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I wish it could be made illegal to optimise for engagement. “Engagement” their acceptable replacement word for what they really want to optimise for: Addictio

I wish it could be made illegal to optimise for engagement. “Engagement” their acceptable replacement word for what they really want to optimise for: Addiction.

geofft 8y ago
"Engagement" is unfortunately a proxy for "profit," if a business is ad-supported or otherwise has revenue proportional to use. And it is basically illegal not to optimize for profit. (You do not have to micro-optimize every decision for short-term profit, but you do have to act in the best interests of the company, and the best interest of a for-profit company is, at the end of the day, profit.) Netflix has said one of their major competitors is now the desire to go to sleep instead of keeping watching, for instance. If you want to make optimizing for engagement illegal—a plan I support, tbh—you need to eliminate capitalism either from the inside or the outside. From the inside, you can try to win hearts and minds of customers and employees with endeavors that aren't structured for profit, e.g., public-benefit corporations or perhaps hybrid non-profit models (like Mozilla, or like OpenAI's new thing, which I am cautiously optimistic about, or like Etsy before they gave up their B-corp status to save the business, which is part of the caution in my optimism). If you can hire all the best employees away from the Facebooks and Netflixes of the world to the Mozillas and Etsys of the world (which, given the number of software engineers who are incredibly frustrated about spending their days micro-optimizing ad engagement, doesn't actually seem that hard), you can probably out-compete them. Or, from the outside, you can just make for-profit companies past a certain point of profit straight-up illegal (which is to say, make the government cease to recognize corporate structures beyond certain limits - this isn't additional government intervention, this is just the removal of government protections for corporations like the corporate veil, work-for-hire, "right-to-work," tax advantages, etc.).
nlh 8y ago
It’s such a slippery slope, but you’re so right. Chemists designed a chemical that’s optimized for engagement too — it’s called heroin! On the other side, one could argue that just about any successful product or service, by definition, optimized for engagement (addiction). Hit TV shows, beautiful vacation spots, sex. So where do you draw the line?
- delecti 8y ago
  Actually heroin was initially sold as a less addictive alternative to morphine.
SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
The problem is that it's also a replacement word for "users genuinely like the thing and want to keep using it". It troubles me when people use it as a smokescreen for adding addictive elements, but I don't think the solution is to say nobody can make their platform fun.
BurningFrog 8y ago
First they came for the engagement optimizers...
lanevorockz 8y ago
Polarisation is how Google, Facebook and Twitter manage to be popular platforms. It's nothing more than returning the results that you want are searching. What these platforms need is transparency and a web of trust pretty much the same as distributed version control systems. Look at Linux and how the source is managed, it would be a good model for social media in combination with blockchain for engagement.

I wish it could be made illegal to optimise for engagement. “Engagement” their acceptable replacement word for what they really want to optimise for: Addiction.

geofft 8y ago

"Engagement" is unfortunately a proxy for "profit," if a business is ad-supported or otherwise has revenue proportional to use. And it is basically illegal not to optimize for profit. (You do not have to micro-optimize every decision for short-term profit, but you do have to act in the best interests of the company, and the best interest of a for-profit company is, at the end of the day, profit.) Netflix has said one of their major competitors is now the desire to go to sleep instead of keeping watching, for instance. If you want to make optimizing for engagement illegal—a plan I support, tbh—you need to eliminate capitalism either from the inside or the outside. From the inside, you can try to win hearts and minds of customers and employees with endeavors that aren't structured for profit, e.g., public-benefit corporations or perhaps hybrid non-profit models (like Mozilla, or like OpenAI's new thing, which I am cautiously optimistic about, or like Etsy before they gave up their B-corp status to save the business, which is part of the caution in my optimism). If you can hire all the best employees away from the Facebooks and Netflixes of the world to the Mozillas and Etsys of the world (which, given the number of software engineers who are incredibly frustrated about spending their days micro-optimizing ad engagement, doesn't actually seem that hard), you can probably out-compete them. Or, from the outside, you can just make for-profit companies past a certain point of profit straight-up illegal (which is to say, make the government cease to recognize corporate structures beyond certain limits - this isn't additional government intervention, this is just the removal of government protections for corporations like the corporate veil, work-for-hire, "right-to-work," tax advantages, etc.).

nlh 8y ago

It’s such a slippery slope, but you’re so right. Chemists designed a chemical that’s optimized for engagement too — it’s called heroin! On the other side, one could argue that just about any successful product or service, by definition, optimized for engagement (addiction). Hit TV shows, beautiful vacation spots, sex. So where do you draw the line?

delecti 8y ago
Actually heroin was initially sold as a less addictive alternative to morphine.

SpicyLemonZest 8y ago

The problem is that it's also a replacement word for "users genuinely like the thing and want to keep using it". It troubles me when people use it as a smokescreen for adding addictive elements, but I don't think the solution is to say nobody can make their platform fun.

BurningFrog 8y ago

First they came for the engagement optimizers...

lanevorockz 8y ago

Polarisation is how Google, Facebook and Twitter manage to be popular platforms. It's nothing more than returning the results that you want are searching. What these platforms need is transparency and a web of trust pretty much the same as distributed version control systems. Look at Linux and how the source is managed, it would be a good model for social media in combination with blockchain for engagement.