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I never understood why those in the tech industry were upset about that. They were doing A/B tests and were tracking sentiment. So what? How is that different
by thelean12 6y ago
I never understood why those in the tech industry were upset about that.
They were doing A/B tests and were tracking sentiment. So what? How is that different than running an A/B test and tracking any other dimension?
People were asking questions like "how many people died because facebook was manipulating their emotions?". What? Why can't we say that about any change ever? It seemed to only matter to people when they started looking at sentiment.
- tmpz22 6y agoThink about it, they did experiments knowing negative sentiments like anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, despair were likely potential outcomes. They were so prepared for those negative outcomes to occur that they went out of their way to measure it. They did these experiments against thousands (millions?) of users.
- thelean12 6y agoThose outcomes are likely on any A/B test. Just because you don't measure it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
- bathtub365 6y agoI agree, but probably not for the reason you think. All A/B tests on users are a form of psychological experiment and should require explicit consent, like an ethical psychological experiment would. It’s concerning that the software industry gets away with this unethical practice until the experiment explicitly mentions mood or sentiment, instead of implicitly being used to change user behaviour.
- thelean12 6y agoThat's at least a principled stance, which I can appreciate. I still disagree, though. It seems like the only logical way to get out of your thought process would be to create software and then never update or change anything. Either that or have every user sign a waiver saying that the product could change in the future and that might impact them psychologically. After all, why is it different when you're making a change without A/B testing it? Surely every change has some hypothesis attached to it. Does it only matter to you when developers observe the metrics changing?
- scotu 6y agoyou could make a study with willing partecipants
- bathtub365 6y ago> I still disagree, though. It seems like the only logical way to get out of your thought process would be to create software and then never update or change anything. Either that or have every user sign a waiver saying that the product could change in the future and that might impact them psychologically. This is a false choice. There are multiple ways you can ethically approach improving software, such as: - user interviews - A/B testing with informed consent - user testing (directly observing the user while they use the software) - focus groups - feedback forms - crash/error logging There are probably more, but the theme among all of them is user consent. The ethical implications of using engagement metrics to drive software development is well-worn territory at this point, especially with respect to social media, and I don’t understand why the software industry seems to get a pass when others don’t.
- scotu 6y agowhat if any A/B testing is actually similarly as bad? Users didn't sign up to be your test subject... Maybe we should do studies where subjects are consenting to it...
- thelean12 6y agoIs that different to you than, for example, releasing a change to a product to everyone and observing the change in metrics?
- scotu 6y agoif that change is the same to every user, then I would start my argument from the position that it is, in fact, different; if the user can tell that something changes because of a new features/changelog that explains it (or lists it for more trivial changes), again, seems different. I would be open to discussion on how it's the same, or how it's unethical, though