transform-social
@gurupanguji🔗 Most tech companies and platforms really don’t know what people like or why…
From the head of design at Substack,
I am very confident this is true of TikTok today. TikTok is an amazing product because of its format and its ranking (and how they relate). There are possibly “experts on psychology” in their buildings, writing long emails no one reads, but TikTok doesn’t know the first thing about “how to control people” or “who you are at a deep level” or “the ways to exploit the limbic system” or anything else along those lines; what they have is: vast and fresh inventory and incredible ranking, especially their explore / exploit balance. TikTok executives cannot predict what their children or spouses will do, let alone what you or the rest of the American people will do. They control and understand far less than people suspect.
The irrepressible monkey in the machine – by Mills Baker
While the specific post itself is a reaction to another incredible post by Frank Lantz, this part rang true to me. The other bit that resonated was this:
Inside companies I’ve worked at, the only way to describe the relationship to users and customers is to say it was fearful. Companies are desperate to appeal to the market; companies are terrified of their users, whom they do not really understand.
While the state was not always fear / terror, there’s a kernel of truth to this observation.
It’s also hilarious to imagine that the tech platforms really have the capability to influence the people to consider their brand or a competitor’s brand in any way. The core of the reason for this is inherently an iterative game.
This competitive dynamic is omnipresent. Even if some Ph.D figured out “how humans work” in some sense that enabled a company to exploit it, humans would very quickly incorporate this implicit or explicit knowledge into their thinking and the hack would stop working.1
The point is merely that there is no permanent hack to be found in any of these fields, or in the academic work they ostensibly make use of. Humans adapt, change, shift, and remain just outrageously hard to influence, let alone “control,” and this cannot change, no matter how expert the efforts at manipulation are.
trndgtr.com
Hacker News
Dave Rahardja
Corina Karstenberg
formuchdeliberation
Salve J. Nilsen
no-advice
µP
