[wavefunction]

A responsible company develops an informed user group they can test new changes with and receive direct feedback they can take action on.

[londons_explore]

A big tech company has ~10k experiments running at once. Some engineers will be kicking off a few experiments every day. Some will be minor things like font sizes or wording of buttons, whilst others will be entirely new features or changes in rules.

Focus groups have their place, but cannot collect nearly the same scale of information.

[rkomorn]

I think a lot of people (myself included) would just like to not be constantly part of some sort of revenue optimization effort.

I don't care, at all, about the "scale of information" for the company's sake.

[londons_explore]

Often the experiments are not for revenue - many of them will be optimizing user experience metrics - ie. Load time or user dropoff rate.

They are clearly good for both user satisfaction and the companies bottom line.

[jjj123]

As someone who works in these orgs, only a small fraction are about user experience metrics. 90+% are extracting more short term value with unknown second order effects on usability.

[wavefunction]

Big tech companies are not serving their "users" but advertisers, it's a common mistake.

[franktankbank]

If you have 10k experiments running then you are probably p-hacking.