> what they're doing is _at best_ tangentially related to improving UX . . . You can spin that as the company just improving the experience so that people want to keep using it, but fundamentally it is intentional psychological manipulation.
So we agree that ab testing is good for optimizing toward a numerical objective. You then seem to think that either:
A) There are simply no numerical objectives that correlate with good ux or
B) Every software company ever is optimizing toward perverse incentives by which they take more money from their users while making their products worse
It’s probably B that you believe, and this is such a myopic and paternalistic view. There are a couple cases where it’s a problem, eg cancellation flows. But this problem is orthogonal to AB testing (try cancelling your newspaper subscription in 1994). AB testing is mostly just trying to improve the rate at which people sign up or buy something, and in this case, your objection hinges on the hidden premise that people are idiots.
> Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
So we agree that ab testing is good for optimizing toward a numerical objective. You then seem to think that either:
A) There are simply no numerical objectives that correlate with good ux or
B) Every software company ever is optimizing toward perverse incentives by which they take more money from their users while making their products worse
It’s probably B that you believe, and this is such a myopic and paternalistic view. There are a couple cases where it’s a problem, eg cancellation flows. But this problem is orthogonal to AB testing (try cancelling your newspaper subscription in 1994). AB testing is mostly just trying to improve the rate at which people sign up or buy something, and in this case, your objection hinges on the hidden premise that people are idiots.
> Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
One man’s ponens is another’s tollens. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/