Sam Lessin on Social Media & Platforms

Essays

From the Podcast

Well, to be clear, be clear, you just Google and Facebook, right? As your two examples, neither of those. Well, let's start with Google and Facebook, which are actually much more profitable businesses, right? Amazon's a tough business, right? Like those two businesses are not commerce businesses. They're attention businesses and like an advertising businesses. Commerce, I remember for years, everyone was like, well, why doesn't, you know, Metta spend time on commerce and there've been some attempts or whatever. You know why? Cause commerce is a bad business.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 139

I just think it's funny that like, you think about the two com the two companies, Jack is like Twitter and square, right? Or wherever it is called. What is it called block? And you're like, okay, so like Twitter, Elon did it for him and cut that from like 1000s of people to like 200 people or whatever ridiculous number it now is. And he's like, probably I should do this one myself. Right? Like, it's, it's a cover story. But it's also it's a cover story because like, but at the same time, it's like,

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep more_or_less_indian_wells_2026_03

Or, or are they just, or are they just like trying desperately to stay in the news cycle when other stuff is going on? Like I gotta say, I'm like right now on Twitter looking at Senator Bernie's. I'm liking, I'm enjoying Senator Sanders, Bernie Sanders. Will AI becomes part of the humans if snow is humanity? I went to Silicon Valley to ask them leading AI experts first. Bernie Sanders is running around San Francisco, San Francisco asking people AI questions.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep more_or_less_indian_wells_2026_03

Lots of people play and there's lots of reps to get good. Whereas the market for selling, mean, for years it was just hold for the IPO for your winners, never sell anything, don't sell Facebook and that's all that matters. But that's a load of horseshit. So.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 99

Of course it is, I just exported on Twitter. I just went to chat, OpenAI, and said, give me a file that everything another AI would need to know to be good at optimizing for me. And it just dumped me a file, it's like pretty good. And like the reality is, like, because of GDPR laws in the EU, there's no way that these companies are gonna get away with locking up your data. It's gonna be so easy to export. And then just some, and the whole point is...

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 97

What's so interesting this week is also this thing going on related to OpenAI's 4.0 model, where Sam Altman, I actually wrote a piece on votes in the LLM era a couple weeks ago on Twitter. And I was saying that the personality is going to be a vote in the LLM era. And I think it's super interesting that the overtuned 4.0.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 97

because I lived in the era where the big blue app was the central golden goose, and there were vicious fights about the second and third tab in the app. Vicious fights, right? And then you couldn't do anything that would disrupt the core thing, so you really couldn't get in front of the people. And then you ended up with this era of like, was my favorite was, you remember when you click on the more tab on the blue app, and it would be like Facebook clock. And you're like, why the fuck? It's like, how did this become Yahoo? Right? Like when?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 97

It's not Facebook. It's not Google. It's not a good business, right? Like that's the big difference is you just have to understand the business model on these things. like, not all things that people like are good businesses.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

Anyway, so the point is when I think the graph data ability, the targeting, but that's all turned out to play out nowhere near as expected. And the second thing to keep in mind is all these networks like Twitter. If you go and say, export my data, I'm taking it with me on Twitter. It's hilarious. You should do it. If you haven't, they give you intentionally like the most broken inoperable file format. like, here's your data, but yeah, but they're not, they can't. It's like literally like, tell me everything you know about me. And like, by the way, you know what the beauty of an LLM is. It makes it super easy to reconstruct all that stuff.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

No, here's the thing. First of all, on the Facebook thing and like what happened there, right? It turned out the data wasn't so much of a note and you know what it was? Apple's interoperable iOS address book totally shattered that, right? Because it basically created a framework for making all of your contacts portable, which is how all these networks grew, right? Like pre with, and there's a whole corporate history to how that played out, but like there's deep portability of the graph of quote unquote, the graph, which was supposed to be not portable. Second,

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

All right. Well, let me, let me kind of state it and then you can refute it. So first on the, on the point that like, that the, the data part, here's the thing. I actually, I love this thesis. When I worked at Metta slash now Facebook now Metta, my team was called the identity team. And I spent all of my time on how do we organize and use history and memory and context to build a moat, right? The idea was like other people will come, there'll be better ways to post. But if we know everything about you and have the deepest knowledge, we're going to have the best targeting. We're going be able to like, undefeatable moat.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

It was Facebook was massively profitable from the early days. It was always almost zero cost from a user perspective. It was a great business from the very early days. Now it was going to get better. There was a bunch of steps to making it better. But there was no question that from a fundamental perspective, it was a killer business from an efficient. Same thing with Google. Google made so much money. Like it was a killer business. Now it got better. But like it fundamentally started there. By the way, they both had deep, especially Facebook deep network effects.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

And a lot of people who went there actually made a ton of money in the Facebook era. And then for the last 10 years, they've been depressed, right? Because there's like no corporate experience, like after that high that you're going to get again. so when, so anything that sorta looks like it, they jump on because they're desperate for that high again. They want that experience. It's like nothing else is exciting. And so the pattern match,

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

It's much more, it's much more cynical than that, which is basically in the early internet, you had Google and Facebook, which had two things. One is they had explosive user growth. had unbelievable. They had all these amazing, they were also unfucking believably good businesses, right? From like a fundamentals perspective, the costs versus the potential that monetization was like off the charts. Good. Right. And a lot of people of our generation experienced that. And it was like the most exciting, most amazing world changing thing you could possibly experience.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

So can I please play the under on this? So I think you're totally wrong. me, like, so just to push back, I agree that a bunch of Facebook people have gone there, right, over time. And I have a much more cynical read than you do about that, which is here's what happened. No, no, no, it's actually, it's much more cynical.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 93

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