Comment by CivBase
5 years ago
If a service is monetized with ads, then the user is the product. We say that a lot but I think a lot of people still don't understand it, especially outside the tech sphere. "Engagement" isn't about building a better service; it's about serving more ads. "Driving user engagement" should be seen as synonymous with "psychologically manipulating users to use the service so they see ads".
Why not “providing value to users so they use the service so they see ads”? A lot of providing value is marketing and engagement. It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user - both should be accounted for.
"It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user"
Example please, how it can be beneficial to me, to be manipulated by ads.
Ads pay for a service that allows you to video chat on a reliable and private connection with anyone in the world, for free. They also pay for google search, which has immense value to you.
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Why invest in "providing value to users" when psychological manipulation is so much cheaper?
Because people tend to drop you and forget about it when you only provide clickbait and doomscroll fodder when they realize that you have nothing of value to provide.
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Different metrics. Providing value could be measured in different ways concentrating on that. Engagement doesn't even have to provide value. User going through more pages to get to the thing they need and spending more time in the app is engagement.
It depends on how you define engagement, I suppose. I've never heard people discuss time spent as an engagement metric, which is (IME) usually actions taken by a user that the business wants to measure.
Engagement just measures how engaged your users are. Time spent measures that. These are all proxies for value, because it is very hard to measure value received.
This would be great if the metric was measuring value. Measuring value is hard; the closest quantified analog we have is money.
So a valid comparison might be "how much would anyone actually pay for this ad-funded thing?" It turns out the answer is often $0.
Time or attention is another way we can measure value. Imperfect, but all measurements are imperfect.
> If a service is monetized with ads, then the user is the product
false. The derived data and access to eyeballs is the product. The user is a resource for creating the product.
Some analogies:
I feel this more accurately dehumanizing than simply stating users are the product.
I don't think the eyeballs are the product.
Eyeballs don't need to be advertised to because they don't spend money
Spending money is the assumption but that is unworkable as a metric for a third party. Far easier to say you did your part with x views than whatever janky curve on attributed sales would result in.
This is true, but it's not exclusively limited to ad-driven models. It can also be true of surveillance or in-app purchase models. The latter has become big in gaming where games addict the user and then steer them toward purchasing special items, expansion packets, "loot boxes," etc.
Basically any app or service where there is a direct link from the amount of time the user spends on it to revenue incentivizes shady "Skinner box" addictive designs and other dark patterns.
If George Carlin were alive we’d have 3+ hours of material on this topic from him.