Hacker News Reader

Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

IMO they really messed up by tracking and using time spent on page per day (or something like this) as a metric. That’s something that makes sense if you’re building a side-app, or an app focused on addictive content like tik tok. But if you’re trying to build a useful tool for people then you’re going to move away further and further from that vision. Which is what happened imo: the useful tool was transformed into a content-consuming app due to tracking the wrong metrics.

The best thing that any PM with enough clout at fb could do right now is force the org to track a different metric, and move the content consuming side to a different app (because there’s still a lot of growth value in communities, watch, etc.)

View on HN

That stays the most fitting metric for facebook though: the bulk of their revenue comes from advertising, and anything related to ads needs your presence: they need data to target you and increase ad price, and they need your eyeballs to be there to watch those highly priced ads. There's just no way around it.

Meta might come up with different revenue streams and different strategies, but for the blue app that ship has sailed.

That’s why I suggested in another comment to also create a subscription strategy

When a metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a useful metric.

Yeah this quote doesn't really work if the metric is your actual goal. If I make daily revenue for my e-commerce company (or daily ad engagement for Meta) my goal, it does not cease to be useful.

By making the metric the goal, it could be that the underlying assumptions change. Maybe previously all time spent on Facebook was "positive" time where the user feels engaged and is interested in ads. After adding dumb notifications. The time spent might become partially "positive" and partially "negative", where the user feels abused and might hate the ads. Is the metric still the goal then?

> IMO they really messed up by tracking and using time spent on page per day (or something like this) as a metric

FWIW, in my time at FB from 2019-2021, we were explicitly disallowed from using time on app as a success metric for the products my team worked on. Instead, we focused on the utility of the experience as the goal, i.e. people finding the product useful was more important than simply using it.

I wasn't working on the newsfeed though, so I'm not sure if that applied to that part of the app.

  > force the org to track a different metric

Like adsClicked / serverResourcesConsumed? Interesting how that would stand up for users that e.g. post text vs users that post video, and the fallout of their followers.

I think “new meaningful connection” would be a great metric.

This is just a result of the business model based on selling the ads, where the time on site correlates to a number of ads seen corellates to money earned. Everything else you describe necessarily follows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com