Hey Internet! Grow up and make us better | Nicholas Molnar | TEDxVancouver

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

We all know that the values of our community shape the way we look at the world. We all accept that the rules of the road affect how we drive. Or that the laws in our country dictate how we should act. When these values and rules change, we pay attention, because we want to make sure that the change was positive for us, and our community. But one area most of us pay very little attention to are the rules, incentives, and values of the services we use online.
Social status, game mechanics, and relevancy are shaping the way we use the internet, but theyfrequently drive us toward the wrong pursuits, when they could easily be used to motivate us to be happier, smarter, or healthier if that was the goal. A simple rethink on the way we harness the power of the internet might just change our world for the better.

Nicholas Molnar is a Web Strategist at Thirdi Software and the Director Of Technical Awesomeness at Fuck Cancer. He believes that the Internet isn't a force for social good, but the people on it just might be. He is experimenting with using social games - and the power of community - to make people live longer.

So we all know

that the values of our community
affect the way we think,

or that the rules of the road
affect the way we drive;

we all understand
that the laws of our country

dictate how we act.

But I am here to talk to you
about a different kind of influence,

the influence of the web services
that you use every day;

how they play into your life,

and how the tiny decisions in their design
can have ramifications in the real world.

It's easy to think of web services
as being super-human.

Something like Facebook or Google
is so big and complicated

that there's just no way
you can understand

what's going on there.

And there's no way to draw
any human assumptions or motivations

that went into their design.

But I'm going to propose
a short, little thought experiment.

What if your favorite social network
started ranking your friends?

Not friends' posts, not based on
how much it inferred that you like them

but on how much you disagree with them.

Would that make your experience
a little different?

Would that make your world
a little different?

What if your search engine
suddenly took on a Icelandic viewpoint?

Would that be
a different experience for you

when you started looking into
a new topic that fascinated you?

Or if your music store suddenly decided

that you needed
to listen to country music.

That could really change
the way that you look at music.

In any of these cases,
would you really notice

that the service had changed,

or would you think that something
about the world had changed?

To understand this,

you need to understand
how the services get created,

how the rules get built,
and how decisions get made.

So we could think of this
as spontaneous inspiration:

geeks in coffee shops coming up with ideas
and putting them out on the web,

but the truth is any savvy company
worth its salt relies on measurement.

They look at patterns
of how people use their site,

they change things, and they see
if that drives them to use it more.

If they find success,
these methods get published somewhere,

and they spread across the Internet
very, very quickly.

And so, measurement
is at the core of decision-making.

The next logical question is:
what are they measuring?

And the answer
is this loosely-defined term

called "engagement."

Engagement is any time
you click on something on the web,

any time you link to something,
any time you tweet about it,

any time that you do anything
that can be measured

is called engagement.

That has some odd properties.

A long, nasty argument,
something bitter and fiery

that can be very engaging
by any objective measure;

an Internet flame war, highly engaging.

But a short love note that can
make two people's lives much better,

that is not very engaging;

and so the data is wrong.

A hot piece of gossip is more important
than a health advisory?

I don' think that's true.

So what happens

when the best thing for us
isn't very engaging?

We are going to look at three examples

of how driving engagement
can be bad for users.

it's important to note
these aren't the work of evil villains,

these aren't people
trying to manipulate the populace.

These are things happening
all over the Internet.

These are examples of the next big thing.

Companies are investing
millions of dollars to get better at this

without really looking at
any of the costs.

So the first problem is

that really engaging sites
know you too well.

Personalization is the holy grail
of the modern web.

You want an experience
that is totally tailored to the user

that knows what they want before they do.

So for example, when I go to Google,
and I search for Apple, I get this.

But when a farmer goes to Google,
and they search for Apple,

they might get this, and that's great.

That's clearly is giving people
what they want,

and it cost no one anything.

So let's dig into how
a system like this works.

Probably one of the most advanced

is the the Netflix
recommendation algorithm.

Netflix takes a look
at all the movies you've watched,

and all the movies you've rated,
and puts you into a bucket.

And then, it looks at
what other people in the bucket like

that you haven't seen,
or watched, or rated,

and it recommends that to you.

60% of Netflix is 16 million users,
so10 million people, give or take,

use this to watch their movies,
to make their choices.

And once again,
this doesn't sound so harmful.

It's clearly a popular service,
and it's recommending good movies.

I mean, really,
this all sounds pretty good,

but nobody asks which bucket
you really belong in,

which bucket you aspire to be in.

Movies are
a pretty small portion of your life.

You're not making life-and-death decisions
based on this system,

it's just choosing

how you're going to spend
two or three hours of your evening.

What about matters of fact?

Let's imagine the same system
ten years down the road:

it's even better, it's truly personalized,

and you're looking for information
about ancient history.

For 42% of Canadians,
this is what you get as the result.

These 42% of Canadians believe

that dinosaurs and humans
walked the Earth at the same time.

Am I the only one
who finds this a little scary?

That as the system gets better,

it's just reinforcing
people's existing biases?

Because there's no way
that if you are in that 42%,

you are not going to click on this,
you are not going to blog about it,

you are not going to tweet about it;

you are going to drive
every measure of engagement

to tell that service
this piece of content is authoritative.

What if you are wrong?

What if there's a way to find truth
that is being ignored?

It's scary because it's happening already;
you can see right there:

Google news -- you go there today,
and you get recommended news stories,

but it's news stories recommended based on
what you were interested in before,

which means
that it's picking up all your biases

every time you click
on the trashy news article,

it's telling the system
that you like trash.

This system isn't designed
to improve your news reading,

it's designed to get
short term engagement,

just get people to click on the box.

So the next problem
with really engaging sites

is that they're very fun.

And I say this half-jokingly,

but making something a lot of fun
can make people addicted to it

not necessarily
because of the value it delivers

but just because of the compulsion,

the loops that they have designed
into the system

to make it really, really sticky.

And sticky isn't the same as rewarding.

Just how sticky something can become:

World of Warcraft had
6 million man-years invested in it.

6 million years of of someone's time
went into World of Warcraft.

And it's clearly very sticky,
and it's very engaging.

People spend 3 billion hours a week
inside virtual worlds in general.

They are spending billions of dollars
on property that only exists in a database

so this is something
that people really buy into.

And I'd like to dig into why;

maybe we can draw some conclusions
that can be useful elsewhere.

So I think the first reason
people spend so much time in these worlds

is because game designers
take fun seriously.

They optimize for it, they test it,

they are basically reverse engineering
the fun center of the brain.

And they tell us something about ourselves

from what games become successful
and what games are boring.

So evolutionary biologists tell us

that people feel pleasure
after completing a collection or a set.

So for example, if you collect stamps,

and you get the last
of the Mongolian 1956 train series,

you're going to feel pretty good.

But you didn't need to tell that
to the Parker Brothers.

They managed to figure that out
all on their own.

B.F. Skinner spent years studying rats,

and their reaction
to various reward schedules.

What he did was he constructed a box,
and he added a lever and a food dispenser,

and he toyed around

with the ratio of how many presses
of the lever delivered how much food.

And what he found was
that if you vary the size of the prize

and the frequency that it's doled out,
the rats are more likely to keep trying.

But of course,

you could've just looked at a slots player
who is showing the exact same behavior.

And I think this applies
to a lot more than games.

The best example of this
in the offline world

is really Weight Watchers.

They use game mechanics brilliantly
to make a diet regime harder to quit.

Players keep track of points,
they get rewarded

if they stay within a certain range
of points in their week;

and it works.

It's been around for 40 years,
and people are stuck on the system.

But today, the most successful use
of game mechanics has been

to get people to reach out
and connect with one another.

I am talking about social games
like Farmville or Mafia Wars.

They're growing very quickly,

they have hundreds
and millions of players.

How do they do it,
and why are people stuck there?

Why do people spend hours
of their day in these worlds?

I think it comes down to the fact

that we crave a feeling
of connection with others.

When we can't find it,
we become lonely and then depressed.

These games provide an easy way
to escape these feelings,

to be constantly connected
with other people,

and they are perfectly designed

to give you safe, little interactions
with one another,

"You got this free gift."

No one has to think about
the phrasing of the message.

It's all provided for you,

and so it's very, very easy
to stay connected.

I mean, these are
really a place to hang out.

But what kind of a place is it?

It's a place where who you know
matters more than what you know.

That's built right into
the logic of the game.

You can't move onto the next level

until you've brought in
a certain number of friends.

Status is everything.

Status comes from spending lots of time
in this system and lots of money.

It's definitely a place
where yelling is better than talking.

If you look at your Facebook news feed,

you see people just yelling
about these various social games.

So I think the kind of place this is
is really a loud night club.

I mean Zynga makes money

by selling virtual items
to players for real cash,

but it only works if players buy in

just in the same way
that you have to buy in

when a nightclub says that they are cool;

that's not enough.

You have to really believe them

if you want to stand outside
for half an hour in the cold

knowing that the place
is empty on the inside.

The status that the items hold
will be valued

by the people who care about them.

Every time you join the game,
every time you invite a friend,

you make the game more valuable.

You are one more person saying,

"This world is real, everything is OK,
come and join me!"

And if a shallow relationship
is what's needed

just to get people into this world,
to get people to commit,

then they're going to design the game
around facilitating shallow relationships.

But it doesn't have to be like this.

We don't have to spend our time
in cheesy night clubs.

All of these tools
that I have been talking about

can be used to motivate people
to do just about anything.

It can make people happier,
fitter, healthier, even tidier.

One of my favorite examples is Nike Plus.

They do everything in their power
to get people excited about running,

and it works.

Nike Plus runners run more
than if they didn't use the system.

It's just a little tracking chip
they put in your shoe,

and then you run,
and you log your progress online,

and they get to use all these levers
and all these tricks

to make running lots of fun.

ReMission is a game for kids with cancer.

The way the game works
is you move around the human body,

and you are learning about cancer
as you are fighting it with a ray gun.

There was an independent study,

and it found that kids
who played this game

actually handle treatment better;

they are calmer, and more comfortable,
and they do proactive things

that are taught in the game
to improve their situation.

Chore Wars is a game for roommates

(Laughter)

and it makes a game
out of doing housework.

It takes these really tedious tasks,

something that can be divisive
between people who live together,

and it makes it into
something fun and cooperative.

And suddenly, you're playing the game
and building your profile,

you are gaining points,
and you don't even notice

that you are sweeping the floor
or scrubbing the toilet.

Right now, I am working
on a game called Save My Life

with some people in this audience,

and the goal is really to lower
people's risk of dying from cancer.

I think one of the ways
we're going to do that

is to throw out a lot
of this standard matrix,

the way that we look at online services

and only focus on
healthy actions in the real world.

If that's the end goal,
if that's all we're really thinking about,

I think we have a chance of succeeding.

I think there's lots of people
out here in the audience

who are building services for the web,

who are building things online
that have people's attention,

and I hope that you guys all take a moment

and start to think about what else
you could be measuring,

how else you could be making decisions,

and If there's a better way

to make the world a better place
through your service.

Thank you.

(Applause) (Cheers)

(Applause)