Somewhat recently Medium laid off about a third of their team as they tried to re-orient to figure out what happened when their original vision went away.
Isn’t this a pretty well-worn path by now? Start with lofty visions, discover that your incentive system rewards for eyeballs and clicks, start to optimize for eyeballs and clicks, become shit soon afterwards.
I do think we see this pattern across a lot of content platforms, like YouTube, as well. My impression is that earnest creators who try to make quality things often get out-competed by attention-hijackers / things that optimize for the action rather than the intent (ala Goodhart’s Law).
Somewhat recently Medium laid off about a third of their team as they tried to re-orient to figure out what happened when their original vision went away.
Isn’t this a pretty well-worn path by now? Start with lofty visions, discover that your incentive system rewards for eyeballs and clicks, start to optimize for eyeballs and clicks, become shit soon afterwards.
I do think we see this pattern across a lot of content platforms, like YouTube, as well. My impression is that earnest creators who try to make quality things often get out-competed by attention-hijackers / things that optimize for the action rather than the intent (ala Goodhart’s Law).