Comment by danudey
8 years ago
My wife and were 'in a relationship' on Facebook within a few months of meeting each other. Then we were 'married'. Even still, for the first four or so years that we had each other on FB, it wouldn't show me her posts. They just weren't in my feed, I'd scroll down so far I was seeing content from months ago, but I'd never see anything she'd posted that week.
Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see posts from 90% of my 'friends', and then going to her feed and 'engaging' with her posts, for it to start showing them to me.
I've never actually used Facebook in any serious way; I'll log in and scroll through my feed once every few months, but I've always hated it. The other day I put my finger on why: it's the mobile equivalent of turning on the TV and flipping through channels looking for something to watch, something you do as an alternative to doing something with your time.
They've probably done testing and found that for some significant percentage of married couples, seeing their spouse's posts caused them to reduce their Facebook usage. So unhappy marriages are ruining it for everyone.
I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up in the short term, at the expense of slowly disenfranchising a large portion of their users.
I interviewed at Netflix recently for a position on their UI team, and I questioned the interviewer about a lot of annoying aspects of the Netflix interface. He was aware of every complaint, and his explanation for every one of them was he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get higher engagement with it the way it is. So, for example, they show you movies you have already said you don't like, because enough people give a thumbs down and then later watch the movie. In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.
Personally, these kind of decisions wouldn't bother me that much if apps and websites made it easy to customize your experience. Facebook makes it difficult by opaquely shaping your newsfeed and giving you what seems like hundreds of options across a half dozen settings pages. Netflix makes it difficult by just giving you practically no options, but there's enough demand that's there a tiny industry in just making websites and plugins to make Netflix usable.
> In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.
The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely. I’ve no doubt that their testing shows it increases engagement, but I find it so jarring and abrasive that I rarely open the app any more. I’m sure they still have content I want to watch, but I can’t stand the experience of trying to find it.
I would love to have more insight into their A/B engagement metrics. I’m sure they capture if immediate engagement goes up when a feature is enabled, and probably the same over time periods of days or weeks. Do they also capture if total app usage declines 75% over 6 months after a feature is enabled?
I agree. You can't even leave Netflix running on a device and leave the room because it will just start playing something without any actual user input! And it appears none of the apps let you turn this behavior off.
Netflix already seems to have no problem getting people to watch hours and hours of shows as a result of having high quality content. Why do they need to perform cheap tricks like auto-preview to bump up user stats, as others have pointed out, at the expense of user happiness/preference?
That’s funny - I Like the auto preview, in fact I would like them to go further and advertise their content to me, as live TV does. When I watch Netflix at the end of a hard day I’m in lazy consumer mode, I want content to be suggested to me. I hate wading through static dull pictures which give me very few clues as to the content they represent. Netflix are unstoppable - they offer incredible value compared to extortionate SKY, i cancelled their £120 per month package 6 months ago and I have never regretted it.
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> The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely.
If you find a lower powered device such as the previous generation of Amazon Fire TV, it does not auto-preview or auto-run trailers at the top of the screen - instead you just get a static image of the show.
Now if only I could get it to do that on my PS4 :(
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I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones.
A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.
A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.
Right. But if you were already selling Teslas, and along came a smooth-talking product designer with a dream to "improve" it by building a horse instead, A/B testing would make sure that change never saw the light of day.
A/B testing is not a way to get out of having to come up with good ideas yourself. It's a way to validate that your ideas are any good in the first place before betting the whole company on them.
A/B testing is most critical when evaluating big changes to a product, because those are the changes most likely to completely blow up the business. Otherwise it's left up to the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, and people are notoriously bad at guessing how customers will respond to change.
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It will also tell you that pumping horses full of steroids will make them go faster. Tech's absurd obsession with metrics and statistics will be their undoing.
If you do enough binary switching, you eventually will get a Tesla. Assuming a Tesla is optimal. Let’s test to find out.
How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?
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Says every product person I've ever worked with who didn't want to actually be data driven.
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> he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get higher engagement with it the way it is
The upshot of this is that if Netflix or Facebook _do_ see a slow drift of users away from the platform, they are institutionally incapable of understanding why. Engagement is not the same thing as satisfaction, which is far harder to measure.
(I'm also now wondering how static the results of A/B testing really are - if an idea fails AB even once does the company abandon it forever?)
But engagement is what advertisers pay for, isn't it ? Clicks ! Clicks ! Clicks !
So I'm pretty sure that they are institutionally incapable of understanding why for a very good reason.
yes, a/b testing optimizes for an average user that dosent exist, and everyone is unhappy with.
Reminds me of the old tale of the man who drowned in a lake with an average depth of 3 feet.
A/B doesn’t design for an average user; it can be all, a tiny niche, or something in between depending on what you’re measuring. For example, DAU and engagement will be affected by drastically different distributions of users.
Did you ask what their definition of engagement is, and why it's the primary measure?
Geeze, I had the EXACT same issue. I almost NEVER see stuff from my wife (even after I marked her stuff as something I want to see). I always see friends that I never interact with and their events that they're going to or all of the meme pages my friends like. But my wife's stuff? Not very much.
I hate using Facebook. The only reason I haven't removed my account is because it's the only way to keep up with certain friends and family. I feel like I am forced to use it simply because there isn't anything better for them to broadcast on.
> The only reason I haven't removed my account is because it's the only way to keep up with certain friends and family.
I'd suggest considering whether this is really true.
That's what the follow feature is for. You can get notified on ALL activity of a friend of you are willing to click two.
All of my friends are set to follow. Seems like a default option.
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You'd think Facebook's algorithms would prioritize your spouse, but you could use friend lists to make it do what you seem to want. You can add people to your "close friends" list and you'll get notified whenever they post. Also tends to put their posts in your feed more from what I can tell (based on the minimal amount that I use FB these days).
https://www.facebook.com/help/598069963644156
Facebook's weighting there makes sense to me. Why do you need to see your misso's posts? You see her all the time.
The posts I actually want to see on Facebook are from my friends that are far away. For me though, FB weights posts that are geographically closer to you higher. When I moved to Australia, I discovered through Facebook that I had 3 or 4 friends from high school here in Melbourne, purely because their posts started showing up on my newsfeed.
Can completely relate. The other annoying thing I have found is that FB will show posts that are outdated. For example, prior to replying here, I scrolled through my feed and over half the posts were from yesterday or two days ago. Even more frustrating is when those posts are from media outlets and contain outdated news or other articles of interest. I know the SOTU was last night, I don't need several posts from various media outlets trying to tell me where to watch. I know the problem is I don't engage often enough or with the content I want to see, but it would be nice if I could have more control over what content I see in my timeline without having to engage.