Maximizing Communication, not Traffic
26avancil
6Sinclair Chen
5Taymon Beal
7lemonhope
4Adam Train
2Milan W
7lemonhope
6jefftk
6lsusr
5Declan Molony
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There is a related problem where many browser-based productivity tools follow design principles from websites that are trying to get clicks. For example, I commonly run into DB interfaces at work that will return, say, 10 (or 25, or other small number) results per page. Now, it's good design to not let a query that returns, say, a million results, crash the browser. But, if a few hundred, or even a few thousand, results will display within milliseconds, why make me page dozens (or hundreds) of times? (I'm looking at you, GitHub commit history!)
Another example would be Microsoft Office's long history of making design choices that optimize increasing "engagement with the tool" rather than making the tool unobtrusively facilitate the task. They got rid of Clippy, but now they're into obnoxious pop-ups that are designed to call attention to some new gadget or feature.
The "click" economy has had pervasive effects on the software industry.
I wonder if this has more to do with how taxing it is to display 100s or 1000s of elements under modern unoptimized web dev practices. In particular GitHub's commits page used to rerender the entire page on scroll. It is easy to program things arbitrarily badly and many an engineer would prefer just displaying fewer things rather than do it the better-quality but harder way.
1Precisely. And just to trace the profit motive explicitly: many of the features in question that get pop-ups in Office, for example, are just marginally useful enough in some niche that 0.5% of people who see the pop-up might try the feature. In the aggregate, there's some telemetry that says those 0.5% of people spend some very slightly higher proportion of time in the product, and some other analysis demonstrates that people who spend more time in the product are less likely to cancel. Everyone else dismisses the pop-up once, forgets about it, and it's annoying on the margin but means nothing.
Follow that pattern for 20 years, releasing many such features, and we get overloaded / busy / confusing UIs by a thousand cuts, but also with a pretty big moat, created by supporting just that precise workflow that someone in an office job environment has been doing that precise way for a long time now and really doesn't want to adjust. Mainstream corporate culture doesn't mind this at all, in part because there are software products that have had functional monopolies for decades and many workplaces haven't had the opportunity to experience anything different, but also because the little precise fiddly features can make a product really sticky, at the expense of the user experience for everyone else.
(Also, to your GitHub commit history example—yes! And also, I can't even go to the address bar and punch in e.g. &page=100, because they do cursor-based pagination! My rage knows no bounds—and drives me to the CLI tool!)
I think (the results of) this process are the main reason why (some) open source desktop software provides a better user experience despite being developed with fewer resources.
Easy to say when you're already known by almost everyone in your world, have total career security, and have a full-sized family! I've never really done teaser links, but I can see why anyone would. You're more likely to gain some reputation or a job or a spouse if the reader goes to your website and sees your name there at the top.
Also, in terms of value to the reader: my life has changed in a big way because of a blog post I read two times that I can think of, but never from Twitter, despite spending more time reading Twitter than blogs by now. When I see something important on Twitter, I usually bookmark it and forget about it; when I see something important in a blog post, I often act. This is my own fault, but I suspect it's a common experience. Infinite scroll certainly doesn't help.
You're more likely to gain some reputation or a job or a spouse if the reader goes to your website and sees your name there at the top.
Right! I agree there are advantages to getting people onto your site beyond the opportunity to show them ads or convince them to buy a subscription. The post, though, is about the consequences of being in the fortunate position of not needing to do this.
I like that [clickbait] isn't a pressure that I'm under.
I have never clicked on a post by jefftk and then been disappointed that it was clickbait.
As someone who also likes to write for fun, I've noticed that the quality of my writing is impacted (and is probably degraded) by the pressure to perform. Writing on LessWrong is fun and my personal standards encourage me to create the best post I can make. Writing college papers was stressful because I was no longer writing for myself, but for a grade and to impress my professor.
To an extent you're touching on extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.
The same is true for other hobbies like playing piano. Growing up doing competitions was stressful, but writing music today as an adult is fun.
Ultimately it's about authenticity.
- The extrinsically motivated person is obligated to create a product.
- The intrinsically motivated person gets to create art.