For example, suppose you did a controlled study and found that the new autocomplete UI was presenting users with only "yes" options, X% of the time. Is there a threshold beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature?
What if the new UI was actually changing user behaviour, causing them to answer "yes" more often than they otherwise would have? Is there a delta (positive or negative) beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature? If you had to adjust it, how would you know you were adjusting it correctly?
What sort of telemetry would you need to put in the product so that you really would know if this was happening?
I'm curious if your team thought about these questions before launching, and what ideas came up.
Someone who thinks "We're optimizing for click through rate" is morally neutral is not qualified to be making these decisions, just as someone who thinks giving lit matches to children is morally neutral is not qualified to be a fire marshal.
Would you agree?
I'm afraid to ask your opinion of SwiftKey's autocomplete.
If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.
And let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a tool that offers an automatic one to three-word email response for when you're too lazy to actually reply. The stakes are about as low as they come.
I'm sure you can think of many products that have fewer users, and features in those products that are less central to them than e-mail composition is to a mail client.
In the case of autocomplete suggestions, they can still cause harm even when they're statistically likely. What do you think Google would autosuggest for "Blacks are...", if it were around in 1950? What would the statistics on the completion of that sentence look like? And would the effect of someone seeing that list be 100% neutral - or would it subtly nudge them?
There's nothing obviously harmful with the specifics of GMail's auto-suggestions now. But the principle of 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use' is not morally neutral.
I'm not arguing against your principles necessarily, but deploying the argument where it's really not warranted is a form of crying wolf and turns people against it.
And as an aside, at my university the only time I ever saw any recruiting material for STEM, it was along the lines of 'Scholarships for women in STEM'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171
But the point is, whether this particular case is a problem or not, the general attitude that led to its development is a problem, and we're using this opportunity to discuss that (even though the original article is not very coherent).
I would suggest that if you are frightened by what is essentially an auto-completing on-screen keyboard being optimized for usefulness over making some random person on Hacker News feel it was more nuanced than just trying to be useful... there's probably no way to implement a feature like this, and make it useful, which wouldn't have you shaking in your boots.
Don't be frightened by what is essentially a riff on T9.
It seems okay in this case though.
Maybe? Maybe not? There’s visible and tangible negative impact from Youtube algorithms (owned, incidentally by the same conpany). And Youtube (or Google? Or Alphabet?) rarely if ever acknowledges and fixes those problems because their algorithms are also optimised for click-through.