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“User engagement” is code for “addiction”

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Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#171

Post by pixelbro »

gary_bernhardt wrote: post #132

Here'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…

Uh, it's interesting that you see the design of your product as a counterexample, because to me it looks exactly like what mobile games have been doing as a mechanism for maximizing engagement.

You want to stop them from playing through too much of the game's content and burning themselves out on it. So you lock them out with a timer, forcing them to come back later. Then you reward them for coming back every day. This encourages them to turn the game into a habit and integrate it into their routine.

Looks to me like you've accidentally stumbled onto one of the very tactics games use to turn people into addicts.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#172

Post by edmundsauto »

hutzlibu wrote: post #111
edmundsauto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not “providing value to users so they use the service so they see ads”? A lot of providing value is marketing and engagement. It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user - both should be accounted for.

"It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user" Example please, how it can be beneficial to me, to be manipulated by ads.

Ads pay for a service that allows you to video chat on a reliable and private connection with anyone in the world, for free. They also pay for google search, which has immense value to you.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#173

Post by edmundsauto »

benlivengood wrote: post #30
edmundsauto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not “providing value to users so they use the service so they see ads”? A lot of providing value is marketing and engagement. It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user - both should be accounted for.

This would be great if the metric was measuring value. Measuring value is hard; the closest quantified analog we have is money. So a valid comparison might be "how much would anyone actually pay for this ad-funded thing?" It turns out the answer is often $0.

Time or attention is another way we can measure value. Imperfect, but all measurements are imperfect.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#174

Post by edmundsauto »

CivBase wrote: post #87
edmundsauto wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for myself as a light FB user in the US, I get a ton of value from seeing my relatives' updates. Otherwise, I would have no connection with the next generation of babies in my family. I generally find this line of thinking problematic: conversations with a homogenous and small group -> generalization based on an interpretation of their interpretation of their experience. Also objectionable but on the other s…

I was providing a quick and simple example, not making a generalization about all Facebook users. Just as my anecdotal evidence does not necessarily demonstrate an addiction problem across all Facebook users, your anecdotal evidence does not demonstrate a lack thereof. The point is that there are users whose use of a service is driven by psychological manipulation, not by a value proposition. The relationship between…

There are also users whose use of a service is driven by direct value received (connecting with families, for free). Both can be asserted as true, both carry very little informative value as statements. The strongest statement that this leads to is something like "some users are manipulated, some receive value."

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#175

Post by edmundsauto »

viraptor wrote: post #22
edmundsauto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not “providing value to users so they use the service so they see ads”? A lot of providing value is marketing and engagement. It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user - both should be accounted for.

Different metrics. Providing value could be measured in different ways concentrating on that. Engagement doesn't even have to provide value. User going through more pages to get to the thing they need and spending more time in the app is engagement.

It depends on how you define engagement, I suppose. I've never heard people discuss time spent as an engagement metric, which is (IME) usually actions taken by a user that the business wants to measure.

Engagement just measures how engaged your users are. Time spent measures that. These are all proxies for value, because it is very hard to measure value received.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#176

Post by srswtf123 »

mumblehat wrote: post #119

A tangential point about the horrifying power of euphemism: I've done some consulting work with some large biopharmaceutical companies in the past and found myself consistently shocked at how effective euphemism was at making people comfortable talking about, and doing, very questionable things. E.g. "Maximizing treatment" = "extend how long a patient requires our medication". This was at a senior level and these wer…

My favorite example is the phrase “human resource”. If you reframe humans as resources, exploiting them is the next, natural step.

Words matter. Corporate speak dehumanizes us all.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#177

Post by PontifexMinimus »

cgriswald wrote: post #118
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #29

I don't like the current trend of social media apps burying users under push notifications, calls to action, and other engagement hooks. However, there's a second, parallel problem adding fuel to the fire: The more we talk about overindulgence in social media (or Netflix, or video games, or fast food) as an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals, the less sense of individual agency we give ou…

Apps and websites often don’t honor their own configuration choices. They use loose definitions to slide in advertisements or other unwanted information. They do not give you the granularity to decide what types of information you actually want. They also change them after you’ve taken the time to get it sort of working for you. You’re not going to give people agency by having them press a button provided by someone…

This is a good point. Feeds should be available in well-defined programmatic formats (such as RSS or ActivityPub) so that they can be processed outside the domain of the app whose data carries them; if necessary this should be enforced by law. This would make it a lot easier for users to consume those feeds in ways that they control, and not that Big Tech controls.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#178

Post by PontifexMinimus »

ceh123 wrote: post #122
rapind wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re just witnessing advertising’s race to the bottom. Eventually everything published is questioned because all forms of media are incentivized to push drivel for eyeballs. The optimist in me see’s how ridiculous and blatant the drivel is becoming and suspects we’ll achieve some sort of collective enlightenment before we extinct ourselves. A smarter media then emerges (timing is everything here) eschewing advertisi…

Paid services to align interests with the user (best user experience wins) are the way to go and I really hope they win out in the long run. I also think individual driven filters and algorithms are the way to go. In my experience, heavily AI/ML driven algorithms for user experience (think spotify suggestions) lead to overfitting super quickly. ML assistance can be amazing (obviously), but I know I want some degree o…

> Paid services to align interests with the user (best user experience wins) are the way to go

I agree; aligning interests is important.

> I really hope they win out in the long run

It's hard for me to see how they can. Advertising supported services are free to the user, which improves take-up which means that network effects are in their favour.

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