[toss1]

Excellent approach - I hope it is part of a trend.

I also wonder if after decades of VCs pumping trillions of dollars into apps and platforms seeking shallow 'engagement' user metrics, and at least the vanguard of the population starting to get sick of it, and it becoming a zero-sum-game, the landscape has fundamentally changed.

E.g., iirc Google originally used the metric of short user time on their site to indicate success - the users who quickly found a useful result would navigate away from Google sooner. They grew rapidly with this approach because people found G actually useful, not engaging, and came back. I wonder (hope) if development & funding will more focus on abandoning superficial 'engagement' metrics in favor of actual utility metrics - such as briefer and repeated usage vs your competitors' products.

[skybrian]

Google minimizing its own screen time is smart, but I think it's harder to encourage this at the ecosystem level. For example, a useful but flawed metric for deciding whether a search link is good is that the user clicks on the link and doesn't come back for a while.

A user bouncing off a website immediately shows that it's probably a bad choice for them, but unfortunately not bouncing off it sometimes means that the website is gaming the metrics by wasting people's time through whatever means.

In particular there are websites that are automatically generated in a way so you don't figure that out immediately. They look like they might answer your question, but under closer inspection it's nonsense.

Videos that look like they might answer your question are another example of a time-waster.

In a way, websites where you can see immediately that it's not what you're looking for are better than the ones where it's unclear. Best would be actually finding an answer. That can't be judged by screen time, though.

[toss1]

Yes, these are real problems - it is a whole lot easier to measure 'engagement' with the proxy of [screen time in our app], which is a very good proxy, whereas measuring app effectiveness is much harder as you point out.

The problem is that measuring 'engagement' is like the drunk looking for his lost key under the lamppost because that's where the light is, not because that is where it will be found - and almost he entire industry is using the wrong metric like that hapless drunk . . .

[usrn]

People have to stop measuring things and need to start justifying things with arguments.

I like to compare "data driven decision making" and "reason driven decision making." Animals make data driven decisions, you don't want to behave like an animal. Sure it's better than being blind but your data should inform an argument not be the argument.