[kevinflo]

Facebook deemphasizing clickbait content reliably hurts their metrics. YouTube deemphasizing extremist videos reliably hurts their metrics. This metrics-driven product development was totally understandable (and I even tried to do it) up until a few years ago when we simply got too good at it and it ripped the world apart precisely along the seams where the human brain has bugs that cause these things to increase metrics.

Email prefill replies are a silly and relatively harmless example to make this case, but the point is every last button on every product we use is caked in this and we're realizing too late that metrics identifying what humans want often does not coincide with what humans want being good.

People may not say no as often, but one no can be very powerful. It's harder to say no. Billions of people nudged towards saying yes is not nothing.