I don't doubt that in many cases developers are actively optimizing for addiction, but I wonder if "User engagement" is also sometimes code for "we made our site hard to navigate, and it takes twice as long to find what you're looking for". I mean, how do you distinguish between users spending more time on your site because they find it fun or useful or whatever, versus users spending more time on your site because it's just badly designed?
“User engagement” is code for “addiction”
141–150 of 276 posts
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#142Social media is a perfect example of where this is used. I know countless people that are literally addicted to it. They want to see every new update continuously and the social media apps are designed to do this through notifications. I saw this clear as day when I was at jury duty. We were waiting for the court to get back into session. There was a girl sitting next to me on the bench and I noticed about every 5 mi…
> If that isn't addiction, I don't know what is. In my case, boredom. I normally fix that by reading books on my Kindle, but if I don't have it for some reason, the phone is a good substitute.
A few years ago, I realized that one of the reasons I felt tense and anxious and overwhelmed all the time was because I had a huge backlog of mental processing. It was like I had all of this sensory and information input coming in on a conveyor belt and not enough hands on the factory floor to go through, box up the useful stuff, and throw out the rest. So I just felt it all piling up in my head as this vague sense of "too much to do".
It finally clicked for me that the reason was because I was constantly running that conveyor belt. Every second I had some downtime, I got my phone out and read a bit more social media. Not only did I keep stuffing more in, but I never set any time aside to process.
So I decided to break my social media phone habit. Moved Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter off my home screen. Trained myself than when I had a few minutes of boredom to just let myself be bored.
Oh my God, I can't tell you what a difference it made. I finally felt like I could manage my own mental load. Instead of constantly having all of this news that I didn't know what to conclude about, I could just work through my thoughts, sort it out in my head, and put it away.
Being bored is amazing. We should all do a lot more of it.
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#143Here's an anecdote about what happens when you design a product in the opposite way. I own https://www.executeprogram.com , which has interactive in-browser courses on various software development technologies. Currently they all cover languages, more or less: TypeScript, SQL, various JS topics, regexes. (Disclosure: it costs money after you finish your 16th lesson.) Almost all (maybe literally all) of our competitor…
Just because there are spaces, it doesn't mean something isn't "addictive." I was addicted to WaniKani when I first started it even if I wasn't binging it. Optimizing your product so users come every day (and hence every month paying for a subscription) you care that users engage every day more than the amount that they engage every day. Advertisement monetization streams care about how much time users are on the platform where subscriptions just care that users continue to use the platform.
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#144Here's an anecdote about what happens when you design a product in the opposite way. I own https://www.executeprogram.com , which has interactive in-browser courses on various software development technologies. Currently they all cover languages, more or less: TypeScript, SQL, various JS topics, regexes. (Disclosure: it costs money after you finish your 16th lesson.) Almost all (maybe literally all) of our competitor…
Unrelated to original thread - I find it interesting the way you approach this comment. You mention pricing almost as if you're apologizing. Your competitors, even if they are binge-focused, don't apologize for charging customers. They would never have a an advert that says "we've got this great course, but before you go check it out, I'll warn you, it costs money".
I like your thinking of non-binge learning, and think you could really use that as a differentiator, in your marketing.
Your site looks great, and I really like the way you approach it, or describe it here, but that isn't coming through in your branding. Think Salesforce's "no software", they showed who the enemy was, and put them squarely against it, and if you really look at it, they were selling a CRM, not selling "no software", you're even closer to your product.
If you haven't yet, you may want to check out the book Play Bigger and category creation.
Just a thought, best of luck to you.
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#145Yes, a small number of apps have very addictive properties. But those addictive properties occur almost entirely by luck.
This idea of app makers as dealers of crack is incredibly self-aggrandizing. It's like someone saying every time they move to new city, they have to register their hands as deadly weapons. Let's take it down a notch, buddy, you're not that powerful.
99% of the time, makers of one addictive app find themselves completely unable to make a new one (exhibit a: Facebook) and just use their profits to buy up that tiny 1% apps that happened to get lucky and strike oil.
Apps can be addictive. Everyone is trying to make addictive apps. But let's also be clear that nearly everyone who tries, fails.
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#146It's good to see more write-ups like this. In my experience see-sawing between different ways of managing social media use, all of the suggestions out there are really just mitigation (turn on iOS Screen Time), or full blown abstinence (get off the apps).
These suggestions are targeted at social media as it currently is, with never ending feeds and attention sucking notifications. It's time to start talking about, and building, social media as it should be.
At the end of last year I spent most of my time thinking about what social media would look like if it was designed to be used less, and in a way that would add value to people.
For me, that meant intentional written reflections, shared with a small circle of close friends and family. To keep me from scrolling, there would be no feed. To keep me from checking my phone, content would rarely be surfaced.
This ended up becoming Sundayy, a mindful social network that you can only check once a week (on Sunday): https://www.sundayy.app
Each day you're prompted to slow down and reflect, but there is no feed of reflections. They're all kept secret, for now. At the end of the week, on Sunday, reflections are revealed. It's a more intimate insight into how people close to you lived their week - day by day and in their own words.
We should definitely bring more awareness to monitoring screen time and curating feeds, but we should also question whether we should have to do any of that at all.
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#147Here's an anecdote about what happens when you design a product in the opposite way. I own https://www.executeprogram.com , which has interactive in-browser courses on various software development technologies. Currently they all cover languages, more or less: TypeScript, SQL, various JS topics, regexes. (Disclosure: it costs money after you finish your 16th lesson.) Almost all (maybe literally all) of our competitor…
Just because there are spaces, it doesn't mean something isn't "addictive." I was addicted to WaniKani when I first started it even if I wasn't binging it. Optimizing your product so users come every day (and hence every month paying for a subscription) you care that users engage every day more than the amount that they engage every day. Advertisement monetization streams care about how much time users are on the pla…
I think your argument here could be made about pretty much any activity that humans do repeatedly. The critical difference is that both WaniKani and Execute Program quickly tell you "go home, you're done", so it's difficult to dump hours of low-quality time into them. Whereas advertisement-driven platforms are incentivized to retain your eyeballs for as long as possible, as you pointed out.
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know the common refrain is "Delete Facebook!" but that's the equivalent of abstinence-only education. We need to start talking about how to configure Screen Time on iOS, or how to use Facebook's built-in tools to hide content you don't want to see. I see it more akin to the opioid crisis. Just like drug manufactures shouldn't be pushing opioids as a way to deal with minor pain and depression because they know it…
> Normal people are seriously outgunned here. This is quite right. PragmaticPulp's phrase "an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals" is a bit of rhetorical jujitsu, creating a strawman to set up a rallying cry "I believe people have agency!" You don't have to assume that individuals are "helpless", as if they are generally helpless and lacking agency, to agree that these corporations are exp…
It’s not just normal people who are outgunned — I am tech-savvy and have had an iPhone since the day they were released. I know how to modify notification settings, but there’s nothing I can do preemptively when can simply Twitter add a new category of notifications, as they did the other day. I had to go into the notification settings within the app and disable this new category, and then do it again for each of the three accounts on my phone.
Similarly, Lyft makes it nearly impossible to figure out where to turn off the coupon notifications. And don’t get me started on LinkedIn...
This isn’t just an issue for normal people. It’s also time-consuming and troublesome for anyone short of the dev who built the dark pattern.
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#149Here's an anecdote about what happens when you design a product in the opposite way. I own https://www.executeprogram.com , which has interactive in-browser courses on various software development technologies. Currently they all cover languages, more or less: TypeScript, SQL, various JS topics, regexes. (Disclosure: it costs money after you finish your 16th lesson.) Almost all (maybe literally all) of our competitor…
Unrelated to original thread - I find it interesting the way you approach this comment. You mention pricing almost as if you're apologizing. Your competitors, even if they are binge-focused, don't apologize for charging customers. They would never have a an advert that says "we've got this great course, but before you go check it out, I'll warn you, it costs money". I like your thinking of non-binge learning, and thi…
I appreciate it. We've struggled with communicating the non-binge aspect, and usually approach it from the other side: by talking about reviews, spaced repetition, remembering, etc. But I think you're right that approaching it from the "non-binge" side is a good idea. Coincidentally, we're about to do a major landing page revision, so the timing is right to give that a try!
As for apologizing for charging money... you're right there too. A lot of people will complain when someone dares to charge money for learning resources, even those that take multiple full-time staff to maintain. I think that's worn me down a fair bit!
Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”
#150I feel like there's basically two business models in the world - you can be a baker, in which you try to create a product that customers will want on its merits, and work to make the best possible customer experience, or you can be a crack dealer. I think a lot of people think they're bakers, but you gotta realize, the moment you start sprinkling crack in the cookies, you're not selling cookies anymore.
Baker Crack-dealer is a spectrum. But wherever you are on the spectrum, you always draw the line one step to the right.