The Job We Didn't Sign Up For

Applying Jobs To Be Done to mass social media reveals the work we do for free.

Time card clock photo by Şahin Sezer Dinçer

I am actively trying to understand why I still use mass social media.

I'm beyond the “is social media good or bad” debate. It’s exhausting. We have plenty of data showing, especially on most of the Meta platforms, that regular and extended use is bad.

A more productive way to think about this is to consider what we are actually trying to accomplish on any given platform. One helpful lens for this question is Jobs To Be Done.

Jobs To Be Done is a framework first introduced by Clayton Christensen in response to the habit of companies relying solely on market research data to understand their customers.

“After decades of watching great companies fail, we’ve come to the conclusion that the focus on correlation—and on knowing more and more about customers—is taking firms in the wrong direction. What they really need to home in on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what we’ve come to call the job to be done.”

Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done” - Christensen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan - HBR Sept 2016

So what job are we “hiring” (a.k.a. choosing) any of the various mass social media platforms for? And the more important question: What have they implicitly hired us for? Let’s take a look.

LinkedIn. Strip away the feed and what's left is what we actually hire: a directory of working professionals, a resume of record, and an inbox where recruiters and prospects can find us. Nobody has ever had a struggling moment that broetry solved. The feed isn't the product; it's the tax we pay to use the directory.

Facebook. The original job, staying connected to the people we care about, was fired years ago and rehired by the group chat. What survived is pure utility: Marketplace, Groups, Events, and the birthdays we’d otherwise forget. Facebook didn’t die, it got demoted to the junk drawer of the internet, full of things we rarely think about but aren’t ready to throw out.

Reddit. We hire Reddit for one job: honest human judgment from people with no commercial stake in the answer. The proof is the word ‘reddit’ typed at the end of a million Google searches, a workaround for getting past the listicles to an actual human opinion. That alignment (what we need / what is served) makes Reddit the healthiest of the three, and also the most fragile. If AI slop erodes that trust, there's no getting it back, because you can't astroturf your way to honest.

Across all three examples, the feed is the rent we pay to the platforms via our attention. We didn’t ask for this. In JTBD parlance, we were hired by the platform to pay attention and consume.

We’re all busy people. If the point above is true (feed = a job we didn’t sign up for), why don’t we all quit? Lots of reasons, including an excruciatingly perfect manipulation of human nature, habit inertia, and lack of network capital exchange amongst platforms. In short: retention through switching anxiety, not job performance.

And, honestly, since phones evolved from, well, phones to magic in our pockets, we’ve become increasingly averse to being bored. Standing in line at the deli? We quickly hire Facebook for a dopamine hit.

As I said at the start, I'm trying to understand my own use and to be more intentional about it. Here’s an exercise that takes ten minutes. For each network you use, write down the actual jobs you hire it for. Not the aspirational ones, the real ones: I keep LinkedIn so customers can find me; I keep Facebook for the snowboard instructors group and Marketplace; I keep Reddit for answers I trust. If you can’t name a job, that’s also an answer.

Then change how you enter. The feed is the front door, and this is designed to keep you in the lobby. Go in the side: bookmark the group, the subreddit, the inbox, and navigate straight to them. Do the job, then leave, the way you’d run any other errand. Nobody wanders the hardware store for forty minutes for pleasure (except my wife, but that’s a story for another day).

And judge the time by the job, not the clock. Twenty minutes finding a contractor on a neighborhood group is twenty minutes well spent. Twenty minutes in the feed is a job you aren’t getting paid for.

None of this necessarily means quitting. It’s more about intentional use. The utility layer of these networks is real, and you should use them without guilt or apology. But it's worth being honest about what they can't do anymore: the thing they were originally hired for, real connection among people who share something that matters.

That job hasn’t gone away, it’s just moved on. It lives now in smaller, intentional communities, the ones someone actually designs and tends, where the people in the room choose to be there, and the room exists for them rather than for a sponsor. After twenty-five years of doing this work, I’m convinced these are not a nostalgia act or a niche. They’re where the job gets done now. And in the age of AI, they are only going to get more important.

So keep the directory. Keep the junk drawer. And go find, or build, a room of your own.