Products and incentives

There’s an old line about internet businesses: if the product is free, you’re the product. It’s catchy, but not quite right. The simpler way to understand consumer internet systems is to look at advertiser incentives. You’re not the product. But you are who the advertiser is trying to reach, and that’s where the money comes from and that’s the outcome the product is architected for. On a feed, the goal is to keep you scrolling, because more scrolling means more views, and more views means more clicks, and clicks are what most advertisers actually pay for. If you’re searching, the incentive is subtler: worsen relevance just enough that paying for placement matters, but not so much that the product breaks. Advertisers pay for ranking and prominence, and that only works if money can distort the results a little. Good search systems maintain a line money can’t cross. Once you see feeds and search this way, the rest of their design makes sense. Three takeaways: Be intentional about any…