Comment by benwerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benwerd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood.

_Exactly_ this. Rather than understanding their users as real humans, having unique insights about them, and building something that meets their real needs, everything has been about maximizing hollow engagement metrics. And guess what? That's good for short term revenue but not long term trust. If you're running a startup and the main way you learn about your users is through statistical tracking and A/B testing, you're missing an important opportunity to get to know them properly. They will lead the way and although you can't simply ask them what they want, if you understand them deeply you'll know what to do.

I'm excited about the next wave of platforms, which are tapping into enormous unmet needs. It's early days, and I can't stand the "web 3" label, but there's definitely going to be a sea change.

Sounds like an example of Goodhart's Law: "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric."

Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I'd give Gresham some due as well.

Many possible examples, but Dwight MacDonald's "Mass Culture" (1953) is a good start.

https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...

they’re just optimizing for the wrong metric. If the metric was “user satisfaction” they could target it day and night and nobody would be complaining.

Any metric can be abused if you try to optimize it at all costs. You can easily increase average user satisfaction by reducing the usage by less satisfied users, it doesn't mean you improved things.

The reason goodharts law exists is because its hard to measure things like user satisfaction, so we're left with poor proxies like user engagement.

Most metrics would imply prison is great: low bounce rate, average session length of a couple of years, very flat retention curve.

The issue is that something like this difficult to operationalize. User Engagement conflated with user satisfaction, with poor results. Maybe you could force your users to fill out Likert scales all the time, I bet they'd love that.

——————————————————————

    Are you satisfied?  
                        
       [yes]  [no]

——————————————————————

Does high user satisfaction make more money?

> Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling.

Or anything else, for that matter. The most shocking part of Android Pie release[0] was the repetition of the "drive engagement" mantra (in the post as well as surrounding articles). Fundamentally, phones are tools; how good is any tool to me when it's purposely designed to make me use it more? A tool should make me more efficient, hence, for the same task, make me use it less! Everything about this is spiralling to artificially inflate dubious metrics such as eyeball time or number of interactions.

[0]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/08/introducin...

> A tool should make me more efficient, hence, for the same task, make me use it less!

It makes sense when you consider Android phones as a set of tools used by advertisers to reach consumers. The more eyeballs the more efficient the tool becomes.

It shows in both app stores on either platform. The play store gives me lots of suggestions on apps to download based on activity, and the iOS store has these write ups to promote apps. Both get them money.

Does Android have something like Siri suggestions with P? Because that seems intended to do the exact opposite of what you’re saying. It is the feature that suggests your notes app if you often use your notes app in the grocery store location. It would be a good use for Android instead of the constant asking to review the store.

It does have a suggested apps section at the top of the apps list. It's supposedly time / location aware, but I haven't dug into how effective that is (I tend to use 3-4 apps almost exclusively on my phone, so that's all I tend to ever get suggested).

I wish there was some kind of pledge or iOS/Android rule not to waste my time.

Example: I'm on 2 dating app. I want notification on so I can make sure to receive messages from actual people but I get one notification every day from each app "You should check for new matches today!" Nether app has a way to turn off that notification.

Google Maps now does something like this too where they are trying to get me to add reviews and photos so Google Maps starts notifying me "Add a review of that place I think you just visited?" I think Google Maps at least had a way to turn it off though not 100% sure.

In general though the more some service bugs me with anything the less I want to do business with that service. That includes mailing lists. Hate them! Don't add me. I didn't opt-in! Etc...

Yes you can turn it off. Its kind of annoying if you're not a contributor

I guess that's why they took away the option to silence your phone. I'll be less engaged if it can't ring during movies and meetings.

When I hear startups declare that they are data-driven I get the image of a person driving a car by focusing stritcly on the dashboard.

There are situations where the only safe way to fly a plane is to ignore everything but the instruments...

Though I suppose in this stretched analogy those are not great positions to be in.

There are also situations where a sticky note can be a vital piece of safety equipment because an instrument is malfunctioning. And even though the pilot knows the instrument is showing bogus data, they're so used to looking at it that they will instinctively do so and react to its bogus indications, so the safest thing is to hide it from view entirely. Fortunately there's enough redundancy in the information from the basic instruments that even if one of them fails, you can still fly the plane by extrapolating the missing information from the other ones.

I'm forced to interact with certain people in my life through certain social media tools, but I lost interest in most if it a long time ago. I've tried to quantify what it is that made it so exciting at first, and the best thing I can think of is that I used to meet new people or engage with people I wanted to get to know better when things were first kicking off.

I never wanted it to become the way I talk to my folks, I wanted to talk to that cute girl in my class or some guy in Russia that happened to like the Smashing Pumpkins too. Maybe I'm not using it right, but it seems more difficult to find new people while wading through ads and political posts from peripheral friends.

I couldn't agree more with this. I'm in the same boat. 32 years old, so I had a social life before social media. There is one exception for me and that's Instagram. I'm a visual person and it satisfies that for me. Three minutes on Twitter is enough to make me depressed for the rest of the day. Facebook isn't much different... I think humans will naturally shift to actually hanging out in real life again.

I don't want to sound like an ass because I wholeheartedly agree with you. The experience is hollow.

But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.

I think what worked 10 years ago no longer flies now. How we socialize on the web has changed, and we're turned off by the traditional mechanics to keep us viewing. There are many alternatives to the service Facebook offers, but I'd like to people aren't 'showing off' as much anymore and are having more 1-to-1 or small friend-group experiences. The larger community is almost always toxic.

Look at cord-cutting: For the longest time we just ignored commercials, until we didn't.

Cord cutting isn't just about commercials (indeed, there is an ad supported tier of Hulu).

It's about control over what you get to watch, when. No more waiting around for a particular time, no forgetting to set the DVR. This has always been a nuisance.

Indeed, even before full-on cord-cutting was a thing, Tivo was (and still is, AFAIK) a thing, including speculative recording of content (i.e. it became more than just a digital version of a VCR).

There's evidence that this has been an evolution rather than a revolution.

> (and still is, AFAIK)

Yep, my condo just cut a deal with our collective internet+cable provider that includes a Tivo for everyone.

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.

Not everyone can, but great products often have a bit of genius or perfect timing in their creation. Snapchat - disappearing picture messages! - wouldn't have been arrived at by analytics alone.

Quantifiable metrics can amplify good instincts, but it can't replace them, and most of Facebook post-newsfeed, or Snapchat post-stories, has been just the metrics-driven iteration part.

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify.

I hope you mean the current world of VC and the greater finance world can't do that. Because as individuals and small companies we can absolutely invest in anything we want whether there's a metric or not. Granted, you can't organize a mega corporation or a hypergrowth startup around vague values because you're so far past Dunbar's number that any kind of shared understanding of anything more complex than simple metrics is tenuous at best.

However it's worth recognizing that there's a real thirst in the world for authenticity in a world driven by global brands and corporate behemoths. There's plenty of room for other approaches, it's just not what interests the financial world whose interest is directly proportional to the number of zeros involved.

"But you can't invest in things you can't quantify."

From:https://genius.com/Frank-zappa-drooling-midrange-accountants...

Once upon a time, a record company had A&R people in it who would take a chance, make a decision, use their gut reaction, sign a group, and see what they could do with it. Okay? That was, whoa, a long time ago. It's not that way anymore. All decisions about who get signed and what happens to the record are made by these drooling little midrange accountants. And everything is based on the numbers games in there. And the taste of the accountants is what is ruling the mass media."

Continues at link.

This attitude is like trying to predict the weather tomorrow by just guessing it'll be the same as today. You're right most of the time...

`A&R` by Bill Flanagan[0] is a fun read about the now deceased world of A&R. Of special interest to anyone interested in the music business who wasn't around pre-internet.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1163779.A_R

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics

Having metrics is important, but thinking that metrics - any set of metrics - capture the whole of reality is delusional. And anyway, in the end you can always quantify your ROI in terms of money.

But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics.

Sure you can. It's how Jobs turned Apple around. By all accounts, nobody had metrics saying consumers wanted less choice. No metrics suggested that a music player with "no wireless [and] less space than a nomad" would be a market leader. No metrics, as far as I'm aware, showed that there was a huge demand for Unix-like stability and command line tools but without the need for tinkering just to get a great UI and commercial software support.

It's difficult, certainly, and requires a nearly pathological drive to make your product as good and polished as possible - a drive that most people don't have today, including Tim Cook. But it can be done.

Reminds me that the balance between logic and emotion within a sociological system was explored many moons ago in the Matrix trilogy through the relationship between the Architect(Logic) and Oracle(Intuition).

WARNING: Mild spoilers if you've not seen the Matrix films

The analytics led social media platforms are evolving towards the early versions of the Matrix created solely by the Architect and ultimately rejected by the humans within:

"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being.

Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.

I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.

If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother." Architect - The Matrix Reloaded (via Wikiquote)

As an industry (and engineers) we have a tendency towards being led by logic and there has been a cultural focus (e.g. DevOps) on being led by metrics...we can sometimes miss or downplay the squishy yet equally important emotive side of systems ;)

Do you have examples of such platforms? Also, your point is legit, but think about a vast number of online services which do not measure anything. A plethora of financial services (insurers, I won't even dare), and other rigid institutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com