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We've already fucked up the idea behind metrics in the SaaS world and now every company is chasing just making people active on their platform instead of solvin
by capableweb 5y ago
We've already fucked up the idea behind metrics in the SaaS world and now every company is chasing just making people active on their platform instead of solving real problem, why not replicate the same success in the afk world?
Low amount of solved crimes? Make it illegal to be offensive on Twitter and suddenly lots of crimes gets solved.
If you use the wrong metric then people will game it. Now watch governments do the same.
- monkeybutton 5y agoThe stats aren't going to juke themselves!
- bb88 5y agoTo be fair, I thought SaaS metrics learned this from government, not the other way around.
- wisemang 5y agoThis didn’t start with SaaS. I know the Reply All podcast has fallen out of favor but give this episode a listen: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34/ https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34/
- creakingstairs 5y ago> Now watch governments do the same. They've already been doing that for ages: crime rate, gdp, employment, inflation. Here is a clip from my favourite show that highlights this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH_6_8NOfwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH_6_8NOfwI
- disambiguation 5y agoHah first thing I thought of too, love that show.
- rtkwe 5y agoI interviewed at a company that developed call center software and they were fairly up front that part of what they did was occasionally intentionally drop calls to maintain wait time numbers for their clients.
- brightball 5y agoReminds me of a business school story about minimizing hold times…so they started using mute instead and the manager got promoted.
- citrin_ru 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law is probably well known but both corporations and governments pretend that this is not an issue because they don't see any alternatives to metrics and KPIs. Decision making which relies on trust and reputation works well if an organization is small (50-100) and there is no big stuff turnover. Metrics are scalable - you can increase organization size from 1000 to 100000 and they'll continue to work (as bad as before but not much worse).
- logicalmonster 5y ago> If you use the wrong metric then people will game it. Now watch governments do the same. So true. In a world with information overload, the real trick is not having lots of information, it's knowing which variables really matter. Bad bureaucracies and journalists often fixate on the wrong stats, which is usually what's easiest to measure or benefits them personally the most. In the case of Quora, they seemed to prioritize signups and decided to become a gatekeeper to loads of actually useful information for humanity. Twitter appears to be sliding down this same path. The managers responsible for these decisions probably have loads of metrics "proving" that they're geniuses for these decisions, but I'd say that they're not measuring the right variables which are a lot harder to figure out. This may be a controversial statement to some, but in the case of Covid, the governments of the world have been fixating on what benefits them most ("permanent" emergency powers, the beginnings of a digital social credit score system through the backdoor of vaccine passports, shoveling trillions of dollars around that will inevitably lead to gross corruption, a permanent in-built excuses for every failure they preside over, an opportunity to reset the economic system (you will own nothing and like it), etc) and what's easy to measure (the omnipresent "cases") while harming a load of other important variables that also really matter to peoples lives and health: the survival of the small businesses their family built, social cohesion and mental health, early cancer screening, physical fitness and low BMI, the right to absolute bodily integrity, and numerous other important things that are harmed by the fixation on only one aspect of health.