Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdednl | Hacker News Reader

I really liked this product (used when working at Meta). What I found interesting is that it's very similar to Facebook, but it optimizes for the opposite values. While Facebook newsfeed seems to try to maximize your time scrolling, watching ads, clicking, useless notifications; Workplace was continuously suggesting changes to maximize productivity, such as "you have not interacted with this type of notifications, stop receiving them" or "this group doesn't seem interesting to you, unfollow group" or even "set a productivity block to stop receiving notifications".

Same company, probably same underlying codebase and structure, but opposite reward optimization for showing items in the news feed and maximize productivity/time spend on feed.

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> Workplace was continuously suggesting changes to maximize productivity

It doesn't. It's the same auto generated timeline where the latest news will be buried under the random updated form three months ago just because the engagement on it was higher.

The rest of the controls are nice, but it's the absolute minimum they did, so I don't see why we should congratulate them for that.

Edit: Forgot the most annoying anti-feature: email notifications. Instead of sending the full text of the post you might be interested in, the email will contain three words and a link to click. Because at Facebook engagement will always trump anything useful.

I've used it at a previous job, the email not containing content was a great feature for when people (inevitably) needed to retract something. That's all I ever took it for - super easy to turn those off and just use in-app messages.

> a great feature for when people (inevitably) needed to retract something.

Ah yes. Because that's a significantly more important and more often used feature than actually reading the content

hey, it's easier to argue for attorney-client privilege for content that doesn't exist, right? :)

That speaks volumes about how they value their devs as opposed to their users, and frankly doesn't surprise me. They don't have any interest in hacking the brains of their employees . . . or perhaps they do, but in a different direction.

Speaking what might be obvious, but I would love a social media experience optimized in a similar way to this: Least amount of time & attention spent on the platform while facilitating the most in-human contact.

So far, no one has figured out a business model for that that works, unfortunately.

They optimize for their customer base.

Which are advertisers.

I'll be impressed when it recommends you logout.

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