[meathook]

What do people think about "minutes per day" as a metric for success?

I think it represents a fundamental misalignment of goals between users and the company. By this metric, the more of your waking life that can be taken, the better.

[beager]

"Time on site/in app" is a strong indicator of revenue per user for apps that monetize through ads, and a fairly well correlated to time spent across all active users.

I think advertising is a misalignment of goals between user and company, full stop. And if time on site is a way to realize more revenue from advertising, the creators of the platform will engineer ways of increasing time on site, and the further down the brain stem they can get with this objective, the more success they'll find, and they'll spend less effort retaining that.

Large ad-supported online networks do this on a scientific level, and it's hard for engaged users to break free. I quit Facebook on January 1 and there are still multiple times per day that I open a browser tab when bored or frustrated and type 'f' thinking I'll go to Facebook. They're in my brain stem.

Really, anything that is used as a means to improve revenue by exposing users to more ads is misaligned with the users' goals.

[jkeat]

"Let's demand technology that serves us, not advertising."

http://www.timewellspent.io/

[soVeryTired]

>"Time on site/in app" is a strong indicator of revenue per user for apps that monetize through ads

Why don't they just report revenue per user though?

[anant90]

The more time users spend in the app, the more ad impressions they can make, the more money they make. That's where the buck stops.

Reminds me of this article by Dustin Curtis: https://dcurt.is/facebooks-predicament

[dvt]

I don't get it. It's not like users are forced to use these applications. If users like Instagram more than Snapchat, they're bound to use it longer (which the article seems to imply). Hence, the metric.

[laser]

If Google intentionally slowed its search results by 10%, would people not spend more time on the site? Perhaps even to the tune of 10%? But would people suddenly love Google 10% more?

As a more explicit example, Facebook used to allow you to type a friend's name into the search bar on desktop, and a card would come down (with other possible people too you could select/down-arrow to) so when you hit enter you would go straight to that friend's page. Now, all search queries take you to a search page, where you can then click on your friend's name. That extra page load and click multiplied a few times a day probably keeps me on Facebook an extra minute or so every day, which I'm sure was used during the feature testing to justify its greatness. Instead, it noticeably and nearly daily negatively impacts my life.

[jgtrosh]

Just a small reaction to your premise that slower search results would lead to more time spent on site:

> https://doi.org/10.1145/2600428.2609627

> Impact of Response Latency on User Behavior in Web Search

> Query response latency. :

> In [18], the authors exposed a commercial search engine’s users to response time delays of varying magnitude and observed the impact of different levels of delay on users’ long-term search behavior. They observed that the users who were exposed to higher time delays issued fewer queries than they usually do. Interestingly, the effects were shown to be persistent in the long-term even after the response latency had returned to the original levels.

I think that to increase user time on their website, search providers do well to try and improve search result latency.

[laser]

Thanks, in the back of my mind I thought this might not be the best example, as I vaguely remembered reading a similar study from Facebook where slowing their users pages down resulted in less time spent on the site. I think the second example holds more clearly, though, and the general point that keeping users on your site longer doesn't mean you're actually adding additional value to their life.

[fenwick67]

Anecdotally speaking, lots of applications intentionally slow down the user interactions as part of their UI.

Page / tab transitions and unnecessary animations are very in vogue.

Also consider the "pagination" model, Amazon and Google still use pages for their search results when they could do infinite scrolling a bit faster.

[wlesieutre]

I'm convinced that Facebook's algorithmic newsfeed is deliberately filled with things they know I'm not interested in because the time it takes me to scroll past them increases "engagement".

EDIT: And creates more ad slots, obviously

[losteverything]

Like how milk is always in the entrance-opposite corner of the grocery store

[cat199]

And also likely uses psychological techniques to keep you checking as much as possible e.g. behaviorism.

[adjkant]

Liking and use aren't necessarily correlated unless two things have the same purpose, and even then, not always. For example, I love Venmo but may only use it a few times a week.

Snapchat and Instagram share some of the same purposes, but most use them for very different things. This article is Facebook trying to say "Look we beat Snapchat at another thing!" in order to leverage their network effect power. What likely happened is they optimized their app to do exactly this with the goal of this press release (and ad revenue as well likely). None of this actually speaks to the app experience of either inherently.

Despite both having app use times over 30 minutes, the reasons for each are entirely different. Instagram is because you are scrolling on a feed. Snapchat is because you're messaging people or taking pictures to send.

[yellow_postit]

See "Hooked" by Nir Eyal which is all about how to get people addicted to your product. Hence time glued to app metrics.

[j_s]

Related/more recent: "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked" by Adam Alter back in March | https://amzn.com/dp/B01HNJIK70

As mentioned here: The relationship between social media use and well-being | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082130

[dvt]

Well, I guess we have different a different understanding of addiction. Building a great habit-forming app (what Hooked is about) is slightly different than selling crack-cocaine.

I would argue one is morally acceptable (building the app) and the other isn't (selling crack-cocaine).

[Veen]

When thousands of very intelligent and highly motivated people dedicate their lives to creating applications that exploit human cognitive and social systems for advertising money, it's something to be concerned about.

Attention is a zero sum resource, and humans can be manipulated into spending their time in ways that are not in their best interest.

Edit: Tristan Harris has written interestingly on this topic:

http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...

[_tulpa]

I would argue that the app is morally ambiguous unless you know what habits it teaches the user.

What if it teaches users the habit of selling crack cocaine? (stupid example, but you get the point)

[dvt]

Actually you're right. I think that's a fair point. It probably needs to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

In that vein of thought, maybe OP had a point. Snapchat/Instagram seems to feed our narcissistic egos more than anything, so maybe it's not as morally inert as I had thought.

[adjkant]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdynfVNbJ5E

PS: Despite being recorded "with a potato", to borrow the first comment, very relevant to basically all social media and moral good. And Bo Burnham is an amazing watch generally anyways, PSA. All of his specials are gold.

[bduerst]

What do you think the pay-to-win mobile apps qualify as? Specifically, the games engineered as Skinner boxes?

[wott]

> It's not like users are forced to use these applications.

Nowadays, everything in this line of business is designed to be addictive.

[ndr]

timewellspent.io

[_tulpa]

I loath that it's a thing. But in this context I'm not sure it's comparing apples to apples.

Comparison aside, I do think social media platforms have a negative net value to society due in no small part to optimising only for this kind of metric. Everything is designed to be addictive. We know addiction isn't healthy but it's cool because users can choose to not get addicted to this thing which is designed especially to take advantages of human weaknesses.

[notatoad]

insta and snapchat aren't productivity apps, they're essentially time wasters. so yeah, minutes per day is a decent metric for success.

when Google Sheets starts bragging about their minutes per day metric then i'll start getting worried.

[davemp]

I'd argue that snapchat is much closer to a productivity app than instagram. Snapchat makes picture (and now regular) messaging faster and more fire&forget. Instagram is just other feed for the user to slog through.

[pm90]

Have you seen SnapChat stories? Its basically a daily feed of a persons snaps/ snap videos. I think its much closer to instagram "feed"

[mbesto]

1) It's TechCrunch, so when you say "people", your talking about tech journalists.

2) Minutes per day is highly correlative to the amount of inventory of ads that you can display to users. More time spent on platform = more money you can potentially extract. Given that time is limited, there is only a finite amount available to competing platforms, so it is actually an interesting metric to track (it combines both opportunity of TAM and individual revenue opportunity).

3) There's no misalignment when you don't pay for something you use. This should obvious to you or anyone else that uses free online services by now.

[SomeStupidPoint]

I'm not sure what you mean by point 3 -- it sounds like the reason for that misalignment, not the absence of one.

[tanilama]

More ads to show to u. It is pretty reasonable metric to gauge your attention.

[zitterbewegung]

I think it should be combined with some type of valuation. Like minutes per day divided by the profit of the average user.