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In the early 2000s, a start-up called Yelp offered a new and friendly feature for the emerging World Wide Web. Ordinary users could publish opinions of restaurants that everyone could read. But there was a problem: very few people were interested in writing things on the internet. Yelp engineers had to give them a reason.
The story of how they prompted this content generated by the user is the starting point for AsAn optimistic vision of the history of the Internet by two business and technology veterans. Yelp considered that people may be forced to publish opinions if they received compliments from others. In the end, alongside similar experiences in other technological start-ups, this led to the omnipresent expression of instant recognition which is the similar button, which Bob Goodson and Martin Reeves write, is now clicked on 160 billion times a day.
Like so many features of online lifeWhat is taken for granted was until recently far from obvious. You had to imagine it. The authors note that at the start of the Internet, it was assumed that “only 1% of people would write and create content that people would really read”. The successes of the similar button and Yelp “exploded this percentage”, creating an online world in which everyone was a content creator.
Goodson writes by experience: in their twenties, after being trained as a medievalist, he played an instrumental role in the development of similarities, sketching his iconography “Thumbs-Up”, reflecting on the concept and discussing the code which made it possible to connect a reaction without leaving a page.
His perspective in the field is perhaps the most precious thing in the book. This brings us back to a time when the web was a sandbox full of intelligent and excited people inventing the future. We see how the current means to relate to each other – to express without friction praise in instant messaging or to publish online stuff – were the result of design of often eccentric design a few decades.
If an account behind the scenes is the strong point of the book, it also makes it a little enlightened on the criticisms really criticism on the wider impacts. It is not completely absent. A chapter briefly explores problems such as the drug addiction of smartphones and mental health problems in children, dependence on regular virtual micro-validation or industry that brings together large amounts of personal data from users, without compensation, and then uses them to sell them to measure.
But the authors quickly jump to the defense of the “small friendly button as” and seem worried about its deeper consequences. Discuss the targeting of British information commissioners in 2019 As a “reward loop” Technique that encourages users to engage with a service that collects their data, they seem shocked. “How could it be?” They cry. “A single technical characteristic among many, rooted in human sociality and embraced by millions. Why would someone want to suppress?”
The problem, according to the authors, is “involuntary multiple consequences”. The similar button was invented to “narrow purposes” – as encouraging the content created by the user – but has been applied to “entirely different” and integrated into new commercial models.
It seems naive. Improving the content generated by the user is hardly a narrow objective, and creating a reward loop to encourage users to publish more seems to be a just description of what the designers of the same-de-façon did. In the specific authors, tell the commercial models which now govern which benefits and controls the data emerged in part of the button itself; The unexpected ways of the ways he influenced the Internet was in accordance with the features and the basic Like objective – a functionality not a bug.
Could the book end with speculation about the future: could the button find itself in an eternal conversation with AI? Could we save one as using only a thought? Anyway, Reeves and Goodson do not seem to be no botrés. “History is full of predictions of the dystopian future that has never materialized,” they say.
However, while we look at the deployment of new types of technology in what looks like a darker chapter in the history of the Internet, AsThe airy tone seems discordant. This could also be instructive. I was wondering to what extent the optimistic approach “it will work well at the end” to reflect the attitude of contemporary technologists. I did not find reassuring thought.
Like: the button that has changed the world By Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson Harvard Business Review £ 25, 288 pages
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