> thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer. As one of the thousands of enginee

> thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer. As one of the thousands of engineers dedicated to making you use your consumer electronics a little bit more: it's really easy to defeat my work. You make a conscious decision not to use the product, you catch yourself using it, you stop. Do it for about a month and you've broken the habit. That's why we look at metrics like MAUs and L28s. There is basically nothing I can do about a user who actively doesn't want to use the product; we basically throw up our hands and say "Not our target market." The reason my job exists is because hundreds of millions of people don't think like that, and don't have any conscious opinion one way or another about my product. It's those users we're trying to influence, the ones who are basically ambivalent, allocate their time based on emotion, and don't have any strong beliefs one way or another about what they should be spending their time on or how they want their life to look. There are enough of them that this market is worth billions, but everything I do - all the engagement work and instant gratification and positioning subtle hints in the UI - is about influencing the people who don't care one way or another. If that is not you - if you have actively made a conscious choice what you want to spend your time on, and it's not watching TV more - you won't even see my product. (It was actually pretty awkward when I took my job, because I work on TVs but watch basically none and didn't even own a TV beforehand.)