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A comment on Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted Online. Parent comment

Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by jedberg on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:08PM (#37682061)
Most businesses have one or more metrics that they track that mirrors customer happiness or satisfaction. For example Netflix has total paid subscribers. Amazon has monthly active users (as does reddit and whole bunch of other companies). Reddit also has daily average time on site.

You could easily tie compensation to these metrics. Of course in some cases these too can be gamed, but as long as you find a metric that mirrors customer happiness, then everyone is incentivized to increase customer happiness.

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Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by peter422 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:30PM (#37682957)
You can increase monthly active numbers by making unsubscribing harder.

You can increase average time on site by just funneling people lowest common denominator garbage all day.

Pretending there is some magic metric here and Google isn’t meeting it is ridiculous. Google is very well liked by the average person!

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Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by gen220 on Thursday September 28, 2023 @12:26PM (#37691943)
Those metrics are in fact routinely gamed by well-meaning PMs whose (perceived) compensation is affected by those numbers, with UX-dubious features like unnecessary and disruptive notifications, highly discounted introductory promotional periods that most users churn out of, and so on.

Hence the adage: the most effective way to take a useful metric for measuring progress towards a goal and make it useless, is to make the metric the goal.

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