Yep. “We want more people to watch Shorts” -> A/B test cramming more into the home screen -> “More people watched Shorts with X change, roll it out to everyone” -> “What’s the next idea to get more people to watch Shorts?”
Someone gets the idea that more views on Shorts is what they need and start optimizing for it. On and on until another metric becomes more important and they optimize for that.
Comment on Why Do Sites Keep Shoving Features We Don’t Want Down Our Throats?
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You’re assuming that these approaches don’t work. As someone who has worked on shitty growth engineering projects for many years, I can tell you they do work very, very well.
I hear people say the same about ads: “why show ads when everyone hates them!”. They fucking work. Big biz doesn’t care about love or hate, it cares about profits.
dwemthy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s the power of defaults.
1 person will hate the change but 100 others will be affected by the default and not care. The net result is more as revenue even if the first user cancels their account.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Bingo. Everyone thinks it’s about retention but it’s not. Lifetime value of a user is a much more complicated than it was ten years ago when Silicon Valley was joking about DAU and such.
If you ever want to fuck your LTV for a company, just phone their customer services a few time and make sure you waste as much time as possible. Your value as a user will drop significantly as you plummet into negative value