[agent281]

I wonder how much the workforce plays into it.

If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?

I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.

Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.

[swiftcoder]

> Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction

This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.

The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.

[kridsdale3]

I used to own a part of the Facebook homepage and maximizing its metrics was my job.

They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of data and surveys etc to prove it.

But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete it. That started my disillusionment process that eventually made me quit.

Money is the only thing that matters to them.

[swiftcoder]

Yeah, I was working at Oculus when the wellbeing narrative started to fall apart across Meta. Was a good time to get out.

[econ]

While it initially makes a reasonable proxy you end up polluting the measurements gradually by engineering for maximum screen time. The Artificialy created screentime is increasingly unrelated to satisfaction and ultimately not at all.

Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is also the main source of "popularity".

The word means something different now.

[lovich]

I wouldn’t say they are hardly incentivized now. They were never incentivized.

What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already

[swiftcoder]

Indeed. It was however expedient to pay lip service to the idea of promoting user wellbeing at various times (i.e. shortly post-Cambridge analytica at Facebook)