Product Mind: How Whatsapp Ate Facebook

Thinking about how apps reflect our brain's hidden wiring

Remember Facebook?

If you’re like me, you don’t log on to the new Big Blue as much as you used to. Yet oddly enough, there was a time when you checked, posted, or uploaded a pic every few hours.

What changed?

This article has two goals.

1. Literal: explain how Whatsapp became the preferred means of sharing over Facebook

2. Figurative: show yet another way software can reflect (and exploit) wiring in our brains we barely knew was there

Too Much of a Good Thing

A little history: years ago, Facebook’s product managers realized people who had more than 100 friends on Facebook started spending way more time on the app. So they built the app to try and drive you to add more and more friends - showing the number up top (like a competition), suggestions, etc.. More was more.

But eventually that hit a tipping point. Seeing what that high school friend ate for lunch was at first amusing, but eventually became annoying. When it crossed into our high school friends’ political views, it became more than that: that “oversharing” started to violate a fundamental part of our psychology.

Fission Fusion Societies

Some background: humans live in what are called fission-fusion societies. That means our social groups change often and we belong to many groups at once (fission - breaking up - and then fusion - reforming).

Throughout the day, I spend time with different groups of people: my family in the morning, co-workers during the day, and friends in the evening. This is actually common in a few animals, like primates and elephants. This is not new: even in pre-modern times, I likely would have split my time among the general tribe, small hunting parties, and close blood relatives.

But for each of these groups, it’s not the same me.

In each group, I have a different role and act differently, even with tiny variations in the group. We might act differently around two of our siblings versus three and with our parents than our uncles. Even with friends, I’m more likely to discuss politics with one group and sports with another. These tiny gradations and the incredibly complexities of managing such a large social map is part of the reason our brains may have become so big.

These tiny gradations in status and behavior are a big part of why Facebook (and Twitter, and Instagram) often feel annoying. On these mega social networks, people have to either “overshare” personal information, or create a cultivated persona that will fit with the 100 different social groups they are sharing with. It becomes weird or inauthentic, which is basically all that’s left on Big Blue these days.

You Are Your Group Chats

Back in 2016 Zuck saw Whatsapp as such a threat that he was willing to pay a staggering $19B for a chat app. Why? By making it really easy to sort your conversations and sharing into a dozen or so groups, Whatsapp can neatly mirror all the different behaviors and roles each of us have. 

These social groups are key to our perception of our own identity, and so by allowing you to validate and engage through your preferred social roles, Whatsapp becomes an enjoyable experience. It confirms who you are.

Different social networks are running into this problem. Instagram has created “close friends” as that network becomes stale. Twitter is the most stressful platform, because every post can get replies even from groups you are not a part of, not just friends, and with enough context removed any post can be seen as adversarial. Lately they have tried a setting where only followers or mentions can reply, but this is not popular yet.

Facebook, in fact, still is popular - but on average, only with older people or conservatives. One reason that might be is because they already have small social groups, so they are less susceptible to the challenges above.

So what?

It may seem that considering these minutiae of a social network may seem like a form of navel gazing.

But this actually says a lot about our social structures and even the future of democracy.

First, the “echo chamber” of Facebook isn’t a Facebook problem - we already lived in one, and we prefer to make that echo chamber even smaller when we can, as evidenced by the migration to smaller social networks.

Second, technology may be making us even more static in our social groups. Why meet new people when you can hang out (digitally) with the same ones all the time? Whereas Facebook encouraged you to make new friends to get more likes, Whatsapp just pushes you to stick to the same people.

Third, these smaller, loosely connected networks allow for more “long tails”: more niche TV shows, more highly targeted podcasts, and more specific news.

That makes an interesting challenge for society. Modern democracy depended on imagined histories of nation-states, reproduced through stories, symbols, and textbooks. 

But technologies are pushing back into the tribal states that humans began in - because that’s where we are most comfortable, and feel most accepted. Is a state made of a million tribes governable? What about ten million chat groups?

We don’t really know, yet. But it is a powerful reminder that tech reflects the wiring of our brains, and is rewiring our societies along with it.