HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

joehendrey

no profile record

comments

joehendrey
·4 anni fa·discuss
That's not a psychological experiment - it's barely even an experiment. If someone chooses one over the other, what have they learnt? Are they controlling or even measuring any other variables? It's also not non-consensual. If you go to a store you expect to have options of things to buy - that's the entire point of a store. It's not even an A/B test! Everyone sees both options and makes an informed choice.
joehendrey
·4 anni fa·discuss
UX is orthogonal to the thing most web-based software companies optimise for. Unless users are paying for the service, what the company cares about is user engagement, not user experience. It's not that every software company ever doesn't know what they're doing, it's just that what they're doing is _at best_ tangentially related to improving UX. It is clearly not in the user's best interest that they feel compelled to check Facebook frequently throughout the day, or spend hours scrolling through their feed. 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.

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.