked in because Mark was like, "All right, well, let's see. Why don't you try and see how it goes?"
00:54:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:54:49] S1: What's something that helps you deal with the hate that flows at you every time you say something that people disagree with? [00:54:55] S0: You try to put it in perspective. So it started with ... I did the redesign of newsfeed in 2009. We launched it March of 2009 for Facebook. I was a designer, I was an IC designer, front entry-level designer. And the first comment that came in was something pretty derogatory. I think it was homophobic and antisemitic. Literally, we're all sitting there. We launched this thing, and we're just looking at the stream of comments, and it's the first one. And it was specifically about ... They don't know me, but it was like, "What exploitive expletive censor censor designed this shit?" And I was like, "Oh, it was me." And I was devastated. I was like a 25-year-old kid. And, I don't know, I thought about it, and I came to this idea that if you spent 30, 40, 50 minutes a day at your desk, and you organized your photos there, and you wrote letters to your friends there, and you read there, and then I just came, and I rearranged your desk, and I didn't tell you, I didn't warn you, I didn't even explain why, you would be pissed, and that would be reasonable. And that was what was happening just with millions of people. So I tried to put things in perspective, and then I tried to step away from it, get time with my kids, get time outside. There are months where it's really not hard at all and there are months where it really, really grinds on me.