Interview: Michael Mignano on the end of social media and the rise of “recommendation media”

08/31/22 • 68 min

1 Listener

This week we’ve got an interview that blew my mind, a truly mind-expanding conversation with Michael Mignano. Mike co-founded Anchor in 2015 and grew it into the world’s largest podcast hosting platform, it was acquired by Spotify in 2019 and he went on to become Head of Talk at Spotify. Recently he left and has been angel investing and is on a tear writing fantastic essays about the future of content distribution technology.

In this conversation we cover:

Why recommendation media—entertaining content from strangers—is replacing social media—content from friends and family.
What strategic motivations platforms like Meta have for making this shift
How it affects creators
Where traditional “social media” type content for friends and family is moving
What could happen when AI content generation keeps getting better
What role there is in this for Snapchat and Twitter, who are both struggling

This episode goes quite deep on the topic and I learned a ton from it. We’re going to have to have Mike back on the show once some time has passed to check in on these trends and see how it’s going!

To go deeper on these topics, read Mike’s essay published in Every on the End of Social Media: https://every.to/p/the-end-of-social-media?sid=9593

In this conversation we cover:

Why recommendation media—entertaining content from strangers—is replacing social media—content from friends and family.
What strategic motivations platforms like Meta have for making this shift
How it affects creators
Where traditional “social media” type content for friends and family is moving
What could happen when AI content generation keeps getting better
What role there is in this for Snapchat and Twitter, who are both struggling

To go deeper on these topics, read Mike’s essay published in Every on the End of Social Media: https://every.to/p/the-end-of-social-media?sid=9593

Previous Episode

Controversy! How hard should we work?

Three topics:

Controversy! How hard should we work? This week a startup with a cute soup dumpling logo tweeted a tweet that got them in trouble, about how you have to work hard if you want to work there. We discuss why people didn’t like it, and finally for once and all end the debate about how hard people should work. (Ha!)
Crying CEO gets NYT trend piece! A few episodes ago we talked about the crying CEO meme and why people didn’t like it. This week, the NYT covered it as a broader societal trend, where bosses “are racing to show they are not just empty suits.” What did they get right? What is the story missing? What can you do as a normal human being to avoid the madness? We get to the bottom of it.
The surprisingly tricky art of stopping trying to do things that don’t work. This week Dan wrote an article about how he noticed a pattern in his life, where he would beat himself up for not doing a thing (like inbox zero) and then go right back to trying to accomplish it in the same way as before. This hardly ever works, it’s usually much better to change your approach instead. In this segment we discuss how to actually do that.

Next Episode

Are AI image generators ethical?

Three topics:

Are AI image generators ethical? There are three main arguments against: that they were trained on artist’s works without permission, that they could put artists out of work en masse, and that they could be use for abuse and deepfakes. Dan and Nathan dive into the issues and emerge with a better understanding than they had before.
Intelligent Tools. Dan and Nathan discuss the most recent Divinations article, in which Nathan argues that we’re now at a point where we can begin to see how AI will actually work in our lives, and move beyond our naïve expectations.
When Productivity Tools Make The Problem Worse. In Superorganizers this week Dan wrote about how sometimes the thing we are using our tools for is actually more about regulating our emotions than getting things done. For instance, obsessing over a todo list might be a symptom of anxiety that we will let people down. If we can become aware of this, we ca do other things (like reflection and journaling) that might solve the problem more directly.