Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit
What do these platforms have in common?
Their financial incentive-structures are in opposition with their users.
User-time-spent-on-platform is the driving metric behind just about everything they do. It is the measure they optimize for.
For a platform to optimize for this metric is not the same as optimizing for the benefit of its users.
This is a proxy metric, and overfitting for it1 means falling into a trap: hacking your users’ monkey brains to harvest their attention. For profit.
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Views expressed are strictly my own, and are not representative of the views circulating the halls of my previous employer, Meta.
And that’s the problem.
Footnotes
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(in the way only a multi-billion-dollar corporate enterprise can be so incentivized to) ↩