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> Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This makes me think of the first song I posted to YouTube. I couldn't help b
by d-d 7y ago
> Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
This makes me think of the first song I posted to YouTube. I couldn't help but curiously flip through the viewer statistics. Automatically I began wondering how I could prevent the 50% drop-off at X seconds, and what type of person was sticking around beyond the drop-off. And before I looked much into it I realized this would be a great way to suck all the life out of something that's supposed to be fun.
- saagarjha 7y agoThis is one of the many reasons I don't run analytics on my website (in addition to the more obvious ones, such as privacy). In my case, I still get useful "second-order" information from the frequency of people writing emails to me about the content, and it feels a lot nicer to read that someone found something I wrote useful than to try to micro-optimize for what people are willing to click on.