“people yearn for the days of social media before algorithmic feeds, but the problem is people's dopamine receptors are just too attuned to algorithmic feeds now.” Marques Brownlee · Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast
Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026
The hosts were working through why every attempt to rebuild a pre-algorithmic Twitter has failed to hold an audience. Brownlee's answer locates the problem in the audience rather than the products: the demand people express is not the demand they act on. He follows it with the observation that people eat the candy and skip the vegetables.
Transcript
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Twitter. None of them are going to work because the base of Twitter was on X now and mostly just fragmented away from it. I
also think that this, yeah, I think people yearn for the days of social media before algorithmic feeds, but the problem is people's dopamine receptors are just too attuned to algorithmic feeds now. And even if there was a platform that came out that was like, we are healthier, people don't go for the healthy stuff. They eat the candy, they don't eat the vegetables. Yeah, I think your dentist goes, yeah, I could tell. I can see. I could tell. You need to buy the Dyson toothbrush. Have
you been on Twitter?
Yeah. All right. We need to do another trivia question and then the ad break. And then we're going to do a little show and tell because Adam wanted to do show and tell and I forgot my product. But I'm going to tell you an ad break. I can just tell. I can just tell you about it. Sure,
you don't need to show.