Comment by CivBase
5 years ago
I was providing a quick and simple example, not making a generalization about all Facebook users. Just as my anecdotal evidence does not necessarily demonstrate an addiction problem across all Facebook users, your anecdotal evidence does not demonstrate a lack thereof.
The point is that there are users whose use of a service is driven by psychological manipulation, not by a value proposition. The relationship between many people I know and Facebook is merely an example.
There are also users whose use of a service is driven by direct value received (connecting with families, for free). Both can be asserted as true, both carry very little informative value as statements. The strongest statement that this leads to is something like "some users are manipulated, some receive value."
> "some users are manipulated, some receive value."
Sure. That brings us back to my original question. Why invest in "providing value to users" when psychological manipulation is so much cheaper? So long as psychological manipulation has a greater ROI, there's no incentive to invest in providing value. Why pay $200 for a fishing net when a $20 one is easier to use and catches just as many fish?
Because the people in charge of those companies understand the value in users returning to use their service. And that short term trickery isn’t really a good route to building value over decades, which is what these companies are eying.
Can you give a concrete example of short term thinking that has surfaced in product? I see a lot of hand waving (in general, not from you) about BJ Fogg’s work, but I’d like to know what you specifically think was a decision made to favor “short term trickery” instead of investing in a long term quality product.
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