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Platforms Are Still Flying Blind When It Comes to Societal Impact — Better Metrics Could Help

Metrics are key to how product teams at tech companies function

Aviv Ovadya
OneZero
Published in
6 min readJan 11, 2021

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Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images

After the 2020 election, a Twitter dashboard that I first prototyped four years before started going wild. It estimates misinformation prevalence by monitoring “the percent of retweets and likes pointing toward domains that had made a habit of sharing misinformation.” This metric had been going up throughout the election cycle from a low around 10% up to almost 20% on November 3rd. And then it jumped wildly to 30% over the next week and stayed there for almost a month. Something was likely very wrong.

Tracking this sort of change is a valuable step toward understanding the platform’s impact. It was almost the simplest possible “health metric” — it likely should have triggered alarm bells and executive meetings — it “should” have been equivalent in importance to a significant drop in a revenue dashboard. But it was also clearly insufficiently visible.

In practice, product teams at companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are primarily rewarded for two things: moving metrics and shipping productswhich then move metrics. If you want to change a system, you must understand its incentives. Since metrics are core to changing…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Aviv Ovadya
Aviv Ovadya

Written by Aviv Ovadya

See aviv.substack.com. BKC & GovAI Affiliations. Prev Tow fellow & Chief Technologist @ Center for Social Media Responsibility. av@aviv.me

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