| > A ton of people love all of those things. This is exactly the problem with completely data-driven decisions. First, do people really love those things, or given an ever-increasing trend toward those formulaic things, are those the particular formulaic things they have chosen? Obviously, it's important to use whatever data is available, but isn't the entire notion of a startup to throw away _ALL_ of the prior data and do something that entrenched players won't tend to risk? I think the idea is not to throw away what's fundamentally important to whatever you do because numbers. BuzzFeed is doing much better at _terrible_ and mostly worthless journalism than they would if they hadn't invented, or at least largely propagated, clickbait, sure. Will they ever, possibly, following this course, reach the value of real journalists? They're a distraction. Sometimes the data just tells us what the easiest ways to distract people are, but following that principle alone is creating a world with lots of cruft and very little actual value. |