I was listening to the Next Billion Seconds podcast the other day. They made the point that in social media 'engagement' is a polite euphemism for 'addictiveness'.

I've rephrased your post to show why I find it unsettling:

> Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority find the algorithmic model to be more addictive. Should we let a tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?

For example, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t enjoy checking my email. But I still compulsively check it dozens of times a day. I think it’s fair to say that I’m an addict.

Do you enjoy checking Facebook? Ask your friends. I know what mine said.

That’s not addiction, that’s a healthy habit. If you were truly addicted to working out, you’d be late for work because you wanted that last mile. Or miss your kids birthday party to hang out at the CrossFit gym. It would consume your time and attention to the detriment of other needs and the needs of others.

That’s the spirit the parent comment is using the term in. As something that demands more of your attention than it deserves.

> Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences.

I'd like to see mostly what my friends are up to. Instead of that, on Facebook at least, I mostly see viral videos from whatever groups I happen to be in. It is true that a lot of the time, those suck me into watching them. Technically that counts as "time spend in the app", but I also see that I'm wasting a lot of my time on crappy pointless videos and because of that I've actually not opened the app at all from time to time. In general, my attitude towards it has also changed - it used to be "ooh, exciting, let's see what's happened", now it's more like "meh, maybe this time there is something interesting, let's check, although probably not". Jaded is probably the correct description.

I think ultimately what you need to optimize for is much harder to measure. I think for most senarios it is "value a user can recieve for a given amount of time". When measuring this, time spent in the application is acutally detrimental unless you are increasing the value a user is getting from the application by a substantial amount.

Being addictive is not a net positive!

I also am quite free to have the opinion that a lot of content is simply a waste of time. I also propose the question of how much actual enjoyment it produces and the quality of said enjoyment. You are free to think otherwise :)

This is a very deep question you’re asking, and I don’t know the answer. But, this boat only goes in one direction so let’s make the best of it.

But seriously, sure other sorting methods are useful. I would like to have many options, but I can’t think of a better default for this use case. Can you?

> ...as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model.

You just don’t understand my point. Maybe read it again. I dunno. But ...

As demonstrated by their engagement, people prefer doing whatever their boss tells them to do.

As demonstrated by their engagement, people don’t actually like sex very much at all.

Machines can't do that, silly. They can only promote hate speech with 100 comments and lolcat pictures with 100 likes. The only option is for them to take a back seat and present an ordering that is semantically meaningful to the human computer operating the tool -- the only one qualified to perform any kind of filtering and sorting.

"Relevance ranking" in social networks is a result of engineers having zero clue what applications they're working on, but that's just typical IT people divorced from reality for you. As you said, they find it acceptable because it's written in Angular v7 and uses ML and A/B testing revealed a 3.2% increase in clicks. The idea of the software industry helping real relationships is in general hilariously contradictory (but of course there are exceptions!)

Engagement means people are engaging more with non-chronological feeds than with chronological ones. This isn't just about blindly accepting what you are given, it's also about caring more for pertinence than order.

If you give no other option than algorithmic ranking that is not designed to maximize my utility but your revenue, that is as close to evil as you can get in my books.

(Edit: as close to evil in the context of social media content sorting. There obviously are more evil things than that...)

On the other hand, non-chronological timelines are celebrated in communities like Scuttlebutt, but it's because we have control and you can choose the UX that works best for you without sacrificing connectivity.

Diagnosis: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm... First round of treatment: https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-interne...

Add to that a perverse incentive (money from ads and 'engagement') for the company designing the algorithm. How can that not lead to evil?

Because one is essentially a feed of data, and the other is obviously/openly being manipulated based on things that I did not choose. The fact remains that removing that option is problematic. They switched the default - fine, makes sense. To remove the basic time ordered feed just shows they aren't interested in allowing users real choice.

I largely mothballed my facebook use years ago - so I'm not a user they should optimise for. But probably have bailed at that anyway.

All engagement measures is time spent on the site. Or how much people are prepared to tolerate.