Does it have to be that way? I spent some time before the dinner visiting with still-relatively-new Pinterest CEO Bill Ready at his San Francisco offices. His goal is to turn the social media site, which lags well behind the giants in users, into the go-to place for digital window shopping. After talking about that commercial goal for a while, however, he revealed his bigger ambition:

“Hopefully, many years from now, at the end and looking back on my life, what I will be able to say we did, and what I will be most proud of, is to prove a different business model for social media.

“Social media is the majority of media consumption. And people have lost control. The algorithms are in control of everything you see. And the algorithm has been told to maximize your view time. For thousands of years as human beings, the progress of the species has been about overcoming our basest instincts. And what the algorithm has figured out is how to play to your primal instinct. It’s anger, greed, all those things that for thousands of years we’ve tried to basically work to suppress, and support the better angels of our nature. And now we have one of the biggest, most profitable business models in the world and it is deeply embedded in this business model to prey upon the darkest aspects of human nature.

“Pinterest is different. I want to prove there is a business model in social media around tuning for positivity. We are going to build a business model around not just keeping you glued to a screen, but helping you do something in real life that makes your real life better…We’ve asked the team to change the optimization function. Can you tune for content that makes people feel better?…It just takes one company to change that.”

Will it work? Can Ready scale the Pinterest business and at the same time create a kindler, gentler social network? Worth remembering that Facebook itself began in a blizzard of good feelings. It was given almost single-handed credit for launching the “Arab spring.” But Ready’s experiment is at least worth watching. “Hold us accountable,” he said as I left his office. 

At Fortune, we will. More news below. 

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

TOP NEWS

Apple earnings

Apple reported Thursday that rising sales of its iPhone helped offset declines in its other products, leading to better-than-expected revenue in the most recent quarter. The smartphone market is in a slump, with Qualcomm CEO ​​Cristiano Amon saying Wednesday that he saw no signs of an immediate recovery in demand. Bloomberg

Splitting up

HSBC shareholders gather in Birmingham, U.K. today for the British bank’s annual general meeting. The big agenda item is a long-shot proposal, backed by Ping An Insurance, that would commit HSBC's leadership to regularly consider restructuring the global bank. The Chinese insurance company is lobbying HSBC to spin off its Asia business to unleash further profits and avoid geopolitical risk. The New York Times

Short-selling

U.S. officials are reportedly assessing whether “market manipulation” is to blame for recent banking turmoil, after business groups complain that short selling—and social media—are putting pressure on what would otherwise be healthy banks. Regional banking shares continued their decline on Thursday, with California-based PacWest dropping by over 50%. Reuters

AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

OpenAI ignored the ‘have a problem to solve’ rule, says president Greg Brockman. It’s now worth nearly $30 billion by Steve Mollman 

Billionaire investor Tim Draper predicts Bitcoin bull market, says ‘controlling’ government is ‘killing the golden goose’ of Silicon Valley by Leo Schwartz

Ford CEO admits the carmaker can’t ‘upskill everyone’ to work on its high-tech electric vehicles: ‘It will take too much time’ by Christiaan Hetzner

Airbnb’s CEO spent 6 months living in his company’s rentals—and found the core problem with his business by Trey Williams

IBM’s CEO says we ‘work better when we are together’ on the same week he announced plans to cut all jobs that A.I. can do by Chloe Berger 

Rich millennials are spending millions to knock down beautiful houses in the NYC suburbs to build mansions as housing wars rage on by Alena Botros

Commentary: Remote work has become a bargaining chip–and that’s problematic by Job van der Voort 

This edition of CEO Daily was edited by Nicholas Gordon.