One of the smaller tragedies of 2020 was the death of the events in Messenger group chats. Here’s some lovely advertising from Facebook back in 2018 when this feature appeared.
In case you didn’t end up using it, the concept was simple: when you would type a phrase such as ‘game night’ in the example above, Messenger would recognise that your message was related to a potential event, automatically prompt the creation of an event, and that event could be organised entirely in the group chat that you were chatting in.
I quite liked this feature! It even led to some events happening that might not have happened otherwise. It was also (this is important) much more natural and easier-to-use than the ‘Events’ feature in Facebook.com, unobtrusively existing in the exact place it needed to.
Then it disappeared.
Part 1: the problem with Messenger Events
In March 2020, an updated codebase for Messenger was rolled out, with the aim of a “faster, smaller, and simpler” messaging app. I don’t know exactly if this was when Messenger Events disappeared, but it seems likely, given the timing.
Then, is the explanation as simple as some Facebook exec saying, “well, this feature is nice, but we don’t have the time to build it into this new code release”? Not quite.
One topic product managers love talking about is trade-offs: with every choice to build Feature A, you don’t build a Feature B. This isn’t the only type of trade-off. Sometimes the question is ‘do we build this quickly, or build it in a way that will make improving it later easier’, or (spoiler alert) ‘do we improve this product, or fuck the user and make more money?’.
So our new question is: how did Facebook product managers decide to remove (or not rebuild) Messenger Events? In their eyes, what were the pros, and what were the cons?
To figure that out, let’s take a brief detour to talk about how you generate $ for the Zucc – or rather, how the Zucc generates money from you.
Awareness of social media business models has advanced. Almost everyone now knows the mantra “if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product”. Ads are the lifeblood of Facebook, with about 98% of their revenue coming from running ads on their various products.
However, you might ask – what role does Messenger play in this? You don’t receive ads in Messenger, and there’s no clear path by which Facebook can directly monetise Messenger directly.
The answer is related to a buzzword that really get tech people going: “network effects”. Messenger is an incredibly useful communications platform, because everyone who has a Facebook account (which is everyone) can be reached on Messenger. Symmetrically, having a Facebook account is an almost-necessity because you need it to use Messenger. “Network effects” refers to this pattern, where a (usually free) tool becomes useful because everyone else is using it.
So Messenger, although it doesn’t directly generate ad revenue, is a powerful tool for making sure that people stay on the Facebook platform. It’s useful to distinguish between three types of ‘usage’ of Facebook’s various products:
- Having a FB account
- Using FB products in a way that does not directly generate ad revenue (e.g. messaging friends on Messenger)
- Using FB products in a way that generates ad revenue (e.g scrolling through News Feed)
Ultimately, making money is everything. 1. and 2. are encouraged with the entire purpose of making 3. happen.
Facebook builds and maintains Messenger entirely so that they can harvest your Messenger data (to improve the ads on Newsfeed) and so that it’s super easy for you to open Facebook.com. Using a Facebook account to login to websites is super easy so that Facebook becomes an inextricable part of your digital life – and so that, again, they can track your activity.
My guess is that the main ‘problem’ with Messenger Events is that it made people less likely to visit Facebook.com. One of the very few reasons I do visit Facebook.com now is to use Facebook Events to organise events and see invitations to friends’ events. I’m sure you’d relate to the feeling of visiting Facebook to view an event, only to see some notifications and discover yourself 30 minutes later scrolling through the newsfeed.
However, Messenger Events replaced a lot of this: many events certainly could suddenly be organised entirely outside the Facebook.com website.
Facebook doesn’t design their products to help you: they design their products to make it as frictionless as possible to start scrolling mindlessly.
For a PM choosing between avg minutes spent / day on News Feed, and a better event management tool embedded right where people actually want it, the choice would be clear.
Part 2: how much would you pay for Facebook?
The inventor of the pop-up ad once called the advertising business model “the internet’s original sin“. Ultimately, the issue underlying the example of Messenger Events is simple, and causes problems far beyond bad product design: the interests of Facebook are completely separate from your interests, because it makes money by selling your attention to advertisers.
Is there a different way forward? Could Facebook run on a subscription model instead?
Let’s again put our tech scumbag hat on. How much money does Facebook make from you per year? How much money could it make from you in the future?
If we looking at Facebook’s earnings report, we can see that they make about $50 per user per quarter in North America in the first quarter of the 2021 financial year (July-September) – so about $200 / year. How many people can you imagine willingly paying $200 / year for Facebook? That amount has only gone up over time.
It is a far easier prospect to get billions of people hooked on an addictive but shitty product and sell their attention to advertisers, than to make a good product and convince them to buy it.
Maybe you might say, ‘well, 16 bucks a month doesn’t sound so bad, right?’. This brings us to another favourite catchphrase of PMs – friction. One of the key insights of the ‘growth hacking’ movement is taken straight from the playbook of poker machine manufacturers: users disengage from an experience only if they are offered an opportunity to do so: a moment of friction in the user experience.
Amongst other things, this is why every single site now has an endlessly scrolling feed: scrolling doesn’t require you to make any decision at all, whereas clicking on a ‘next page’ button does.
Receiving a monthly bill for Facebook would be the mother of all sources of friction. So I doubt that we’ll see a shift to a subscription model any time soon.
Some reflections
I’d long thought about the issues created by social media companies’ misaligned incentives. But it was only when I started working at Atlassian that I actually started realising how designed every ‘user journey’ on a tech site is. You can absolutely bet that if you find a process easy on a website, it’s because someone intended it.
And if it’s is hard to put down your phone, you can bet your life that it was designed that way.
ideas best shared 