Nate Parrott’s Nice and Engaging Website

Smart Events, Smarter Communities: Leveraging AI to Power Engagement

This session is about practical, usable stuff — no fluff.

Tally Counter & Tracker Daily - Apps on Google Play

Count anything by tap with widget: goal,coins,days,clicks,numbers,progress,reps

matduggan.com

I wrote a browser extension to try and make finding random, independent websites more fun.

Artificial adventures

I've been playing around with AI. Nothing I'm doing is particularly exciting, but the internet tends to only surface the most extreme opinions in either direction and I found it useful to hear from friends who have opinions that aren't optimized for click-through rate.

Mustard Notes (@mustardnotes.com)

I'm a firefox & chrome browser extension that lets you put notes on any website AND have your bluesky/GitHub followers see them! chrome.mustardnotes.com firefox.mustardnotes.com (still in development and a hobby project so expect some rough edges 🙃)

Why infinite scroll's inventor wants to kill his creation : The Indicator from Planet Money

We practically live on our phones these days. Scrolling and scrolling, endlessly. Entrepreneur Aza Raskin is responsible for creating this infinite scroll. He also testified against Meta, who have been under fire — and in court — charged with making their apps addictive to children.  On today’s show: Raskin tells us about the changes he thinks platforms should make to help people take their attention back. Come see Planet Money live on stage! 12 cities. Details and tix here: planetmoneybook.com Related episodes: The Social Media Crisis How algorithms are changing the way we speak For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Cooper Katz McKim. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.

Bluesky Analytics

Engagement analytics for Bluesky accounts. See which posts resonated most.

Give Lively - A Free Fundraising Platform For Nonprofits

We built and support a powerful and practical fundraising platform that is free for nonprofits and intuitively easy to use for donors. Sign up today for Fundraising Pages, Text-to-Donate, Peer-to-Peer, Event Ticketing, and more!

Neocities

Create and surf awesome websites for free.

Bookmarks

Stairjoke.Ninja, an old-fashioned personal website

The Challenge of Understanding What Users Want: Inconsistent Preferences and Engagement Optimization

Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments, and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is that incentives are misaligned: platforms are not optimizing for user happiness. We suggest the problem runs deeper, transcending the specific incentives of any particular platform, and instead stems from a mistaken foundational assumption. To understand what users want, platforms look at what users do. This is a kind of revealed-preference assumption that is ubiquitous in the way user models are built. Yet research has demonstrated, and personal experience affirms, that we often make choices in the moment that are inconsistent with what we actually want. The behavioral economics and psychology literatures suggest, for example, that we can choose mindlessly or that we can be too myopic in our choices, behaviors that feel entirely familiar on online platforms. In this work, we develop a model of media consumption where users have inconsistent preferences. We consider a platform which wants to maximize user utility, but only observes behavioral data in the form of the user’s engagement. We show how our model of users’ preference inconsistencies produces phenomena that are familiar from everyday experience but difficult to capture in traditional user interaction models. These phenomena include users who have long sessions on a platform but derive very little utility from it, and platform changes that steadily raise user engagement before abruptly causing users to go “cold turkey” and quit. A key ingredient in our model is a formulation for how platforms determine what to show users: they optimize over a large set of potential content (the content manifold) parametrized by underlying features of the content. Whether improving engagement improves user welfare depends on the direction of movement in the content manifold: For certain directions of change, increasing engagement makes users less happy, whereas in other directions on the same manifold, increasing engagement makes users happier. We provide a characterization of the structure of content manifolds for which increasing engagement fails to increase user utility. By linking these effects to abstractions of platform design choices, our model thus creates a theoretical framework and vocabulary in which to explore interactions between design, behavioral science, and social media. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship and Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative [Grant W911NF-19-0217]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03683 .

The Curiosity Box – The Subscription for Thinkers

Vsauce delivers viral science toys, brain-busting puzzles, and other cerebral wonders to your door each season.

zio.sh/didweb.watch

🦋🤖 Bluesky bot to track did:web usage — https://bsky.app/profile/didweb.watch