| > That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. Stop right there. What you mean is that their corporate wallets like it. These companies delude themselves if they consider “spend more time in the app” as an indicator for users liking it, in no sane world it is true. I like Mail.app because I need to spend so little time in it to get the most value out. I hate Instagram because it happens all the time that I missed a friend’s post because I didn’t scroll far enough. Curiously enough, this self-centered self-delusion only happens in UI teams of pseudo-free double-sided market “products” where you have to keep viewing ads to make the corp money. This business model also breaks how the market is supposed to work—the actual users and paying customers are now separate groups, users cannot vote with their wallets (or even leave, because the offering is free and my friends are here so the moat for competitors is infinite), and company’s interests are not aligned with theirs. |
Users weren’t wrong to dislike this! Facebook violated their assumptions, just as if you learned someone was live-streaming your conversation with them at a bar. In response, Facebook provided more granular privacy controls—but more importantly, users changed their behavior to adapt to the assumptions of the new platform.
(The outcry also highlighted the potential for virality in feed-like platforms, which was great for growth but of course also has negative consequences…)