NEW EPISODE OUT NOW:
They’re controlling us, the game is unfair, and there is another way.
While a bit dramatic, these were the thoughts I wanted clarified when I met with Francis Lyons, an Emmy Award-winning producer, founding partner of Truepic, and CEO and Founder of ooPoll, a new form of engagement platform that rewards its users.
Partnering alongside goliaths such as ESPN, Vice, and MTV , becoming a patent holder and a technology innovator, Lyons has incredible expertise within various realms, and his career speaks for itself.
Yet, with all these accomplishments, he focuses on growing the good. His endeavors always emphasize pro-social business practices that promote equity for everyone's voice, not just what the mass media wants you to hear.
As a result, our conversation wasn't about Hollywood but instead focused on the Social Media Epidemic, which is leaving us lonelier than ever before (a bit ironic, is it not?).
In our conversation, he breaks it down as a man who's been on the inside and is now working to combat it to improve civic discourse and humanity.
To begin with, he explains that we must understand and recognize that all our interactions, both digital and face-to-face, exist and are being vied for within the Attention Economy: the 24 hours any one of us has on a given day to divert our brain power to a specific idea, product, etc.
Most of us own more than one screen and brands, companies, influencers, firms WILL pay for that.
It has become a battle, and the typical way to win that battle, if you are a platform, is to make sure you are one of the top “4 or 5 sources” users get their media from. If not, you are irrelevant.
How do you win? Addict your users, and then sell their attention away to advertisers.
Its biggest players are all names you are likely to recognize, companies such as Netflix or Instagram that all earn more money by keeping you on their platforms for longer periods.
This makes sense: more use of their content means more opportunities to cash in on subscriptions or ad placements.
Specifically, within the social media realm, this is done through the way companies run their algorithms. Lyons explains that the two most popular are engagement-based feeds and chronological-based ones.
The former recommends and places content on your screen based on prior engagement with similar posts, while the latter prioritizes content based on what was most recently posted.
Both are used to keep users glued to the screen and discriminate against content that does not precisely fall within either category.
Now, while these algorithms may not be inherently evil and morally wrong, they do raise the issue of bias and doom scrolling.
When all you get is only what you want, you are more likely to lean too much in one direction and not be open to diverse thoughts- you enter an echo chamber.
Secondly, these types of engagement encourage you to continue scrolling even past what you would typically enjoy. This leaves you with that empty feeling that many of us are too familiar with—an experience that has been unpleasantly coined as “doom-scrolling.”
Lyons explains how there are about 320 million people on Social Media solely within the U.S.
Of those, less than 1% are making full-time money, 14% are making part-time money, and the other 84% are making nothing except fleeting entertainment.
This translates to about 268 million people being victims of doom scrolling.
The astonishing part is that big media companies are making money off of 100% of their users.
Lyons sees this as a bit unfair, perhaps even twisted, especially when it does not have to be this way.
Introducing an equal-engagement feed where content is shared equally, likes are not displayed, and all posts have a primarily equal amount of exposure time.This is the engine running ooPoll, and Lyons hopes it can lead to impactful change as the world wakes up to the Social Media epidemic that plagues us and leaves us more divided rather than unified.
With a reward system that encourages users and creators, the money shifts from solely the Attention economy (which rewards big names) to the creator economy, which gives a healthy
percentage.
It implements respectful settings around things we enjoy and have in common.
That is how we improve civic discourse and humanity.
I believe we can all agree this is a mission worth pioneering. It is something that our world needs more than ever.
Stay tuned for the next article, in which I’ll share a few of the critical and deep insights Mr. Lyons shared with me in our conversation.
The things he’s had going on through his mind and what has stuck with him throughout his journey as an entrepreneur, businessman, and believer in the good.
- Making The Most Of Being Curious
Daniel J. Cuesta
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