People seem to frequently forget that your measurement is always a proxy. A proxy for what? That's for you to decide. But you can't ever measure anything directly.
It's sadly common even in data science but the biggest offenders I see are business people. You can't use metrics without understanding what they're for otherwise you'll just enshitify your product. Be that number of clicks, time on page/site, number of academic citations, whatever. They're meaningless at face value. A good example is time on site. That's great for social media like YouTube where it generally correlates strongly to "using the website for what the website does" but even then it can be "scrolled for 20 minutes looking for something to watch, gave up. But on a news site, no one fucking cares about that. Your job is to provide information, so time on {page, site} might actually be a negative because it doesn't necessarily mean people are reading that whole time but they might be struggling to find the information they are looking for. A confusing UX also optimizes time on site.
No it isn't, but it looks like it is. The same is also true with (abusive) monopolies. They make less money stagnating. The difference in both is that it's easier to be poorer. But you give up a lot of value for easy money, and let's be real, when you're that rich it's no longer about the (utility of) money but the power and high score/bragging rights.
(Markets can work with monopolies, even efficiently, but it's the problem of benevolent dictators. They're never benevolent and eventually abuse their power. Competition is good for everyone involved because a stagnating monopoly is just one overtaken by bureaucrats who don't know how to make money, i.e. it is already dying)
People seem to frequently forget that your measurement is always a proxy. A proxy for what? That's for you to decide. But you can't ever measure anything directly.
It's sadly common even in data science but the biggest offenders I see are business people. You can't use metrics without understanding what they're for otherwise you'll just enshitify your product. Be that number of clicks, time on page/site, number of academic citations, whatever. They're meaningless at face value. A good example is time on site. That's great for social media like YouTube where it generally correlates strongly to "using the website for what the website does" but even then it can be "scrolled for 20 minutes looking for something to watch, gave up. But on a news site, no one fucking cares about that. Your job is to provide information, so time on {page, site} might actually be a negative because it doesn't necessarily mean people are reading that whole time but they might be struggling to find the information they are looking for. A confusing UX also optimizes time on site.