| There probably should be a robot that responds about Facebook posts "you aren't the customer, you are the product." The article is pretty careful to use the term user - undoubtedly we are users. But here is the problematic statement: "This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users." The thing is - sure, the user time spent is measured, and "providing legitimate value" is not. How would one measure that, exactly? But - more importantly - the metric, the ONLY metric, that really really matters is revenue. From real paying customers - ie: advertisers, some alluded to in the article. So that is the one for which all optimizations are directed - via the indirect metric of "user engagement" where "user engagement is a pretty good proxy for "users see ads" and perhaps "users click on ads." It does not appear that "providing legitimate value" is part of any of that, nor is there any reason that it ever would be. IFF sufficient value could be provided that people would actually pay money just to use Facebook, so much money that it dwarfs all other forms of revenue (and perhaps even anti-correlates with ad revenue).... THEN we'll see Facebook focussed on user value. But not until then. |