Lessin: The internet optimizes for engagement over truth because attention is easily monetized
Sam Lessin · The Truth About AI: Sam Lessin’s Contrarian Take · Joe Lonsdale · May 17, 2025 · at 12:30
Sam Lessin, General Partner at Slow Ventures and former Facebook VP of Product, breaks down the commercial incentives that drive internet platforms toward entertainment.
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“The reality is the internet in general, not just Meta properties, not just Facebook, but the internet in general, it's an incredibly good machine for engagement and attention, right? It's incredibly entertaining and why it's incredibly easy to measure. You can measure time spent because you can measure time spent and engagement and optimize for it. You can run that machine and get so good at engagement, entertainment. Now information, truth, reality, these are much harder to instrument and they're much harder to optimize for and much harder to monetize. And therefore candidly, The internet has gone the way you'd expect it to go, right? Which is it's tended towards the things where you can turn that crank efficiently from a capitalism perspective.”
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