Big Tech Companies Try to Self-Medicate

(Bloomberg) -- Big tech companies are making changes to some of the viral mechanics that drew users to their services in the first place. Instagram has started to hide “Like” totals on posts in the U.S. and will soon do it for the rest of the world. Twitter Inc. now gives its members the option to hide replies to their tweets, allowing them to partially conceal the ugliness and combativeness that’s endemic on the service.

And Amazon.com Inc., a pioneer of crowdsourcing product reviews, recently changed the way it displays customer feedback at the top of all product page on the site. It now prioritizes ratings from customers over those who took the extra time to write a review. It’s the first such adjustment in 20 years.

The companies all deserve credit for conscientiously reconsidering the consequences of their design choices. These seemingly simple mechanics created bad incentives—be it the mental toll of the Instagram popularity contest, the bullying nature of online comments or the fake reviews paid for by desperate brands.

But examine these moves further, and it’s easy to conclude that they don’t completely fix the unhealthy dynamics that have ruined our attention spans, corrupted political discourse and tricked us into buying junk.

Let’s take Instagram’s move first: The photo app is obscuring the number of Likes on everyone’s pictures. A few prominent Instagram personalities condemned the decision and threatened to seek the dopamine hit of Like totals elsewhere. “I’m not posting on IG after this week cuz they removing the likes. Hmmmm what should I get into now?” tweeted singer Nicki Minaj (108 million Instagram followers).

But the most striking aspect of Instagram’s change is how feeble it is. While users can no longer compare the relative popularity of their photographs to other people’s, they can still find the Like totals on their own pictures with an additional tap. Instagram is owned by Facebook Inc., famous for testing changes to see how they impact user behavior, and it’s likely the company has concluded that without Like totals, people will post more. The move is unlikely to change the feedback loop of attention and approval that’s been linked to negative outcomes like increased anxiety and depression, especially acute in teenagers.

Twitter’s change is similarly thin. Users can conceal replies to their posts, but another user needs only to click an additional link to unlock them. Twitter is likely hoping that the option to conceal replies can stimulate casual users to post more. It’s not so much hiding the vitriol endemic to its discourse as much as it’s offering users the option to throw a white sheet over it.

Amazon’s move is a little harder to understand. I started noticing customer rating totals were appearing instead of review totals over the summer. In an emailed statement, an Amazon spokeswoman says only that it’s easier than ever to submit a one- to five-star rating on a purchased product and that the company is “always experimenting to provide a better shopping experience for customers.”

The change may have been driven by similar thinking to Instagram and Twitter. Over the years, Amazon’s product review system has been famously corrupted by competitive and avaricious third-party sellers (see here, here and here). Those merchants give out free products to earn reviews and try to break Amazon’s rules by paying people to gin up positive feedback, which then improves their visibility through the site’s search engine.

By changing the overall feedback mechanism to prioritize customer rankings, Amazon may be trying to break this cycle of gamesmanship. But like Instagram and Twitter, it’s hesitant to disavow the reviews tool altogether. Customer reviews are still easy to find, even in cases where the bulk of them were created by content farms of paid contractors.

Tristan Harris, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit that aims to get technologists to consider the impact of their work, is largely unimpressed. “It’s fine and great that they are changing some of the feedback loops,” he says, but “you have this digital Frankenstein wrecking the world, and this is basically just tying a pinkie behind its back.”

Here’s a more optimistic way to think about these changes: They’re a start.

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To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net

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