So what’s a better way to think about solving these problems from a design perspective?
This question is one of the reasons why we founded the Institute, because there are actually a number of things that have been tried in the space, with varying degrees of success, but a lot of knowledge exists. in small groups within companies and it was ‘not widely available.
One of my favorite examples that I’ve always looked up to is Google’s search quality team and the work they’ve been doing at least until 2015 or so. Google has developed guidelines for search quality. Everything is very objective; they don’t evaluate content qualitatively, they just look for objective criteria. A lot of it is really just basic tests of media literacy, like: All things being equal, it would be better if publishers or content creators were transparent about their children. their people. Another way is different ways to gauge the amount of effort put into content, because all things being equal, it would be better to put in more effort.
However, on this point, in terms of defining quality metrics, it seems, on the one hand, like: Duh, of course, platforms should try to show users the good, not show them the bad. bad. But they seem to shy away from this, at least in the case of Facebook, because they fear being seen as playing favorite videos, especially among user-generated content.
A lot of social media companies came out of the internet age of the 2000s, a lot of their mission statements and values are geared towards giving people a voice. YouTube’s mission statement is “Give people a voice and show them the world”. Twitter’s mission statement is, I forgot exactly—
“Give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
“Instant without a barrier”, yes. Facebook’s original mission statement was to “connect everyone in the world”.
All of these mission statements are very much like, “Let the people talk, show everyone things, bring people together” and these statements do not fit any objective definition. in terms of quality, to say the kind of content we want to be successful on the platform.
And all of them are very easy to grow. We shouldn’t be surprised at all that the big platforms that survive the first generation or two social media companies are the ones that prioritize growth, the ones that show that the bigger you are, the more useful you are. useful and so you have to get as big as possible as quickly as possible.
There is a pessimistic implication of that, which is that Facebook and other dominant platforms make a lot of money doing things the way they do now. And one thing that the Facebook Papers reveal is that it is just as dominant as Facebook—or Meta—Being in the market, they are still really scared about potential competitors like TikTok. So if you’re proposing to make changes that might sacrifice some of those immediate short-term interactions, imagine the leaders of these companies thinking they can’t take the risk. of some depressed kids opening TikTok because Facebook is trying to get them to read. One New Yorkers article. So are we nave when we talk about platforms changing direction this way?
