“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
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“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
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Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#2Often something made in the name of user engagement makes me less addicted instead
Say we have something that shows all expanded comments immediately: keeps me on that site
Then they do an "engaging" redesign where only 10% of the comments actually show and requires lots of clicking to expand them, and lots of unrelated animated images show below: makes me want to close that tab and do something else
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#3Yes, and "influencer" is code for psychological manipulator.
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#4I recently saw an FB "data engineer" talking about "experiment review sessions", where the - presumably engagement related - results of interface changes are discussed (he also expressed hope that all companies work that way).
It's very rational. The user needs a good user interface, the best that can be built. What is the best? The one the user likes to use, day in day out. Is that a problem? Obviously not for the platform.
When FB CEO announced that he want's to make users happy, he acknowledged his real intents: mass, aggregate control of behavior. I cannot deny that it carries a purely instrumental view of humans - but that's again only rational in the context of business.
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#5The author knew that adding a strong and clickbaity title is code for "addiction" still used it and published it in various places for getting the engagement. The companies and their managers are driven by same sort of metrics as the author.
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#6Yes, and "influencer" is code for psychological manipulator.
It's not much of a code though is it? I mean, it's as subtle as "executioner".
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#7Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games.
>Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! The reality is very different. Reddit, for example, has always obfuscated the true Karma score (“to prevent vote brigading”), and the position of a piece of content within the feed can be purposely decided by the Reddit home office, not by the community. This is incredibly, deeply sinister.
Why is it 'deeply sinister' -- he just seems to assert it, reddit home office isn't putting other content there that isn't sponsored -- astro turfing exists and explains a lot of that but I don't think it's the reddit admins. The voting mechanism is pretty good at determining interesting content from uniteresting content.
This whole article reads like a conspiracy theorist rant like some luddite against tech. There are negative behviors associated with modern technology but this article just asserts that without really elaborating exactly why. It just blankly gestures "you know -- bad tech, feedback loops, doom srolling" all the keywords!
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#8I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time, a distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization [1]), and just in general a society where our information consumption is determined by black boxes with opaque goals that do not optimize for the common good.
I attribute a significant part of the political rift and radicalization that has occurred in the western world in the past few years to specifically this feature, the algorithmically determined, engagement maximizing, feed.
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#9I agree with all of this. I also think Medium is a social media site (as is HN), guilty of the same things the author calls out.
Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
#10I still haven't fully grasped that we reached this point of perversiveness online. We have brilliant minds and a ridiculous amount of money working on making Alabama's soccer moms click more ads, and we have reached the point of making people addicted to websites to reach that goal.
Obviously this is nothing new, and the cigarette industry has been profitting off addiction for decades, but I never expected the same thing (except the very immediate threat of lung cancer) to happen to tools that could have been optimized for so much good instead.
And the worst part is that some of it is just so incompetent. I've been trying to break away from Facebook for a while, and recently (the past year or so) I started realizing that my Facebook feed always shows me the exact same posts in the exact same order for days, to the point where I know exactly what post will be first when I open the website. Where is all the Facebook money going? What are these people working on? What are they doing?