A friend asked me yesterday why I'm building Hide Feed instead of the million other things I could be working on, so I thought I'd take a step back and explain why I'm building tools to help people spend their time well.

Most people now live in a state of being constantly distracted, and that's no accident — the devices and services we use and rely on are designed to capture our attention as often and as long as possible. At Google, I saw how well-intentioned people who genuinely seemed to want to put the user first ended up shipping products and features that did the opposite. I don't think this phenomenon is unique to Google; this is certainly the case at the vast majority of tech companies.

Here are some of the reasons why this happens:

• Misaligned incentives

  What are you more likely to get promoted for: increasing engagement or shipping a feature that helps people spend less time in your service? Milestones like having people watch 1 billion hours of YouTube every single day are touted as a cause for celebration. But what percentage of those hours would people regard as time well spent? You're going to have a hard time finding support to build a feature that helps people moderate their consumption. Good luck getting people excited about reducing watch hours, thus decreasing ads impressions and revenue.

  The problem is that in order to justify their existence, teams pursue ever-increasing goals. There are always more users to acquire, more use cases to cover, more time that users can spend in the service, and more money to make. The concept of "enough" simply doesn't exist. In an environment where growth is unquestionably and relentlessly pursued, it's nearly unthinkable to make the case that increasing engagement is perhaps not what's best for the user.

• Fear of the competition

  People sometimes use the justification "if we don't do it, then Facebook/Amazon/Apple/[insert competitor here] will" or "well, [competitor] is doing it" to make product decisions. They're afraid that if they don't capture all their user's attention using exploitive and addictive design patterns, they'll lose out to their less ethical competitors who will. So they rush to do it first, which of course, leads to everyone following suit. Thus creating what Tristan Harris calls the "race to the bottom of the brain stem".

• Blind optimization of metrics

  In the pursuit of being data-driven, people often forget that the things we actually care about are often difficult, if not impossible, to measure. Here's how it usually plays out. Say a team has the goal of improving their users' lives as much as possible. In other words, they want to maximize users' well-being. But that's really hard to measure, so they look for a proxy, a figure that can approximate "life improvement". The team decides that if people find their service beneficial, then they'll will use it more, which means that they'll spend more time in the service. Sounds reasonable enough.

  So they set "time-in-app" as their top-level metric and focus on improving that number. They add an endless feed to their app. Time-in-app goes up! They add personalized recommendations to get people to discover new content. Time-in-app goes up! They send countless notifications all day long. Time-in-app goes up! Someone asks if all these changes are actually beneficial for users and they point at the top-level metric. Time-in-app went up!

  They forget that metrics are almost always proxies for the thing they want and not the actual thing. This is why having a bad proxy is worse than having no proxy at all — people optimize for the wrong thing while being led to believe that they're doing a great job.

• Disbelief in the harm of distractions and digital addiction

  Some instances during my time at Google when I was dumbfounded at how other product managers treated our responsibility as creators of products used by millions of people:

  • Someone asked whether we might be sending too many notifications in our product, and the product manager in charge responded that we should actually continue to send more and more notifications and stop only when we see a measurable negative impact on retention. His reasoning was that we are not our users so we should actively disregard our intuitions and rely on data alone. I was surprised that (1) he didn't think it was possible that people might not benefit from the notifications but still use the app because it provides an essential service and (2) he thought people could be so fundamentally different that being distracted more often might not have a negative impact on them.
  • A product lead used the word "addictive" in a product requirements document to describe a major new feature he was proposing. When someone commented that we should probably use a different word, he explained that no, he actually did want users to feel addicted to the feature. I don't think I need to explain why this is problematic.

  In general, there still seems to be a fair amount of skepticism about the negative impact that technology can have on people's well-being, especially within the tech industry. To me, the claim that most people would be happier spending less time scrolling through social media and being less distracted seems as obvious as the claim that most people would be happier eating healthier foods and exercising more. I hope that the debate around the negative impact of common practices used at tech companies follows the path of the debate around the health implications of smoking.

The reason why I'm building tools like Hide Feed is because I think services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. offer a lot of value, but their incentives are diametrically opposed to helping people spend their time in a thoughtful and intentional way. I want to be able to use them without being subject to manipulation that's now common enough to be considered standard practice, and I want to help others do the same.

<aside> 👋 You're reading Road to Ramen, where I think aloud and share everything I learn in exploring the question: Can I make a living building things I love?

by DK the Human (@dk_the_human)

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