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How “engagement” made the web a less engaging place
- Safety1stClyde 10y agoI would never put a "Like" button on a web site of mine.
- cableshaft 10y agoI liked this article. Big thumbs up from me.
- ryan-allen 10y agoBut did you share it on Facebook?
- wonderous 10y agoUpvoting something is not bad, but it becomes bad if every upvote is not based on an expressable reason beyond I agree, support, etc. with no valid reasoning. Likes would be a lot more meaningful if randomly the user was required to express the reasoning behind why they liked something. If the user showed a pattern of not being able to express why they liked something, at the very least, other users would not see their vote as part of the count. This would also likely increase the cost for "like spammers" - but the real value would be that likes were more meaningful.
- westbywest 10y agoResponding, in the spirit of your comment, to acknowledge my agreement, rather than just upvoting invisibly.
- deathhand 10y agoBut due to sheer mass of readers at what point does 'me too' become irrelevant?
- wonderous 10y agoIt doesn't, it appears be pointing out that simply receiving a comment would not be a measure of someone expressing that they are able to explain why they liked something in a way that's not simply repeating what's already been said.
- deathhand 10y agoWhat would eventually happen though is that the comment quality will decline because people like to hear/see themselves communicate/talk. It's part of our ego from the human condition. I upvoted you - Reasoning being that you responded(something I like) - I also enjoy the run on sentence. It eventually becomes a circle-jerk. That is the problem with forcing replies. Voat is a good example of this.
- wonderous 10y agoFrom another comment by me: "in case it's not clear, this would be a control for moderation, posting it as a comment for non-moderators to view would be optional." Voting as a signal to quality is as important if not more important than the comment quality. For example, HN as a vast amount of high-quality submission votes and related comments, but their still are a lot of spammy, off-topic, low-value, etc. submissions and comments. Key is to insure in any system that there's a cost to expression and that cost is relative to the value. Another related issue with voting is that users don't understand the intent of the interfaces use or misuse it to achieve an unrelated outcome. For example, some users on HN use flags as downvotes, but that is explicitly not what they're to be used for per the guidelines; those users happen to know the system and that the system weights flags in a way that's comparable to downvotes.
- character0 10y agoUnfortunately, most people read the headline and then decide whether or not they agree with the article. My girlfriend works at a major online media publication and a lot of their Facebook shares and clicks happen before the user has viewed the story.
- wonderous 10y agoWhich is an issue that most likely any with experience in systems like this knows - and instead of letting the user know that unless they read the article and are able to proceed to randomly prove they read it, there vote will not be counted.
- halomru 10y agoWhich is logical if you consider likes and reshares as the goal of sharing the story: sheer volume makes it impossible for me to evaluate each post in my Facebook feed in depth, so even if we assumed that people would actually read the article before liking, they are much more likely to read one with a good headline. A good hook is more important than good content (from the viewpoint of getting lots of reactions). And when I can see how many people liked what I shared, that seems like a reasonable metric to optimize what to share
- freshhawk 10y agoThat makes sense, your likes/shares aren't for you they are for other people to see. So it's more important to like and share the things you want other people to see you like/share than to have them reflect your actual preferences.
- heavenlyblue 10y agoFor the UK, I have found that the articles featured on the front pages of major newspapers (e.g. The Telegraph or The Guardian) are very different from the ones featured in my Facebook stream. These are usually highly polar political pieces for Facebook. It makes sense, on the other hand - an average Facebook reader is more prone to clickbait-y content than a user who specifically targets the front page.
- AndrewStephens 10y agoI am doing my part to combat this trend by writing very dull and unpopular blog entries. No likes for me thank you very much.
- yarper 10y agoThank you for your service
- moufestaphio 10y agoI'm conflicted on upvoting this comment, because if I do I'm just part of the problem right?
- WalterBright 10y agoI downvoted your post so you can revel in confirmation bias! :-)
- jsemrau 10y agoI do the same thing. #LMIBA Let's Make the Internet Boring Again
- vkb 10y agoThis is a rather interesting stance to take for a publication whose article quality has degraded and ad size has increased (thirty-eight trackers, including two from Facebook, detected by my adblocker when I tried to access the article) over the past five years to the point where I refuse to read them. If you take a look at the homepage through the Wayback archive as it used to appear in 2005[1], 2011[2], and today, you'll see how content disappears and click-baity headlines rise over time. The Atlantic is very much a part of the problem of "the race towards the bottom" the author describes, and instead of having a discussion about how to fix it and maybe trying different revenue models, it continues to un-ironically have share and tweet buttons at the top of this article. [1] https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20050210070148/theatlantic.com https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20050210070148/theatlantic.... [2]https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20110731234233/http://www.theatlantic.com:80/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20110731234233/http://www.t...
- fitzroy 10y agoPublishing pieces like this is one of the few ways the editorial side can put public pressure on the ad sales / revenue side to change or improve their behavior, particularly if other attempts have been ignored. Writers may not be able to bite the hand that feeds them, but they can nibble.
- EGreg 10y agoThe author is an individual, and the Atlantic may be contributing to the problem but at least they published his piece.
- rdruxn 10y agoThe Atlantic publishes a monthly magazine, exactly the type of bundle the author is advocating for.
- throwaway2048 10y agoBeing a hypocrite dosen't make what you are saying invalid or wrong in any way.
- robotbikes 10y ago
- tetrep 10y agoI think this article missed a huge reason for the race to the bottom, and that's internet advertising. Articles are not written for "engagement" (per se), they're written to make the publishers money. I think nobody is actually expecting anyone to click an advertisement (at least not on purpose), but getting people to view the article, and therefore view the ad, is likely the website's primary source of income. And as more and more ads are viewed and not clicked, (there's probably some adtech term for this) the price per view is going to go down, which will encourage more clickbait, which will drive the value of an impression down, etc. The article struck me as a bit weird, it complains about yellow journalism, but it doesn't really dig into why it's happening. It just declares that shitty articles are written for the metrics, and leaves it at that. As if "metrics" had any intrinsic value. The mapping of metrics to money, as done by internet advertisements, is the actual problem. While engagement is certainly a way to get more people to view more ads, it's but a tool and symptom of the system it's a part of, not the genesis of it.
- rashkov 10y agoYou're right when it comes to publishers, but this article most resonated to me about why I stopped sharing on facebook, which does not involve money. I found that getting few or zero likes on a post was a negative signal and it really shaped the content that I was willing to share. I've felt for a while that I liked facebook when it was weirder and there was more diversity in the types of content, but that has really declined in their pursuit for optimizing engagement. Twitter still has this so I appreciate that network quite a bit more for it.
- acomjean 10y agoi would agree advertising is definitely polluting the content Im taking a genomics class, so I figured I'd look up to see if there are any videos for more information on some topics... Turns out there seems to be a cottage industry of having the computer read a definition, and post it on YouTube: for example this user. These videos show up often in searches and crowd out some of the more interesting stuff. https://m.youtube.com/user/medicaldictionaryapp https://m.youtube.com/user/medicaldictionaryapp
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vtange 10y agoLike/Dislike is black and white by nature -> it will naturally divide people into red camp and blue camp. And those who don't vote are not heard.
- johnchristopher 10y agoCorrect me if I am wrong but Facebook can track how much time your browser spends on a given post when scrolling the feed so I am confident that the voice of those who don't vote is somehow being measured at some point.
- vtange 10y agoSo only Facebook would know the neutral votes. For everyone else, it's the two opposing sides/extremes.
- scelerat 10y agoL'enfer c'est les autres.
- sbardle 10y agoDidn't Friendfeed invent the Like button? The article goes too far but there is something to be said about its core argument. I don't think the Like button or emojis are good at recognising Value. A popular extrovert with 1000 fb friends uploads a selfie and gets 100 Likes. Meanwhile a quiet but conscientious person uploads a before and after picture of a litter-pick they have undertaken and they get 2 Likes from their 50 friends. There has to be a better way of recognising and incentivising the latter activity across social networks.
- et-al 10y agoThis was an issue when Twitter/Facebook/Instagram switched from chronological feeds to "curated" feeds. i.e. Let's increase the echo chamber.
- sbardle 10y agoGreat point. Also, I think a problem is one person can only send one like. Returning to my example, I'd like to be able to give the litter picker 20 likes, and maybe the Selfie uploader 1 like. I think there has to the option of another accreditation technology which runs across social networks. It's an area I'm interested in and looking to do my next project on...
- moogly 10y agoGoogle Reader had "social" features? Heh, I never knew. And I was one of the people who got mad as hell when they shut it down and tried out ~30 clones before settling on a self-hosted TinyTinyRSS instance.
- sorenjan 10y agoIt was great for sharing links and articles. I think they even added comments at the end, but I didn't really use that.
- rhizome 10y agoI feel the same: the first...third? of the article was basically news to me. I thought the article was going to be about how every web designer interrupts whatever it is you're there to read/see/etc. Multiple times. Instead we get yet another Medium-quality thinkpiece extrapolating someone's personal experience. At any rate, the title here should match the article's.
- NoGravitas 10y agoI had actually switched to a tt-rss instance before Google Reader shut down, and I'm still using it.
- vit05 10y ago"Perhaps that’s why podcasts have surged in popularity and why you find such a refreshing mixture of breadth and depth in that form: Individual episodes don’t matter; what matters is getting subscribers. You can occasionally whiff, or do something weird, and still be successful." Disagree. I think that is one of the main reasons of why podcasts haven´t become more popular. It is way harder to see people sharing just one episode or a piece of an episode in a conversation. Usually, they just say they listen to a particular podcast and you should go and listen to someone talk for 30 minutes before decided if you wanna follow him. And that particular episode that you chose could one of the worst that the podcaster has produced. Individual episodes matter, especially to bring more people to your subscribed list. A personal example it is how I discover the best, IMO, podcast: 99%invisible. I was reading the most upvoted comment about a shared video on Reddit about how Taiwan collect their trash and he was suggesting listen to this podcast episode http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/ After listening to the episode, and to his sponsor to this particular episode, I subscribed. And brands cares way more about engagement than about the numbers of the subscriber. You could have a big number of subscribers that doesn't react to anything that you produce. And you could have a small number of subscribers that really like your content and, especially, trust in your endorsements. And the best way to metric this is seen the numbers of sharing, likes, and comments in the content that you produce. Engagement numbers is more important than plain numbers, for everybody. http://www.adweek.com/digital/micro-influencers-are-more-effective-with-marketing-campaigns-than-highly-popular-accounts/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/micro-influencers-are-more-eff...
- tsunamifury 10y agoIn general, as someone who consulted on the NYT front page, and several other higher profile news products in 2009 on... The major change is simply economic: that the product stopped being the publication and started being the article. The public turning point for this granularization was when Gawker decided to play per click in March 2008. As this motivation was generally adopted industry wide, it separated a writers incentives from that of a the publication as a product. We no longer had a quality bar set by brands, and instead a race to the bottom set by individual writers competition. You can see it everything from click-bait headlines to inflamatory articles, all the way to its final form: Fake news written only for views at the price of all other qualities.
- rhizome 10y agoWho did Gawker decide to pay per click in March 2008, advertisers or writers?
- eastWestMath 10y agoWhy would Gawker pay advertisers?
- gipp 10y agoThis is a major reason, though certainly not the only reason, that the NYT has moved toward a primarily subscription-based business model for their online offerings. It's actually been very successful to date, and I think it's a good move for resisting the urge of clickbait. (https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/ https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/)
- gozur88 10y agoThey don't really have a choice. I don't think you can simultaneously offer a quality product and still compete for advertising dollars with the Buzzfeeds of the world. The Times had a huge advantage in that they had a solid pre-internet brand. I wonder if it's even possible to start a company like that today without sinking hundreds of millions into getting it off the ground.
- ativzzz 10y agoI think upvotes accomplish similar goals. I am significantly more likely to click on HN/reddit links with high scores. In fact, my attention when browsing a link aggregator is split about 60/40 between the number of upvotes and the titles. I have limited time to browse, and it is much faster to "filter" content by outsourcing that to you guys.
- awinter-py 10y agoSimple metrics get us to local maxima, but it's unlikely they can get us out of them. This is why privacy matters -- deep consumer data leads to 'binge products'. This is the business netflix is in. It's possible to create cocaine using this model but it isn't a great way to make something awesome and new. 'What's new' will always come from the fringes.
- rbhatia 10y agoI guess that's downside of focusing on a single metric for defining success (and the rewards that come with it). Wine ratings, stock prices and standardized tests have the same downsides of driving homogeneity and risk avoidance.
- s0me0ne 10y agoIt's seo, people outsource writing crap blogs for seo ranking and having fresh articles that Google wants to see the site is updated
- sogen 10y agoSadly the article has Revcontent at the bottom. Oh the irony...
- untangle 10y agoSo web content, notably blog posts, have gone the way of musical content. That is, the written "albums" no longer sell; the market just wants "singles." So the blog version of "Stairway to Heaven" will become as rare as Bowie and substantive songs will be as tears in the rain.