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
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 products — which then move metrics. If you want to change a system, you must understand its incentives. Since metrics are core to changing…
