By Yoree Koh
Tim Kendall last year deleted the Facebook app from his phone
for reasons that are becoming increasingly common: a sense of
anxiety and dissatisfaction after viewing other people's filtered
lives, frustration at the divisive political discourse and
harassment from trolls.
What makes Mr. Kendall's move more surprising is he was an early
architect of Facebook Inc.'s business model, and has served as
president of another popular social-media business, image-sharing
company Pinterest Inc. Mr. Kendall is wealthy and a success
professionally by almost any measure, but the endless scrolling
through social media was producing unwanted negativity in his
life.
"I felt bad about myself. I felt inadequate," he says. "I felt
like most people had better lives than I did on every
dimension."
More recently, he has spent $7 million to fund Moment, a
Burlingame, Calif.-based mobile app to help people assess and in
some cases reduce the time they spend on their phones. His position
isn't that social media is bad, but that users understandably
struggle at times to find the right balance for it in their
lives.
That message is increasingly in vogue in Silicon Valley, where
social media is going through an awkward adolescence.
Deleting the app
Fifteen years after Mark Zuckerberg launched a Harvard-based
social network that grew into a corporate behemoth, Americans are
increasingly reassessing the role of social media in their lives.
About 42% of Facebook users surveyed by Pew Research Center in May
and June said they have taken a break from the social network for
several weeks or more. A quarter of survey respondents said they
deleted the app altogether. A more recent survey from Pew, in
September, showed that among teens -- the industry's future -- 59%
of all respondents reported being bullied online.
Silicon Valley insiders such as the Center for Humane
Technology, run by former Google and Facebook employees, speak out
increasingly on such issues as tech addiction and privacy.
Representatives of the center have met with policy makers in
Washington, D.C., and tech leaders on the West Coast, urging them
to think about ethical design choices.
Those shifts have huge business implications for the tech firms,
which grew at meteoric rates for the past decade and are scrambling
to adjust to a new reality. Facebook, Twitter Inc. and Snap Inc.
each reported earnings last month showing either slowing or stalled
user growth.
In response, they are trying measures to recapture the magic
that drew many users to social media in the first place.
Facebook, which for years focused obsessively on getting users
to spend as much time as possible on the platform, now emphasizes
boosting "time well spent" on the site. It is hiring thousands of
content moderators at great expense to reduce the spread of toxic
content, and adjusting its algorithms to prioritize "meaningful
social interactions" between friends and family, rather than
provocative content that can be polarizing.
Twitter likewise has spent the past year weeding out trolls and
highlighting tweets about music or sports instead of content that
goes viral just because it is inflammatory. Chief Executive Jack
Dorsey says his goal is "to help increase the collective health,
openness, and civility of public conversation."
The goal is to bring back -- or keep -- people like Mia
Hansen.
The 40-year-old from Lafayette, Calif., didn't like Facebook's
changes to the newsfeed over the years that seemed to favor posts
from obscure acquaintances over close friends and family. She says
she deleted the Facebook app from her phone after she became a
mother and it became "too much of a hassle."
"I aged out of Facebook," says Ms. Hansen, though she adds that
she still logs in occasionally on her desktop.
Analysts say the business threat is real and that there is no
guarantee that social media will be as central to daily life in a
decade as it is today. The social-media platforms "need to evolve,"
says Brian Wieser, an internet analyst at Pivotal Research Group,
an equity research firm based in New York City. Mr. Wieser says the
platforms are at a point where they have an opportunity to address
the mounting concerns and complaints of users "or it could be that
human interest will change. People might prefer to go to the park
to read a book."
Those who helped build the social-media platforms say the
companies are maturing in a way that is painful at times, but
natural. In Twitter's case, the company's growth was so fast that
it was difficult to map out what a "micro-blogging platform" would
look like in 2018.
"There was no master plan or thinking around what the long-term
implications of this would be," says Satya Patel, who was vice
president of product at Twitter from 2011 to 2012. As Twitter
caught on, for example, it gave a microphone to anyone who wanted
one.
"Turns out, giving everyone the ability to amplify their voice
isn't necessarily the best thing for society," says Mr. Patel, now
a partner at venture-capital firm Homebrew.
A Facebook spokeswoman says the platform has been a force for
good with users organizing movements, raising money and awareness
for causes and reconnecting with loved ones.
Still, social media platforms have also become powerful tools
for white supremacists, terrorists and conspiracy theorists.
"Facebook was created for a better species than human beings,"
says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the
University of Virginia and author of the book "Antisocial Media:
How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy."
"Facebook removed friction for a lot of behaviors," Prof.
Vaidhyanathan says. "It removed a lot of things that slowed down
communication in the world, and it turns out those barriers are
important."
Many of the changes the tech firms are putting in place this
year, such as hiring moderators and blocking trolls, are designed
to function as guardrails, restraining the anything-goes mentality
that prevailed in the first decade-plus of social media.
Mr. Kendall, the former Facebook executive, says he regrets not
foreseeing how bad actors would hitch themselves to Facebook's
quest to connect the world. "I feel a little guilty about not
anticipating some of the ramifications, even though I think that
would have been really hard," he says.
His new company, Moment, whose app has been downloaded seven
million times, generates revenue primarily by selling subscriptions
for services like coaching to help people get the most out of
social media without letting its allure have a negative impact on
their lives.
Happy v. unhappy
According to a survey by Moment conducted over six months
through Sept. 24 that asked about 9,000 Facebook users about their
use of the service, those who said they were "happy" on Facebook
spent an average of 20 minutes daily on the social network,
compared with 43 minutes average daily use for those who said they
were "unhappy" with their experience on Facebook. By contrast, the
survey found that people reported getting more enjoyment from using
apps that weren't social media.
Mr. Kendall says he believes in the future of social media.
Having worked alongside Mr. Zuckerberg for years, Mr. Kendall says
he is confident the executive will put in place the right
adjustments over time.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the first engineers at Twitter, says
the companies will never find solutions that satisfy all critics,
because of the sheer range of problems confronting them. Even so,
he says, they should be doing better. Mr. Henshaw-Plath, who no
longer works at Twitter, is currently working on building a
decentralized social network.
"Social-media companies have become incredibly important to our
democracy, and we only do an OK job, but not so poorly that I think
they should be fired or we should abandon them," he says. His
overall assessment: "Needs improvement."
Ms. Koh is a Wall Street Journal reporter based in San
Francisco. Email: yoree.koh@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 09, 2018 14:33 ET (19:33 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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