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by davidmanheim
1699 days ago
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Others pointed out that it's hard to measure subjective factors well. I'd point to a different issue - if you have a metric for, say, wellbeing which is correlated with what you actually care about, putting pressure on other parts of the system - like maximizing engagement - will systemically warp those metrics to be less accurate. For an extensive discussion of how this can happen, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585 |
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On the other hand, I think Facebook is pretty good about constantly reevaluating metrics and trying to make sure that they track what the company actually cares about. The mechanism for this is partially embarrassment avoidance. If there are obvious egregious examples of violations that are not tracked by metrics, employees loudly complain and the company culture expects those responsible to explain what went wrong and how it will be fixed (better metrics).
From what I've seen in practice, this usually results in changing the engagement metrics rather than the well-being metrics. For example FB changed most raw engagement metrics to "authentic engagement" metrics at some point while I was there. Instead of counting total likes, you count likes from accounts that are not deemed to have participated in "inauthentic engagement" (you can read FB's blog for definitions).