In anticipation of my upcoming podcast episode with @ned (coming April 27th), I thought I'd share an episode from my archives. It's with Hooked author, Nir Eyal.
You're probably already aware that social media companies such as Facebook run off of your attention. The more time you spend on the platform, the more advertising inventory there is for Facebook to sell. So, the more money Facebook makes.
Nir's book, Hooked shows product designers how to use psychological principles to increase engagement with products. Or, rather, get users "hooked."
It's hard to blame product designers for wanting to get their users "hooked." They're just responding to economic incentives. If you want your company to beat the competition and survive, you have to attract advertisers or appease investors.
But, these incentives have some consequences when it comes to our attention. More and more people are openly admitting they have a problem controlling their use of social media, and other technology products.
Still, some product designers are claiming they have an ethical responsibility to not design to maximize attention. Former Google product philosopher Tristan Harris started the "Time Well Spent" movement. It's named after the idea that, instead of designing technology products to maximize time spent, they should be designed to create lasting and positive changes in the lives of users.
Companies such as Meetup, Duolingo, and Headspace have joined the Time Well Spent movement. But, it remains to be seen whether the methodologies will be profitable.
STEEM has the potential to fix these broken incentives. I'll save rambling about this for another post, but the crux is that STEEM will incentivize creators and curators to elicit different behavior rather than just paying attention.
In the meantime, enjoy this little debate with Nir Eyal. It's certainly not my best showing, and Nir has thought a lot about this. The biggest issue with his argument – as I look at it in retrospect – is that simply installing an ad blocker doesn't fix these broken incentives.
If you want to be sure to catch my conversation with @ned, all of the subscription options are available at my podcast home page.