Utilitarianism

If, like me you still use Facebook, then you will have noticed a dark design pattern. The pattern is to hide hyperlinks to stories in the comments, rather than to make it easy to click straight through.

Facebook has convinced content creators and social media monkeys that if they post the hyperlink in comments, rather than directly, it will promote their content and make them more visible.

Rather than encourage me to click through that design pattern encourages me to comment on the clickbait headline, and completely ignore the original post.

Strava intends to float itself on the stock exchange. In my experience of Twitter, Facebook and other social media apps this is the beginning of the end for the app. In my experience when an app such as Zwift gets VC funding it loses control of its app. Users go from being the customer to investors becoming the client. In this situation user experience degrades continuously.

Years ago, when I was using Zwift, they got VC funding, and within days bluetooth pairing between the speed and cadence sensors and Zwift failed and their solution was “Have you tried turning it off and on again” rather than “Which devices are you using, we’ll see if we can recrate the bug and patch the issue?”

Today I saw the headline “Content creator camps help kids become online influencers” and to me, this represents a nightmare, rather than a dream. It represents a nightmare rather than a dream because the notion of creating content to sell, to influence, and to market, rather than to amuse, inform, educate and entertain seems wrong.

YouTube and Instagram are awful. They’re awful because people are creating content to get views, likes and subscribers, rather than to produce individual videos of special interest. Social media should first and foremost be about connecting people, having conversations and establishing strong bonds, that, with time, become friendships in the physical world, rather than online. People should create content that is fun and entertaining.