it's ironic how many people believe the lie that this country cares about child safety when not a single law has been changed to stop school shootings nor a single investigation since The Release of the Files...
And human behavior is absolutely shaped by our environments and systems. We're quite easily manipulatable - whether we want to admit/realize it or not.
Social media literally hired human behaviorists to design their apps to make them more addicting. You're quite mistaken if you dont think apps arent engineered to drive human behavior.
Dark Patterns are very prominent and well known thing in tech UI.
I mean competed away. There are a lot of dating apps out, probably a lot more than you think. Zero of them were bought out by Match before the market made them huge.
I'm just one person, but it seems to happen quite consistently that the profiles that appeal to me begin to only be offered behind a rose or some other paywall... rarely if ever in the "free" swipe feed.
User behavior is shaped by systems just as much as systems are shaped by humans. There's a reason social media has the hold on us it does even though we all hate it.
You can absolutely design apps in a way that doesn't incentivize the worst human behaviors. Tech socially engineers our behavior all the time - just rarely ever in our favor.
We humans are both easily manipulated and often too egocentric to realize and acknowledge that fact.
"There's a reason social media has the hold on us it does even though we all hate it."
The reason is stated vs revealed preferences. It's that simple. People say they hate social media while their actions reveal something else. So yes, you can easily design an app that doesn't incentivize the behaviours we say we don't like, and we won't use them, because despite saying we don't like them, we prefer them.
I thought getting bought by the Tinder people is when OkC became more like Tinder.
And OkC was the best at finding people I'd at the very least be friends with - which is foundational to me anyway. And Hinge loves hiding those profiles behind roses.
Its switch to a swiping interface didn't happen until a couple years after Match bought it. And everything became like Tinder, not just Match apps. Because it genuinely worked better.
And yeah I can totally see how the long profiles could be useful for finding friends. But that's not what the site was ever primarily meant for.
The reality is that OkC basically started out for grad students in Brooklyn to be able to find each other, the kind of person who loves writing and reading profiles. But that's not most people, and so as they expanded across the country they shifted to the format that worked better for most people.
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