Week 1178
As we continue to work on Toby, I’ve been reflecting more on my own content consumption patterns. Toby (and other AI companionship products) will have to compete with a wide-ranging landscape of existing leisure content options: movies, books, games, Youtube, Tiktok, Netflix, Twitch, etc. I thought it would be a good exercise to rank my own favorite forms of content and see how Toby compares to them.
NOTE: I’m leaving out things like tech twitter, hacker news, and nonfiction books from my “leisure consumption” category.
- Youtube
- I watch Youtube way too much. Most of my youtube content consists of sports, video games, poker, tech videos, and documentaries.
- I watch a ton of sports so I’ll break down that category a bit more
- Most watched: basketball, football
- Often watched: volleyball, league of legends
- Sometimes watched: f1, other esports, soccer, chess
- Instagram Reels
- I use ScreenZen as a time block for Instagram Reels but unfortunately I still click past the warning quite frequently. It’s scary how addicting Reels and Tiktok are. I was planning to scroll for 5 minutes to observe my top Reels categories but ended up wasting 30 minutes in the blink of an eye. Anyways, my current Reels feed consists of the following:
- absurdist memes
- sports clips
- cooking tutorials / restaurant recommendations
- blender renderings
- scenic montages with relaxing music
- reddit stories
- I use ScreenZen as a time block for Instagram Reels but unfortunately I still click past the warning quite frequently. It’s scary how addicting Reels and Tiktok are. I was planning to scroll for 5 minutes to observe my top Reels categories but ended up wasting 30 minutes in the blink of an eye. Anyways, my current Reels feed consists of the following:
- Games
- For video games, I only play on the Nintendo Switch with my roommates. Current game rotation is Super Smash Bros, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Overcooked, and Mario Kart
- We also occasionally play board games like Catan or various card games
- Movies
- I would consider my movie consumption rate to be extremely average. I’ll go watch the popular movies like Oppenheimer or Dune but otherwise I don’t think it’s worth the time.
- TV shows
- I usually binge shows in one go, so I require much more activation energy to start a show.
- Fiction books
- I used to read a ton of fiction when I was younger but stopped in high school / college and have only recently started to pick it back up
It’s been an interesting thought exercise to explicitly list out what my content consumption looks like. My initial reaction after going through this was that I’m spending way more time than I expected on leisure content. It feels bad to not be maximally productive. In an ideal world I would only consume content that is work related.
However, I also think there’s an argument for consuming more leisure content than I currently do. It would bring me closer to the content intake of an average consumer, which could help me better empathize with potential Toby users. But maybe that’s just me coping with my inability to resist the algorithms. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To be honest, I don’t think the current Toby is entertaining enough to make it onto my list. It would probably catch my attention due to the novelty factor but I wouldn’t continue watching the streams for long because the interactions start to get repetitive. I don’t mean that Toby will repeat itself verbatim, but the style of responses feels a bit stale after you interact with him for a while. I’m not sure how to fix this but better prompting and better memory are the immediate next steps. The hard part is evaluating its “entertainment value” after making these changes. It’s a subjective metric so the only true test is to just spend a lot of time talking to Toby and hope that my experience maps to the broader population of users.
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Content I enjoyed: