Evaluating User Value in Social Media Products

Product leaders must prioritize user value over engagement metrics to avoid unsatisfying experiences.

### Understanding User Value and Engagement in Social Media Products
* 🤔 Determining whether users derive value from a product requires more than just tracking engagement metrics, as **increased content consumption does not always equate to user satisfaction**.
* 📉 Focusing solely on metrics like dwell time can lead to a **decline in user happiness**, as users may engage with content that doesn't align with their interests, such as **excessive violence or irrelevant videos**.
* 🔍 The shift in Twitter's content algorithm has transformed it from a **chronological feed** to one resembling **TikTok**, resulting in users encountering **unwanted political content** and **sensational videos**.
* 💬 "If I'm highly engaged in content that ultimately I really don't like, **long-term retention will be poorer**," highlighting the risk of prioritizing engagement over quality.
* 💡 Product designers must ensure that users can **easily manage their content preferences**, as many struggle to **navigate the tools available to curate their feeds effectively**.
* 📊 Historical examples from Facebook and Instagram illustrate how **initial user-friendly features** can degrade over time as platforms prioritize **engagement**, leading to a **diluted user experience**.
* 🔗 Founders should clearly articulate the purpose of their product and understand the balance between **engagement metrics and user satisfaction**, avoiding the trap of becoming an "**engagement farm**."
* 🚀 Ultimately, having a **strong vision and moral authority** as a founder can guide product development and maintain a focus on **delivering genuine user value** over time.

how do you know if your users are getting value from your product? It might be really easy just to say well if they're watching more content on Twitter that must be good, but yeah me watching a bunch of fist fight videos is not what I

actually want. If you're optimizing for a single metric to the exclusion of all other factors, you're probably going to lead yourself down one of these rabbit holes. This is where I think founder CEOs do have an advantage, they they have the kind of moral authority of like I

started this company and this is what I believe in, this is where we're going. Welcome to a new series we're doing here at YC looking at uh some of the most popular consumer products from across the internet and giving you our unvarnished thoughts. Tom and I both have

a bunch of experience building products that a lot of consumers have used um and we thought it'd be interesting to just kind of like dive in and take apart some of the most popular products that you all probably use. So to start with we're going to explore uh Twitter, or what is

it now called, X. X uh yeah, Twitter versus X and what has happened over the last year or two under new ownership, let's euphemistically call it. So where should we start? I think there's a ton of things we could talk about obviously here and and the timing

is right, this is like a very perfect moment to talk about Twitter. I'm sure a lot of people are using Twitter these days. By far the biggest change that I have seen in Twitter over the last year or so is this shift from a you know, chronological, is feed of topics that you

have expressed that you want to follow to now kind of like more of a TikTok feed of stuff that you might be engaging with yeah and really explicitly I used to see like Twitter used to feel like a left-leaning I mean you know I'm a

moderate to left-leaning person the content was sort of left-leaning politics and now I just seem to get like MAGA rally after MAGA rally same which is sort of you know fine content I presumed it always existed but I I just never saw it and I've I don't think I've

engaged with it in a sense it's sort of imperceptible you know it's not like a button has changed or the color scheme has changed but just somehow the content has quietly morphed uh in a way that is becoming more and more evident yeah on

that topic in particular to be fair I think Elon explicitly said when you're using Twitter you should feel equally bad if you're on the far left or on the far right and perhaps he has achieved that I don't know but at least in my own

usage of the product I'm sure that my engagement is up and my happiness when I go and resume my life is lower totally totally and same way I absolutely agree I now I see way more videos of like some random fight in Mexico City or someone

gets smacked in the face by something or like random cat videos is like you know it gets the the dopamine hit going or something but I don't feel like I've learned anything or like engaged with someone who's taught me something right so why does does this happen why are

they're doing this uh well it's tricky when a team and a product manager has a number to to um to work towards and in this case like dwell time or engagement or number of minutes each user uses a service like a well-meaning product team

in my experience like tends to optimize and optimize and optimize for that single number almost without regard for you know harder to measure stuff like taste or like UI quality or educational or I don't know what do you think yeah you bring up I think the critical point

which is how do you know if your users are getting value from your product yeah right it it might be really easy just to say well if they're watching more content on Twitter that must be good they're choosing to do it so of course it's good but yeah me watching a bunch

of fist fight videos is not what I actually want even though rooted in my lizard brain somewhere I'm going to keep watching them totally and when your business model is predicated on advertisers and selling like seconds of video sure the more hours your users

spend on the site theoretically you should be getting higher ad spend whereas there are business models like Google famously who aim to get you off the site as quickly as possible you're getting value if you you did a search and the first search was so good you

click the first link and you disappear right the counter argument that I would make to that is um if I am highly engaged in content that ultimately I really don't like um long-term retention will be poorer right and so eventually even if your business model is ads and

you're getting me to spend a bunch of time on the site. I'm going to eventually stop using it, or I'll switch to something else over time. The quality of the service and the desirability, it um, goes down, and your your best users churn and

go somewhere else. So let's talk about um, if you're going to go down a path like Twitter has gone down, or I should say X has gone down, where you move to this algorithmic feed and it just figures things out. Sometimes you'll get users

that are in a bad state, like I was a few weeks ago, where I just felt like every time I use Twitter it was bad, and yet I kept using it. So I I tweeted about it and everybody said, 'Oh, you're you're doing it wrong. You need to go and click

the little dot dot dot button and say 'not interested in this post,' which I did, and it was very effective. But like, should the product designers make that more explicit? Yeah, now is probably a good time to actually dive into the Twitter feed and take a look at it. This

is my Twitter feed. I hope there's nothing too embarrassing. The first uh, the first item is this tweet from a guy called Massimo. I I actually do follow him. His tweets are generally pretty good, but this is a a sand castle maker I guess, and if we scroll down, what do we

got uh, some political stuff. We've got some random soup. What is this um, the thing I really notice is like a bunch of just like political videos. I'm just not really interested in. 1% of the world's population is white, 60 4, what is this? 40

Who knows why I'm seeing this? So what you're saying is I have to go to these three little buttons, yes? And if you click 'Not interested in this post,' it will, I believe, eventually have you stopped seeing okay. So I don't need to mute or block, I'm just like, 'No, but but...'

Here's a great product design question. Like, they've now given you many tools to potentially solve your problem, yeah? And I don't know what I'm okay not interested, fine. In fact, we can maybe pull up um the screenshot I found here. Um, I was trying

to like figure out what do I do and I came upon this Reddit thread, 'How do I stop Twitter from showing me random  in my feed?' Yeah, this is basically like the instructions off product on how to use the product. Yeah, when people need to like record long

videos telling other people how to use your product, you've probably done something wrong. The question is again, like, how did we get here? Like, why were these changes made? I suspect a lot of it is top down, um, trying to drive more engagement. The question is where does it

go, and have they thought through that? Um, and so like it's it's perhaps useful to look at history um and see the kind of the history of social networks and how this has played out for each of them. Um, and so if we start with like Facebook,

let's say when Facebook started, there was no Newsfeed. It was your personal wall, you could post content there. We're aging ourselves now. Um, probably the single biggest change that Facebook the product ever made, it for the better, was moving to this Newsfeed where basically anytime

someone would modulate their wall it would show you the content that you had chosen to see yeah so instead of having to go and creep on each individual person just put it all there and it was content that you had already expressed that you wanted to see people follow

brought it to you right so that made a lot of sense there was a huge uproar at the time though if you remember yes there were uh protests outside the Facebook office but every single metric was way up yeah and that's probably indicative of any consumer product

change you you change something that people are used to you're going to get millions and millions of people screaming about it whether it's good or bad so anyway Facebook this change but then what happened then Facebook got really popular and my mom joined and my

sister joined and all these people that I don't really want to keep in touch with joined and so the the Facebook news feed got a little diluted for me um and then what happened Instagram came along and it was a new network um it was a

different type of content but I think the biggest difference is the network was different and that was great it was the people I wanted to follow my actual early adopters again rather than this broader expanded social group but then what happened everybody else joined I started following Brands it was

interesting for a while but then in the drive for engagement um they just started putting more stuff in my feed that I didn't really want to watch and now I open Instagram and it's like approximately zero photos of my friends and just kind of random clickbait yeah

totally so it goes from sort of this tight-knit social community, people you're seeing every day, you're engaging with their their photos, and then it sort of broadens out. How did we get from a small social network of my friends to this like just engagement-based, like Tik

Tok, the most recent one, um I think just skipped straight to the end game. Total speed is like, let's just show all the possible content in the world and let the algorithms figure out what the human brain wants to see. Yeah, and it feels like a a a deeply unsatisfying

experience, you just empty calories perhaps. So yeah, what what can people learn from this? I I would say what I would try to encourage product builders to think about is like what problem are you really trying to solve in the world? If it's boredom, like being bored, then Tik

Tok maybe is an awesome product to solve that. If the product you're trying to build is like connection between real people, then probably you need to very explicitly like fight against this urge to just drive more engagement. Totally. And the sort of understanding that human

communities are based around Dunbar's number, you know, you can only really know 150 people, and so a social network that kind of constrained itself to that smaller group might be really interesting, but then you have to find a different way to monetize because you're

not getting as many as many hours of viewership. Therefore, your ad revenue goes down and and so the pressure ultimately pushes you towards this algorithmic feed. All right, so you're Elon, what should you do? I don't know. I don't know if he

bought it as a as a commercial concern really or for political influence or on a whim as a joke yeah I don't really know yeah I think if I were in charge the number one thing I would do is um I think the idea of an algorithmic feed

where it tries to sort the content the universe of content that you might want to see sort it per your interest I think that makes a ton of sense the introduction of a lot of entropy content is what I would call it content that like maybe I want to see but very likely

I don't want to see like the fist fights and the car crashes I think that needs to be done much more judiciously and much clearer ways for users to give feedback about what they want and don't want yeah because as you said earlier there are these ways to curate Twitter

and actually it does seem to be pretty effective you spend five or 10 minutes telling it what you like and you don't like and your your feed gets better another way I tried was these um these kind of curated lists up top so you've got your

obviously your following tab which is people some people like it some people don't there are these lists kind of pre-made lists so when the Ukraine war first broke out I followed a set of a set of people who seem to be very well informed and this is advertising free

there's no random Mexican fist fights it's it was a pretty high quality way um to learn about what was going on same with UK politics so we've just had an election in the UK um so it just zooming out what you're basically doing is

You're inheriting the credibility of work other people have done, that trust, that's exactly what I'm doing, but it's so hard to find these lists. I had to go all around, it's it's it's insane, and these are so so powerful. And the thing

that I find Twitter is still, for all of the junk on it, the garbage, the the clickbait, the thing that I found the most valuable is when there truly is a a breaking news event, you know, the the attempted assassination of Trump, still the first place you go. It's unbelievable

like the Ukraine war, UK politics, in those moments, it it shines, but when there's nothing happening, it's just feeding you this like constant drip feed of junk. Why is it so good at those things? I think it is that it is so easy for first-party information owners to

put content onto the platform. Yeah, so like we saw like during the assassination attempt, we saw a bunch of firsthand videos that the normal media organization would not have produced for us so quickly, right? That's the magic. It is, and and I feel like Community Notes

have done a relatively good job of calling out the stuff that's fake news versus real news, actually. Um, so in in one sense, I think that's been a really positive change. Maybe let's let's touch on some of the other changes we've seen

um, over the last 12 months or so. The blue tick, that was a big um a big status symbol originally, wasn't it? Yes. You blue tick, I emailed the person I knew at Twitter to get it. I got a blue tick and yeah, like blue check mark was a signal of

credibility I think so that other people who saw posts that had that they knew like okay this is at least somehow legit it's not just a random bot account doing something and now you can pay what like seven bucks or nine bucks a month or something and you you might have Donald

Trump's parody account but OB parody account always gets truncated and then you see the Blue Tick it's like Donald Trump Blue Tick this must be real yeah so I think they overloaded this idea um where they wanted to filter out bots and the only way to do it was to get them to

pay money that makes sense and if they connect that to the blue check though they now overload this term and now I don't know if it's just a 12-year-old in his basement paying for Twitter premium or an actual legit person that I should

pay attention to I mean people talked about editing tweets for like the longest time as if it was going to destroy the world or something and it just been fine right it's fine it works you should be able to edit stuff yeah y so that's a kind of big nonevent if we

just look at the sidebar here on the screen of Twitter um what are all those icons on the left um oh my God yeah you know I didn't think I've clicked more than two or three of those I recently clicked on the grock one might be that

one is that one okay gr what happens this is a perfect example of like a product expanding beyond what I think the users think of it as so this is basically ChatGPT inside of Twitter yeah which to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense and I'm sure to any normal

person makes zero sense see I I think this is this is a great example of the job of a founder or product leader um which is to clearly articulate to the entire team and to the world what this product is for and how you're supposed to use it and I feel like this is an

example of it deviating from that and I just worry there's just not a lot of great consumer product sense coming out of that I I think I admire him in many many ways I mean if you saw the recent um uh SpaceX Landings like catching the

booster in the in the um chopsticks absolutely incredible but when it comes to mass market consumer product this does not seem super well thought out yeah yeah Jeff Bezos once said that like taste um is not transferable across domains and to me this is like a great

example of that I would say Elon like if I I drive a Tesla I think it's the best car that I've ever sat in but the taste and the decisions they made on that do not match what I see on Twitter and X these days another topic um what's with

the name why did we change the name to I don't think I've unironically called it X ever yeah and I do not intend to change that do it's just astonishing because Twitter like got the verb you know like to tweet when your product gets the verb you

you've won yeah like I Googled it or with bump I don't know if anyone said I'll I'll bump you with Monzo in the UK people said like I'll Monzo you money Monzo me the money like we got the verb

right yeah Bump has been shut down for now a decade um and Apple just copied it um so 14 years later now you can hold your two iPhones together and people literally call it bumping like we should bump and I hear that I'm like yeah a

good name so how how did we come up with our product names um for me with Bump we built the product um and I showed it to some friends and I said what did you just do and they said we bumped our phones together and I said that's the

name that's it well that's one of the beauties of starting a a consumer internet company like relatively towards the start of the internet I mean I think these names are available exactly the domains we could get Mono.com actually we were first called Mondo.com it had

these connotations of world in a lot of European languages M or Mundo or um means world and it's surf slang for awesome someone told me but you we kind of just liked it we could get the dot and then we got sued this German company uh had a

conflicting trademark and so we had to change the name and we went to our users and asked them like hey what we want we like the M we got a new M logo what should our new name be and like 14,000 people suggested different names and so

Monzo was one of them and it's stuck ever since but uh I think when you get something short and catchy and you have the verb just like total insanity to change I agree especially for something as meaningless as X right like yeah that the whole basis of that seems to be Elon

Musk is obsessed with the letter X, yes, and perhaps the most favorable view of it would be he has in his mind this grand plan of a future product that is not Twitter. Right? Twitter maybe is some tiny piece of it, but he's putting that on the world ahead of saying what that

product is. And I think it makes no sense. Yeah, I mean it started out, um, pre-PayPal it was, uh, it was going to be an all-encompassing online bank, right? And then it sort of merged, and there was a big fight over what name they chose and

there've been talks, mostly by Elon, it seems like, that Twitter's going to become a payments platform. So that's the view of this, like Twitter becomes the everything app. Yeah, I would much prefer if they showed where it's going and then have the name match what people perceive

when they see that product. Yeah, versus what seems like the opposite. So if you're thinking about changing your name, how do you go about it as a founder? Yeah, um, number one, if you think you need to, the best time to do it is now rather than later, uh, because there's less you

know, awareness in the world about your product. And then I think that my advice is just try to pick something that, um, people can easily say, and when I say it to you, you can type it into Google and spell it right. You have to ask how is

that spelled? Correct. Yeah. Never, um, and ideally, if you can pull it off, it has something to do with what your product does. Um, and I think ultimately the best companies bring meaning to the name often rather than the other way around. Monzo doesn't mean anything. Yeah. Google

didn't mean anything other than some nerdy thing yeah Amazon's a big river in South America like you bring meaning to it as long as you can say it and spell it and I think that's all that matters how do you think all of these ch

just have impacted the revenue commercials at Twitter right well I don't have any inside information but from what I've read um a bunch of advertisers don't love the type of content that their ads might appear next to and so they've pulled out so I think ad revenue

is down significantly um I don't know how the subscription revenue is doing I'm sure it's okay but probably not taking over um so probably the revenue metrics aren't great but I bet the engagement metrics are off the charts yeah and that's sort of the problem

right when you give a team especially a product manager this singular number to optimize for just everything else goes out the window and you just it's like the infamous sort of AI that's that's tasked with making paperclips you just end up with the whole world

enslaved for this enormous paperclip did my job boss right yeah and so I I do think that a lot of top-down um ownership is really important in things like this like when I worked on Google Photos I was kind of the user that we

were designing the product for and of course there will be critics of that you know I was designing the product for how I wanted to use it and there are people who wanted to use it in a different way but at least it had a consistent um worldview of like what this product is

for how you should use it and it feels like maybe we're getting that from Elon here and what he wants Twitter to be is just we're not ready for it I don't know to wrap this all up to kind of summarize what we talked about what advice would

you give to a product founder who's starting out maybe they they're hiring their first or second product manager kind of scaling I I think the number one thing is trying to articulate what is your product for and who is supposed to use it and what are the good states that

a user might get into and what are the states that maybe look good but are actually bad yeah and can you wrap that up into a metric like is there always a metric you're optimizing for I'm not sure there is to be honest thinking about my example on Twitter I'm sure my

time spent is up I'm sure every engagement metric number of likes number of whatevers is all up but if you asked me after I closed the app how do you feel Dave I would probably say uh that was a waste of my time yeah I wish I'd

been playing with my kids instead and this is kind of heresy right to tell um consumer product founders that they just we're not saying they shouldn't have metrics sure metrics should be part of your toolkit but if you're mindlessly optimizing for a single metric to the

exclusion of all other factors you're probably going to lead yourself down one of these rabbit holes where you end up with a with an engagement farm yeah I think this is where the role of the product leader is really important because you can just say we're building

It's this way. I might not be picking the optimal way to grow this product, but at least it's going to be consistent and have a clear purpose. And I'm having that kind of clear vision for what you want your product to be over time and and

having the authority as a founder to kind of enforce it, right? Like this is where I think founder CEOs do have an advantage. They they have the kind of moral authority of like, I started this company and this is what I believe in, this is where we're going. Yeah, when

you're saying that I'm thinking of Steve Jobs in in building the iPhone and making decisions on what they were going to do in the iPhone and what things they were explicitly not going to do. Um, some of those decisions in hindsight I think they changed and they were probably the

wrong decisions, but he was the owner of that and so there was really no debate I think inside of Apple about what things they would do or what things they wouldn't do. It was just baked into the culture. Everyone knew like, we're going to do it this way. And so I want to thank

you all for listening to our first in hopefully a long series of uh of product deep dives. If you have a product that you would like us to dissect, um, let us know in the comments. Yeah, thanks for watching. [Music]

Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders

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Video Team:
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Ryan Loughlin - Senior Producer



Y Combinator

Measuring Product Value and the Dangers of Single Metric Optimization

Questioning whether increased content consumption equals user value; using Twitter's example of increased engagement through fight videos, which doesn't necessarily reflect positive user experience.

Highlighting the advantage of founder CEOs in setting a product vision and direction.

Discussing the tendency of product teams to over-optimize for single metrics (like dwell time) at the expense of other crucial factors.

Emphasizing the importance of understanding whether users derive actual value from the product.

Contrasting business models: Advertisers benefit from high engagement, while others (like Google) aim for efficient task completion.

Analysis of Twitter's (X's) Algorithmic Feed and User Experience

Discussing the negative user experience caused by the algorithmic feed, leading to frustration despite continued usage.

Suggesting improvements to the user interface, making it easier for users to filter unwanted content.

Analyzing a sample Twitter feed, highlighting the prevalence of unwanted political content and random videos.

Pointing out the need for clearer instructions on content filtering, suggesting a design flaw when users require external guides.

Evolution of Social Networks and Engagement Strategies

Tracing the history of Facebook, from its initial design to the introduction of the Newsfeed and its subsequent evolution.

Comparing the initial experience of Instagram with its current state, highlighting the shift from a tight-knit community to an engagement-driven platform.

Analyzing TikTok's approach, focusing on its prioritization of content diversity over curated user experience.

Suggesting a focus on solving specific user needs (boredom vs. connection) when designing social media products.

Potential Solutions and Recommendations for X (formerly Twitter)

Speculating on Elon Musk's motives behind acquiring Twitter and the potential implications for the product's future.

Suggesting improvements to the algorithmic feed, focusing on better content curation and user feedback mechanisms.

Highlighting the effectiveness of curated lists in providing high-quality content, free from random or unwanted material.

Acknowledging Twitter's strength in delivering breaking news, contrasting it with its weaknesses in non-event periods.

Discussion of Other Significant Changes in X (formerly Twitter)

Analyzing the devaluation of the blue tick verification, highlighting the impact of monetization on credibility signals.

Discussing the impact of the tweet editing feature, concluding that it has been largely uneventful.

Critiquing the addition of ChatGPT integration, questioning its relevance and user value.

Impact of Changes on Revenue and Concluding Thoughts

Discussing the negative impact of content changes on advertising revenue.

Drawing a parallel between single-metric optimization and the paperclip maximizer AI, highlighting the potential for unintended negative consequences.

Offering advice to product founders on defining their product's purpose and target audience.

Reiterating the importance of a balanced approach to metrics, warning against over-optimization of single metrics.

Emphasizing the role of the founder in setting a clear product vision and enforcing it within the company culture.