
How “engagement” made the web a less engaging place - dotcoma
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/how-the-like-button-ruined-the-internet/519795/?single_page=true
======
tetrep
I think this article missed a huge reason for the race to the bottom, and
that's internet advertising. Articles are not written for "engagement" (per
se), they're written to make the publishers money. I think nobody is actually
expecting anyone to _click_ an advertisement (at least not on purpose), but
getting people to view the article, and therefore view the ad, is likely the
website's primary source of income.

And as more and more ads are viewed and not clicked, (there's probably some
adtech term for this) the price per view is going to go down, which will
encourage _more_ clickbait, which will drive the value of an impression down,
etc.

The article struck me as a bit weird, it complains about yellow journalism,
but it doesn't really dig into why it's happening. It just declares that
shitty articles are written for the metrics, and leaves it at that. As if
"metrics" had any intrinsic value. The mapping of metrics to money, as done by
internet advertisements, is the actual problem.

While engagement is certainly a way to get more people to view more ads, it's
but a tool and symptom of the system it's a part of, not the genesis of it.

~~~
stevesearer
I can't speak for everyone, but my site
([https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com)) keeps the
advertising very much aligned to the content so I do expect that readers will
click the ads on purpose and actually gain value from them.

When you're browsing around looking at office design projects and photos,
you're seeing static advertisements for office furniture and services you
might be interested in if you're in the industry. And if you're spending time
on a website that consists only of office photos, you are probably are in the
group interested in the advertisements.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> I do expect that readers will click the ads on purpose and actually gain
> value from them.

I would be interested to know whether you have any stats to back this up; _if_
it works this would be great.

~~~
stevesearer
What sort of stats are you looking for specifically?

~~~
netsecmonkey
Click Through Rate?

~~~
corin_
CTR doesn't differentiate between accidental clicks and clicks from people who
appreciated the advert. Sure, you could give it a gut judgement based on
industry standard CTRs / personal experience, but it would be very rough.

To actually judge whether users wanted to see the advert the best metric would
be conversions, but that's likely data the site owner wouldn't have (and even
with that data, you'd need something to judge it against - for all the talk
that most adverts are ignored, the fact remains that some adverts through
Google/Facebook/whatever ad-network _can_ lead to direct conversions with a
positive ROI).

Not saying it wouldn't be interesting to hear what his typical CTRs are, just
that nobody should look at the answer and think you can make significant
judgements based on them.

~~~
jimmaswell
Comparing the ctr to the average sounds a lot better to me than "rough".

~~~
corin_
It's better than nothing, but it certainly isn't better than rough.

Setting aside what's "average" \- are you controlling for the type of advert
(both what it's advertising and its format), the type of audience, etc...

Over the years I've seen plenty of examples where CTR and ROI just aren't
linked at all. Right now my work doesn't involve a huge amount of this kind of
advertising (though I do have experience overseeing 7 figure budgets in the
past) so I don't have much great data to pull examples from, but here's one
real example from a couple of months ago:

Two not-huge (sub $10k) media buys, both direct with websites (not through
networks), both with websites that are well-respected by their readers and by
their industry, both using the same adverts. One of the sites excitedly sent
us a report about how well the ads had performed, a 5.63% CTR for banner ads,
clearly we're popular! The tracking on our side showed that of the just over
15k clicks they sent, 12 converted into users for us. Meanwhile the other site
was reporting a 1.32% CTR, sent just over 6k clicks (pricing and order size
wasn't exactly identical between the two sites), and landed 700 new users. I
know both companies well enough to not suspect click fraud, and I've seen the
company that performed badly perform well on other campaigns. But if you just
looked at this comparison, there's no argument that the campaign with a much
lower CTR was actually hitting an audience that was more interested in what we
had to sell than the one with the high CTR. There's lots of possible reasons,
from accidental clicks depending on how sites are set up to the audience
targeting each site did (both are big enough sites to offer specific targeting
within their audience), etc.

(Edit to add that of the two campaigns I compared, both produced a negative
ROI from my point of view, i.e. our CPA was far too high - just one was a lot
worse than the other. I just pulled up the first spreadsheet I saw from the
most recent obvious example I could think of for CTR != ROI.)

If CTR is the only metric you are able to look at, then you can do your best
to make judgements on it. But the reason the adtracking solutions that annoys
so many people exist is because without proper tracking, it's really hard to
actually judge the value of any advertising you buy.

All that said, CTR does still have a big place in the industry, because
generally speaking websites (or ad networks) are able to tell potential
customers their typical CTRs, but aren't able to give data about further down
the funnel (conversions, etc.) because this is data the ad buyers control, not
the ad sellers. But it's really important not to think it tells the full
story.

~~~
stevesearer
I agree that just looking at clicks or CTR can be misleading. Because the
people clicking in my case usually can't buy something directly after clicking
it can be even more murky. But this particular industry has primarily been
advertising in magazines, so in some ways it is actually a better situation
than before.

Also, by ~5% CTR in your example are you meaning that for every 100
impressions that campaign was getting 5 clicks?

~~~
corin_
Yep, CTR is clicks divided by impressions. Although thinking back I believe
they were site skins with billboards, not just banners. Even still, for that
ad format on that site I would have expected 1-2%. (And yeah, skins do tend to
get more accidental clicks than a small banner ad, but in many cases can also
provide better results regardless of accidental clicks.)

Depending on the ad format/placement and many other variables, it's possible
to have a high-ROI advert with a 0.1% CTR, or a low-ROI advert with 5% CTR (or
the exact opposite).

------
tsunamifury
In general, as someone who consulted on the NYT front page, and several other
higher profile news products in 2009 on...

The major change is simply economic: that the product stopped being the
publication and started being the article. The public turning point for this
granularization was when Gawker decided to play per click in March 2008. As
this motivation was generally adopted industry wide, it separated a writers
incentives from that of a the publication as a product.

We no longer had a quality bar set by brands, and instead a race to the bottom
set by individual writers competition. You can see it everything from click-
bait headlines to inflamatory articles, all the way to its final form: Fake
news written only for views at the price of all other qualities.

~~~
gipp
This is a major reason, though certainly not the only reason, that the NYT has
moved toward a primarily subscription-based business model for their online
offerings. It's actually been very successful to date, and I think it's a good
move for resisting the urge of clickbait.
([https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/](https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/))

~~~
gozur88
They don't really have a choice. I don't think you can simultaneously offer a
quality product and still compete for advertising dollars with the Buzzfeeds
of the world. The _Times_ had a huge advantage in that they had a solid pre-
internet brand. I wonder if it's even possible to start a company like that
today without sinking hundreds of millions into getting it off the ground.

~~~
arghimonmobile0
In this space, I'm very curious to see how the English version (just launched)
of decorrespondent.nl will fare. This is a Dutch-language high quality news
platform started only about 3 years ago, and the model is yearly paid
subscription. I think this would be an example of what you're referring to. To
be fair though, the editor who started it came from a well-respected
traditional media newspaper.

------
AndrewStephens
I am doing my part to combat this trend by writing very dull and unpopular
blog entries. No likes for me thank you very much.

~~~
moufestaphio
I'm conflicted on upvoting this comment, because if I do I'm just part of the
problem right?

------
vkb
This is a rather interesting stance to take for a publication whose article
quality has degraded and ad size has increased (thirty-eight trackers,
including two from Facebook, detected by my adblocker when I tried to access
the article) over the past five years to the point where I refuse to read
them.

If you take a look at the homepage through the Wayback archive as it used to
appear in 2005[1], 2011[2], and today, you'll see how content disappears and
click-baity headlines rise over time.

The Atlantic is very much a part of the problem of "the race towards the
bottom" the author describes, and instead of having a discussion about how to
fix it and maybe trying different revenue models, it continues to un-
ironically have share and tweet buttons at the top of this article.

[1] [https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20050210070148/theatlantic....](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20050210070148/theatlantic.com) [2][https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20110731234233/http://www.t...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20110731234233/http://www.theatlantic.com:80/)

~~~
fitzroy
Publishing pieces like this is one of the few ways the editorial side can put
public pressure on the ad sales / revenue side to change or improve their
behavior, particularly if other attempts have been ignored.

Writers may not be able to bite the hand that feeds them, but they can nibble.

------
character0
Unfortunately, most people read the headline and then decide whether or not
they agree with the article. My girlfriend works at a major online media
publication and a lot of their Facebook shares and clicks happen before the
user has viewed the story.

~~~
freshhawk
That makes sense, your likes/shares aren't for _you_ they are for other people
to see. So it's more important to like and share the things you want other
people to see you like/share than to have them reflect your actual
preferences.

------
wonderous
Upvoting something is not bad, but it becomes bad if every upvote is not based
on an expressable reason beyond I agree, support, etc. with no valid
reasoning.

Likes would be a lot more meaningful if randomly the user was required to
express the reasoning behind why they liked something. If the user showed a
pattern of not being able to express why they liked something, at the very
least, other users would not see their vote as part of the count.

This would also likely increase the cost for "like spammers" \- but the real
value would be that likes were more meaningful.

~~~
tabeth
What you mention here is why I disagree with the fact that you can up OR
downvote here without commenting. A comment should be required before you can
upvote or downvote. All for similar reasons you raise here.

~~~
Klathmon
I think a more useful solution is to move away from a binary "up/down" vote to
a system which gives multiple options with differing meanings to each.

Agree, useful/helpful, disagree, not relevant, spam, illegal, inflammatory,
etc...

Then you can apply different weights to different votes and maybe even allow
people to sort by the different values. Even some "dark" UI patterns might
work well like completely ignoring some values (like disagree) and leave them
there as a way for some to express that without having it change anything.

I haven't given much thought to the details, but it seems like this could help
on the surface.

I feel like a major problem would be getting people to actually vote. It's
already hard enough IMO and I frequently forget to vote on comments which I
very much enjoyed and we're very relevant (like your own until this moment),
and needing to have many options to choose from and possibly multiple steps
would make that bar even higher which means less votes overall. Also getting
across the meaning of what each vote really is meant to represent would be
tough as well...

~~~
mikestew
_Agree, useful /helpful, disagree, not relevant, spam, illegal, inflammatory,
etc..._

Now limit the number of times I can vote within a given time period, and
you've reinvented Slashdot.

~~~
Klathmon
But I want the opposite.

Encourage people to vote as many ways as possible, as many times as possible,
as much as possible.

Check off not-relevant, agree, inflammatory. Or maybe disagree and relevant.

No limits, maybe some weighting, but no limits.

Just because some of the ideas have been done before doesn't mean it's just a
reinvention.

~~~
mikestew
_Encourage people to vote as many ways as possible, as many times as possible,
as much as possible._

Here's the magic of the Slashdot system: not everyone has all day to click
voting buttons, but some people do. So what you'll end up with your
proposition is voting dominated by people that make a career out of hanging
out on one web forum, with the conversation consequentially dominated by them.

The Slashdot system is more like jury duty: go in, do your civic duty by
casting your five or ten votes, then go on about your day. I don't want a
justice system dominated by people with nothing better to do than sit on
juries every day.

~~~
Klathmon
That just lowers where the "poweruser" bar maxes out, it still doesn't
encourage users to vote, nor does it really help with the reason for voting
(as after I use my 10 votes, what happens when I see clearly off topic or bad
content? Do I need to un-vote something good? Do I need to choose to un-vote
something "less off topic"? Should I just ignore it?). I have a feeling that
it would be gamed as well, comments or posts earlier in the day would be more
likely to get votes.

I feel making the voting process easier by creative UX would help, and then
weighting can take care of the rest. If a power user votes 100X more than the
average, have their votes count 100X less, or some kind of other method to
weight them back into normalcy and keep the system from becoming a "most
active dictates what the platform is" kind of thing.

~~~
pseudalopex
I think you're overestimating people's need for encouragement. Slashdot
cleverly gives out moderator points occasionally, not regularly, which gives
users the experience of wanting them but not having them.

Slashdot sets lower and upper bounds on comment scores and lets readers set a
threshold. Promoting good posts has more impact than demoting bad ones, so
you'd probably just ignore all but the worst off-topic posts.

Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.

~~~
Klathmon
>Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more
often.

But the nice part is you can control how you approach this weighting.

Perhaps every days votes is normalized to 10. So if I only voted once it
counts 10x, but if I voted 100 times each would count .1x.

There are tons of ways to implement it so the feeling of uselessness doesn't
apply, after all, qt the end of the day we are pretty gullible bags of meat.

~~~
pseudalopex
If the weighting formula is known, I'm going to think twice before casting my
second vote of the day. And it only takes one person to reverse-engineer it.

That might not be a bad thing. I'm just saying it works against your goal of
getting people to vote as many times as possible.

You owe it to yourself to at least study Slashdot's system before putting too
much thought into creative UX, dark patterns, and complex weighting. It isn't
the last word in comment scoring, but as someone else pointed out, you could
probably fill a book with all the lessons that shaped it.

------
sbardle
Didn't Friendfeed invent the Like button?

The article goes too far but there is something to be said about its core
argument.

I don't think the Like button or emojis are good at recognising Value. A
popular extrovert with 1000 fb friends uploads a selfie and gets 100 Likes.

Meanwhile a quiet but conscientious person uploads a before and after picture
of a litter-pick they have undertaken and they get 2 Likes from their 50
friends.

There has to be a better way of recognising and incentivising the latter
activity across social networks.

~~~
et-al
This was an issue when Twitter/Facebook/Instagram switched from chronological
feeds to "curated" feeds. i.e. Let's increase the echo chamber.

~~~
sbardle
Great point.

Also, I think a problem is one person can only send one like.

Returning to my example, I'd like to be able to give the litter picker 20
likes, and maybe the Selfie uploader 1 like.

I think there has to the option of another accreditation technology which runs
across social networks.

It's an area I'm interested in and looking to do my next project on...

~~~
radix07
Then you should go to slashdot, they have been doing that for awhile...

~~~
smcnally
Doing which? Allowing multiple likes? Cross-site accreditation?

Slashdot hands out Moderation points sometimes, and asks people to meta-
moderate sometimes -- both different from Likes.

~~~
slau
For varying definitions of "sometimes."

I don't visit Slashdot anymore, but for the period between 2004-2010, I had
virtually unlimited mod points.

~~~
smcnally
Understood. Even then, though, you couldn't mod the same item more than once,
iirc

------
awinter-py
Simple metrics get us to local maxima, but it's unlikely they can get us out
of them.

This is why privacy matters -- deep consumer data leads to 'binge products'.
This is the business netflix is in. It's possible to create cocaine using this
model but it isn't a great way to make something awesome and new. 'What's new'
will always come from the fringes.

------
Safety1stClyde
I would never put a "Like" button on a web site of mine.

~~~
dotcoma
I took the "Like" button away from my blog.

------
ativzzz
I think upvotes accomplish similar goals. I am significantly more likely to
click on HN/reddit links with high scores. In fact, my attention when browsing
a link aggregator is split about 60/40 between the number of upvotes and the
titles.

I have limited time to browse, and it is much faster to "filter" content by
outsourcing that to you guys.

------
rbhatia
I guess that's downside of focusing on a single metric for defining success
(and the rewards that come with it). Wine ratings, stock prices and
standardized tests have the same downsides of driving homogeneity and risk
avoidance.

------
moogly
Google Reader had "social" features? Heh, I never knew. And I was one of the
people who got mad as hell when they shut it down and tried out ~30 clones
before settling on a self-hosted TinyTinyRSS instance.

~~~
rhizome
I feel the same: the first...third? of the article was basically news to me.

I thought the article was going to be about how every web designer interrupts
whatever it is you're there to read/see/etc. Multiple times. Instead we get
yet another Medium-quality thinkpiece extrapolating someone's personal
experience.

At any rate, the title here should match the article's.

------
untangle
So web content, notably blog posts, have gone the way of musical content. That
is, the written "albums" no longer sell; the market just wants "singles."

So the blog version of "Stairway to Heaven" will become as rare as Bowie and
substantive songs will be as tears in the rain.

------
vtange
Like/Dislike is black and white by nature -> it will naturally divide people
into red camp and blue camp. And those who don't vote are not heard.

~~~
johnchristopher
Correct me if I am wrong but Facebook can track how much time your browser
spends on a given post when scrolling the feed so I am confident that the
voice of those who don't vote is somehow being measured at some point.

~~~
vtange
So only Facebook would know the neutral votes. For everyone else, it's the two
opposing sides/extremes.

------
s0me0ne
It's seo, people outsource writing crap blogs for seo ranking and having fresh
articles that Google wants to see the site is updated

------
sogen
Sadly the article has Revcontent at the bottom. Oh the irony...

------
scelerat
L'enfer c'est les autres.

------
cableshaft
I liked this article. Big thumbs up from me.

~~~
ryan-allen
But did you share it on Facebook?

------
vit05
"Perhaps that’s why podcasts have surged in popularity and why you find such a
refreshing mixture of breadth and depth in that form: Individual episodes
don’t matter; what matters is getting subscribers. You can occasionally whiff,
or do something weird, and still be successful."

Disagree. I think that is one of the main reasons of why podcasts haven´t
become more popular. It is way harder to see people sharing just one episode
or a piece of an episode in a conversation. Usually, they just say they listen
to a particular podcast and you should go and listen to someone talk for 30
minutes before decided if you wanna follow him. And that particular episode
that you chose could one of the worst that the podcaster has produced.

Individual episodes matter, especially to bring more people to your subscribed
list.

A personal example it is how I discover the best, IMO, podcast: 99%invisible.
I was reading the most upvoted comment about a shared video on Reddit about
how Taiwan collect their trash and he was suggesting listen to this podcast
episode [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-
anxiety/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/) After
listening to the episode, and to his sponsor to this particular episode, I
subscribed.

And brands cares way more about engagement than about the numbers of the
subscriber. You could have a big number of subscribers that doesn't react to
anything that you produce. And you could have a small number of subscribers
that really like your content and, especially, trust in your endorsements. And
the best way to metric this is seen the numbers of sharing, likes, and
comments in the content that you produce. Engagement numbers is more important
than plain numbers, for everybody.

[http://www.adweek.com/digital/micro-influencers-are-more-
eff...](http://www.adweek.com/digital/micro-influencers-are-more-effective-
with-marketing-campaigns-than-highly-popular-accounts/)

