Twitter recently rolled out a new redesign and was met with backlash from most users. This is because users automatically navigate interfaces that are used for a long time. In a way, navigation is similar to a routine, a habit, and when the interface design changes, the user navigation habits must change as well. This increases cognitive load and can reduce user satisfaction with the product.

Users are resistant to change

Familiarity bias is another reason people dislike redesigns. It refers to a mental phenomenon where people opt for the more familiar options, even though these often result in less favorable outcomes than available alternatives. The Endowment Effect could also be a reason how people tend to assign a greater value to an object that they own, rather than an object that they don’t. In the case of the redesign, this phenomenon can lead users to prefer the existing version.

Familiarity bias and Endowment effect

<ul><li>Allowing people to opt-in to changes when the redesigned version is introduced. This gives users a feeling of control and can make them more amendable towards the changes even if they don’t opt-in. </li><li>Radical redesigns should be avoided whenever possible. Make small incremental changes Previous studies have found that small changes are usually not observed when people behave habitually.</li><li>Preparing the users for the upcoming changes is crucial. Creating expectations can make users more likely to adapt to the changes and accept the redesign. Apple has been doing this for years.</li></ul>

Ways to improve the way users experience the redesign

Recently, Twitter unveiled a new design for its website and app, including a new font, higher-contrast colors, and less visual clutter. According to Twitter Design, the changes are meant to make the…

Psychology

Recently, Twitter unveiled a new design for its website and app, including a new font, higher-contrast colors, and less visual clutter. According to Twitter Design, the changes are meant to make the platform more accessible and allow users to be more focused.

As part of the makeover, Twitter created its own font called Chirp. In the past, the company used typefaces such as SF Pro, Roboto, and Helvetica Neue. The main reason behind the change was improving legibility. White space has also increased and the site’s colours now have higher contrast which makes photos and videos stand out more.

So me Twitter users don’t appear to be handling the change particularly well; they immediately tweeted they weren’t fans of the changes and called the new font “ugly” or “unfinished.”.

This isn’t the first time a redesign creates a backlash. In fact, most product redesigns are met with scepticism and confusion from users. Andy Warhol’s quote below from his bestseller “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again” expresses how many users feel when they encounter an unexpected redesign:

Everything was fine, the same as always. I hate it when you find a product you like that fits a particular need of yours, and then they change it. ‘Improve’ it. I hate ‘new, improved’ anything. I think they should just make a completely new product instead and leave the old one alone. That way there would be two products to choose from, instead of half an old one. — <a dir="ltr" href="http://vestoj.com/the-philosophy-of-andy-warhol-from-a-to-b-and-back-again/" rel="noopener">Andy Warhol </a>

Psychology plays a big role in this. Even when the redesign has been extensively tested with users and is an improvement compared to the previous versions, users are likely to react negatively towards it. This is due to a number of reasons discussed below.

Users automatically navigate in interfaces that are used to for a long time. In a way, navigation is similar to a routine, a habit , and when the interface design changes, the user navigation habits must change as well. This increases cognitive load and can reduce user satisfaction with the product. <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Changing-circumstances%2C-disrupting-habits.-Wood-Tam/409938fde7da711cfacaf2199dcc86106484b59f" rel="noopener">Research </a>has shown that habits are hard to change and require a lot of conscious effort in order to change, which can cause distress.

Some insights into this behaviour can be drawn from the <a dir="ltr" href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82894184.pdf" rel="noopener">user resistance to change (URTC) framework </a>, which has been used to address technology acceptance. URTC refers to an adverse reaction to changes experienced by the users when they encounter new technology. Resistance can be either active (visible and easy to identify, like in the case of Twitter users complaining about the latest redesign) or passive (more difficult to detect and manage). This idea relates to the concept of <a dir="ltr" href="https://medium.com/r?url=https%3A%2F%2Fideas.repec.org%2Fa%2Fblg%2Freveco%2Fv73y2021i1p53-63.html" rel="noopener follow">resistance to change </a>, which was first introduced by Kurt Lewin in 1947 and can be defined as a negative attitude towards change. <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262488728_An_Exploratory_Study_of_User_Resistance_in_Healthcare_IT" rel="noopener">According to researchers </a>, the main reasons behind resistance to change are perceived loss of control and perceived dissatisfaction.

Familiarity bias is another reason people dislike redesigns. It refers to a mental phenomenon where people opt for the more familiar options, even though these often result in less favourable outcomes than available alternatives. Familiarity bias was first described by Daniel Kahneman and it’s a well-documented heuristic (shortcut) our brains take that makes us prefer familiar experiences.

According to <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/fresh-vs-familiar-aggressive-redesign/" rel="noopener">NN/g </a>“users don’t care about design for its own sake ; they just want to get things done”. Unlike designers, most users don’t spend ages analysing or admiring the design of a product. They are satisfied with a design when they know the features and can immediately find the ones they need. A radical redesign interferes with this making them having to relearn how to find the features they like using and causing frustration.

The Endowment Effect is a concept in behavioral economics that refers to how people tend to assign a greater value to an object that they own, rather than an object that they don’t. In the case of the redesign, this phenomenon can lead users to prefer the existing version and experience aversion towards the new one. The status quo bias is another cognitive bias similar to the endowment effect; people have a preference for the current state of affairs. More specifically, people tend to accept and prefer the default option instead of comparing the actual benefit to the actual cost. As a result, even if the redesign is ultimately improving user experience, users will — at first — show a preference for the design they’re used to.

People don’t like changes but this doesn’t mean that we should never redesign products. Below are some steps we can take to improve the way users experience the redesign.

Lack of control and resistance to change can make redesign unpopular. There is a solution to this; allowing people to opt-in to changes when the redesigned version is introduced. This gives users a feeling of control and can make them more amendable towards the changes even if they don’t opt in. This can also be done by giving users the option to switch between the beta version and the current one. If a user opts in to an early release, they are more likely to tolerate bugs and glitches and accept changes to the design. This way also allows user researchers and the design team to collect more data and validate their redesigns with a larger number of actual users while making them feel more included in the process. Rolling out significant product changes without warning or explanation, without allowing them to go back to the previous interface, makes users feel powerless and not valued.

Another way to minimise user backlash is by conducting more user research . Learn how and why users use the product and what’s important to them allows us to ensure the new design finds solutions to their pain-points while ensuring they can still find the product useful. It is important to know which functions and aspects of the product are important for our users and ensure these are not affected negatively by the redesign. User research also makes users feel more involved in the change process.

Radical redesigns should be avoided whenever possible. Making small incremental changes is another way to redesign products without upsetting the users. Previous studies have found that small changes are usually not observed when people behave habitually. In this approach, the design team makes small changes gradually so that users barely notice them.

Preparing the users for the upcoming changes is crucial. Creating expectations can make users more likely to adapt to the changes and accept the redesign. Consequently, communication with users is necessary at this stage. Companies like Apple have been using this strategy, which often ends up making users look forward to the upcoming changes.

Finally, it’s good to wait a few weeks before deciding that the redesign was a failure. Most of the time, especially when the redesign has been researched and developed correctly, users get used to it, end up appreciating, and preferring it to the previous version!

Ali, M., Zhou, L., Miller, L., &amp; Ieromonachou, P. (2016). <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0268401215000948" rel="noopener">User resistance in IT: A literature review </a>. International Journal of Information Management , 36 (1), 35–43.

HUÈšANU Alexandra, 2021. “<a dir="ltr" href="https://ideas.repec.org/a/blg/reveco/v73y2021i1p53-63.html" rel="noopener">Do Users Hate Redesign? — A Literature Review On User Resistance To Interface Changes </a>,” <a dir="ltr" href="https://ideas.repec.org/s/blg/reveco.html" rel="noopener">Revista Economica </a>, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Faculty of Economic Sciences, vol. 73(1), pages 53–63, March.

Ru, C. (2020). <a dir="ltr" href="https://medium.com/swlh/this-is-why-users-hate-redesigns-5e7c88c6e414" rel="noopener follow">This Is Why Users Hate Redesigns </a>. Start it up

Wood, W., Tam, L., &amp; Witt, M. G. (2005). <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Changing-circumstances%2C-disrupting-habits.-Wood-Tam/409938fde7da711cfacaf2199dcc86106484b59f" rel="noopener">Changing circumstances, disrupting habits </a>. Journal of personality and social psychology , 88 (6), 918.

Yang, L. (2020). <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.prototypr.io/why-users-hate-redesign-f23c5c2f9d8a" rel="noopener follow">Why Users Hate Redesign </a>. Prototypr.io

Why do people hate redesigns?

New research revealed that the biggest investors in the world don't make the best decisions when selling stocks. This came to light when an investor's stock selling decision was compared to a strategy which is almost like throwing a dart at a list of names that exist in their portfolio. If their clients had instead hired the monkey with darts to randomly choose which stocks to sell, the client's portfolios would have earned 0.8 percentage points more per year.

Monkey randomly throwing darts are better stock sellers.

Our poor decision-making is tied to our thinking. Investors use System 2, the more deliberative, rational way when making buying decisions. And they use System 1 the automatic, instinctual way when making selling decisions. When investors thought more deliberately about selling the stock, their decisions improved.&nbsp;

Use System 2

A new study finds finance professionals fail at their jobs in a surprising way. There are lessons for all of us.

Investing

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Frustrated investor, losing to a drunken monkey

If you're Jeff Bezos, you're not going to have some random dude manage your money and hope for the best. You're not gonna open up a Robinhood account and risk it all on meme stocks like GameStop. You're going to hire the type of investor who has a Ph.D. in mathematics and drives a Bugatti, a go-getter who wakes up with a turmeric latte and pores over satellite images of factories in Asia to predict the earnings of some 3D-printing company most of us have never heard of. We're talking about the best of the best in finance.

Billionaires and gigantic institutional investors turn to these financiers because they want their investments to make the most money possible, which requires making the right calls on both buying and selling stocks. New research confirms they're whizzes when picking which stocks to buy. But when it comes to the other important part of their job — picking which stocks to sell and when — even these titans of finance are no better than a drunken monkey throwing darts.

The story of this study begins several years ago, when two of its co-authors were feuding in graduate school. Lawrence Schmidt, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was trained in the old school of economics, which asserts that investors behave rationally when they buy and sell stocks, carefully sifting through information on companies and making the best trades they can. Alex Imas, now at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, was trained in behavioral economics, which asserts that people's trading decisions can be — and often are — steered off course by the pesky flaws of our brains. "And we started this paper with the idea of settling the fight between the two of us," Schmidt says.

As luck would have it, they met a professional investor named Rick Di Mascio. Di Mascio runs a company called Inalytics, which tracks the investing activity of major financial companies' investors to assess and improve their performance. He had spent years collecting rich data on the trades and portfolios of the titans of finance. Like Imas and Schmidt, he wondered whether these elite investors make systematic mistakes when trading. And after seeing a presentation given by Imas at a conference, Di Mascio offered the economists his glittering data set. Now equipped with the data, Imas and Schmidt could finally settle their feud.

Fancy-schmancy financier vs. drunken monkey

Schmidt, Imas and Di Mascio joined forces with Klakow Akepanidtaworn, a financial economist now at the International Monetary Fund. The economists analyzed data on 783 big-time investors from January 2000 to March 2016. To give you a sense of how elite these investors are, they manage portfolios averaging almost $600 million. They typically focus on trying to maximize investment returns for one or two important clients, like a multibillionaire, a massive pension fund or a sovereign wealth fund.

The first part of these economists' study evaluated the investors' performance. To do that, the economists compared the investors' trading decisions with what they could have done instead. And the economists decided to compare those decisions with the simplest alternative investment strategy they could think of, "which is almost literally throwing a dart at a list of the names that exist in their portfolio and buying or selling that instead of the company that the investor actually chose to buy or sell," Schmidt says. In other words, it's fancy-schmancy financier vs. monkey randomly throwing darts.

[Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money 's newsletter. You can <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money">sign up here </a>.]

The economists' first big finding is that these financiers are real whizzes when it comes to buying stocks. They've got skills that could justify charging clients high fees. The average stock they chose to buy outperformed the random dart-throwing monkey by 1.2 percentage points. That might not seem like a lot, but with the power of compound interest, it really adds up over time. It makes these investors rock stars in the world of finance. They're earning those Bugattis.

But then the economists looked at these investors' performance when selling stocks. It turns out they're bad, much worse than the monkey. The stocks the investors sold ended up going up in value faster than the stocks they decided to keep. If their clients had instead hired the monkey with darts to randomly choose which stocks to sell, the clients' portfolios would have earned 0.8 percentage points more per year. Again, that is a huge amount in the world of finance. Goodbye Bugatti, hello Ford Focus.

The economists next tried to figure out why the elite investors are good at buying stocks yet bad at selling stocks. And the basic theory they landed on is that these investors spend much more brain energy on buying stocks than selling them.

The title of their study is "<a dir="ltr" href="https://click.nl.npr.org/?qs=eadcb315d87a5f2f22478e695d6c8d7e58a2f5e141ce977b99ec7d109c5c2fe4d5653954d7eb1618213fd2c7026a1863c898a253962394c7">Selling Fast and Buying Slow </a>," a reference to Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow . The book summarizes decades of Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky's research about human decision-making. This research sowed the seeds for what has blossomed into behavioral economics.

Kahneman offers a framework for thinking about how humans think. He says people have two systems in their brain. System 2 is the more deliberative, rational way we make decisions, the one we use when we can sit down and slowly ruminate about the world. System 1 is the automatic, instinctual way we make decisions. It's the part of the brain that our ancestors developed when they were getting chased by lions on the Serengeti. When you're getting chased by lions, you've got to think fast. And so we've evolved to use these heuristics, or simple rules of thumb, to navigate a complex world on the fly. These mental shortcuts work a lot of the time, but they can also lead us to systematically make decisions that aren't in our best interest.

"The title of our paper is basically saying that people use the deliberative System 2 when making buying decisions and use the more intuitive, automatic System 1 when making selling decisions," Imas says.

To test this theory, the economists looked closer at which stocks the investors tended to sell and which ones they tended to hold. And it turns out that the investors aren't horrible at selling all stocks. If a company releases an earnings statement and all of a sudden the investor has an impetus to think more deliberately about that company's stock, their decisions over whether to sell it dramatically improve. Their selling decisions are also much better when it comes to the best- and worst-performing stocks in their portfolio. It's like when a stock becomes shinier, they pay more attention to it and start acting like a savvy financier again.

It's pretty darn surprising that elite investors are falling asleep at the wheel when it comes to a big part of their job. Previous research has found that small "retail" investors, like ones buying stocks in GameStop, are steered astray by their mental flaws. But we're now talking about the crème de la crème of the finance world. There are literally millions, even billions, of dollars on the line.

Imas believes that at least part of the reason is a general behavioral economics insight that people make worse decisions when they lack feedback. When investors buy stocks, they have something to look at to see how they're doing. They can learn from past mistakes in buying stinkers and adjust accordingly. But when they sell a stock, poof it's gone. They're not looking at the alternate universe where they held onto the stock and made gobs more money. They're not learning from their past selling mistakes.

Schmidt says asset managers may be more focused on buying stocks because buying stocks is sexier than selling them. When you buy some new, obscure stock that you expect to rocket for some smart reason, it makes you look good at your job. You can take the head of some sovereign wealth fund out to dinner and explain to her why you're a genius for investing in some neat company.

But the bottom line is that these investment managers are failing to maximize returns for their clients. Without some changes to improve their selling decisions, they'd be better off strictly focusing on buying stocks and letting "a robot manage their selling decisions," Schmidt says.

And so Schmidt, who has long ascribed to the traditional economic view that investors trade stocks rationally, appears to have lost the fight that originally inspired this study. "My big takeaway from this paper is even when we look at a sample of extremely talented, highly incentivized expert investors, they are still people," Schmidt says. As simple as that sounds, it contradicts a school of thought that dominated economics for decades — a school that Schmidt once wholeheartedly embraced. Now, he says, "I think I'm becoming converted. I think I'm becoming a behavioral economist."

Did you enjoy this newsletter segment? Well, it looks even better in your inbox! You can <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money">sign up here </a>.

Sell Better To Beat The Best Investors💰

It refers to the use of complete sentences and other natural-sounding phrases and verbal units in search queries and how those queries are interpreted by search engines using artificial intelligence algorithms Most internet searches were based on keyword phrases, such as “Thai food” or “long-haired dog breeds.” Conversational searches use grammatical and syntactical patterns that closely resemble the way people talk. The result is a search experience that’s more organic and appealing to the average searcher.

What is conversational search?

<h3>Prioritize natural language, using the same kind of verbiage when structuring your content that an average person would use.</h3> It’s safe to assume, for example, that more internet users would ask, “How do you fix a broken Wi-Fi connection?” than, “How can I troubleshoot an unresponsive wireless connection?” Your content should use a similar language: “To fix a broken Wi-Fi connection, first run the troubleshooter tool under your network settings to diagnose the cause of the issue.”

Optimizing content for conversational search

Conversational search changes the SEO content creation game, but content marketers can still win the game – Content Marketing Institute

Marketing

How To Adapt Your Content To Get Found in the Conversational Search Era

A mere decade ago, the term “conversational search” would have meant nothing to professionals on the front lines of the ever-evolving content creation and SEO industry.

Today, it’s a core targeting strategy employed by thousands of companies, big and small, to increase web traffic and drive consumer engagement.

What makes conversational search an important innovation and such a potential stumbling block for content creators? To understand that, you first need to understand what it is and why its importance has risen.

Conversational search refers to the use of complete sentences and other natural-sounding phrases and verbal units in search queries and how those queries are interpreted by search engines using <a dir="ltr" href="https://mobidev.biz/blog/future-ai-machine-learning-trends-to-impact-business" rel="noopener noreferrer">artificial intelligence algorithms </a>.

Historically, most internet searches were based on keyword phrases, such as “Thai food” or “long-haired dog breeds.” However, conversational searches use grammatical and syntactical patterns that closely resemble the way people talk. The result is a search experience that’s more organic and appealing to the average searcher.

<a dir="ltr" href="https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2020/11983/pdf/dagrep_v009_i011_p034_19461.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer">Research </a>related to the conversational search phenomena indicates consumers are much more likely to engage with fluid, interactive digital experiences than rigid, antiquated ones. Reports like these underscore the need to place conversational search considerations at the center of the content planning process.

Keep in mind: “Organic” doesn’t mean open-ended. Traditional keyword searches tend to unleash torrents of undifferentiated results, many of which have no relation to one another aside from the inclusion of a given keyword. Most searchers find these results tedious and difficult to wade through, often resorting to random clicking to get to the information they’re seeking. In the worst-case scenario, they may abandon their search altogether, drastically decreasing their chances of encountering content that may serve them.

By comparison, conversational searches return refined and targeted results. In recent years, the explosion of conversational searches is largely attributable to the growing popularity of digital voice assistants like Siri, Alexis, and Google Assistant. Its use is predicted to continue climbing as more users come to rely on intuitive text and <a dir="ltr" href="https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/01/voice-search-content/">voice searches </a>.

The popularity of these AI-driven devices isn’t surprising, considering they went mainstream with Siri’s release in 2011. But satisfaction rates now are as high as 80%, according to <a dir="ltr" href="https://getvoip.com/blog/2019/05/01/what-is-conversational-ivr/" rel="noopener noreferrer">GetVoIP </a>, with many customers citing their ease of use and reliability in comparison to other devices.

Put simply: Conversational search represents a distillation of the things modern consumers value most: convenience, accessibility, and a high degree of <a dir="ltr" href="https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/06/expert-tips-personalize-content-segment-audiences/">personalization </a>in online activity.

How does conversational search impact content creation?

Optimizing for search once was as simple as sprinkling in discrete keywords to increase the odds of the content popping up higher in search engine results. The more times the keywords appeared, the more “relevant” the piece was deemed for searches containing those keywords, and the more likely it was to claim a position in the coveted SERP top slots.

Adding conversational search to the picture makes things a bit more complicated.

For content to rise to the top of search results pages today, it must satisfy searchers’ informational demands immediately and minimize the probability that they’ll venture elsewhere for answers. This is easier said than done.

Double-digit search result pages are chock-full of well-intentioned posts that try and fail to be useful to internet users. To avoid suffering the same fate as those underachievers, you must avoid the traps they fell into.

How to optimize content for conversational search?

When formulating novel solutions to novel problems, cling to old wisdom: Know your audience.

Putting yourself in the shoes of your prospective reader or viewer not only enables you to develop more effective content, but it opens up more avenues to deliver it. That was true in the days of newspaper advertisements, and it’s true now.

Several optimization tactics can help your content fit the contours of a conversational search. All of them require you to go back to basics and pair useful, well-conceived, quality information with revealing website data and <a dir="ltr" href="https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/06/seo-refresher-content-attractive-google/">SEO best practices </a>.

Tailoring your content to the broadest possible range of consumers starts with predicting the kinds of questions most people would ask. Before you draft your content, ask yourself some fundamental questions, such as:

<ul><li>What does the average person already know about this subject? </li><li>How does this subject affect people’s day-to-day lives? </li><li>When and where are people likely looking up this information? </li><li>How might one act on the information I plan on presenting? </li><li>Will the structure of this piece tell the reader everything they need to know? </li> </ul>

Pondering these sorts of questions will put you in the right headspace to empathize with your hypothetical reader and aid in laying the groundwork for a piece with universal utility.

Another part of anticipating user questions and providing accessible responses is emphasizing natural language from a grammatical standpoint. It’s necessary to use the same kind of verbiage when structuring your content that an average person would use.

It’s safe to assume, for example, that more internet users would ask, “How do you fix a broken Wi-Fi connection?” than, “How can I troubleshoot an unresponsive wireless connection?” Your content should use a similar language: “To fix a broken Wi-Fi connection, first run the troubleshooter tool under your network settings to diagnose the cause of the issue.”

That said, it’s usually worth including multiple derivative forms of the same query to better cover your bases.

It’s no longer enough to carpet-bomb readers with simplistic keywords and search terms that lack context. Instead, writers should look for ways to incorporate and answer detailed questions that directly align with readers’ needs.

One way to do this is to weave in pointed hypothetical questions intended to capture the reader’s attention or act as the authoritative final word on the topic at hand:

Consider the query: “What’s the best way to sleep?”

A conversational piece of content likely to appear in the results might use the question as a header, then offer an answer like this: “There’s no one right answer in the health-related question. However, most sleep specialists agree that curling up on your side is the way to go, as it alleviates back pain, prevents snoring, and improves circulation and digestion.”

Another way to incorporate conversational search terms is by creating a frequently asked questions section. It allows you to address multiple anticipated queries in the exact form you expect them to be asked in search.

With both of these strategies, you’re essentially treating ideas, phrases, and even whole sentences as complex versions of traditional keywords and building them into your content the way you’re accustomed to doing.

It’s not enough just to create quality conversational content – you must make sure your audience can access it easily and gets something worthwhile out of it. Web designers and analytic experts must be involved to develop a systematic approach for planning and producing <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.toptal.com/designers/web/content-first-design" rel="noopener noreferrer">content-first design </a>to maximize consumer engagement.

From the headline and the copy to the basic layout and surrounding graphic elements, every aspect of a post should be engineered to establish a connection with the reader from the moment they load the page. By steering them toward the information they seek with a minimum of clicking, you can help your content gain readers from conversational search.

The current consensus in search analytics spheres is conversational search is the future of online interactions. Content creators must get with the times or languish pages and pages down in search results.

But if you look closely, you’ll see that this emerging landscape isn’t so different from the one most of us already know well. It is simply a matter of doing what content creators have always done – identifying the needs and preferences of consumers and meeting them on their terms.

Conversational search and optimizing for it

Social media is rewiring the central nervous system of humanity in real-time.-We’re now at a crossroads between its promise and its peril.

Researchers and the public have the right to know how social media platforms are accessing and using consumer data. But there’s also a need to protect user privacy and security. Solution: Algorithmic transparency that lets researchers examine peer-to-peer information sharing without sharing personal information would lead to a greater understanding of malicious use and how to prevent it

Transparency paradox

Social media and search engines have become the main way people organize and access information, but companies that run them are guided by profit, not things like democracy or human rights. Sometimes, the most popular, profitable speech promotes racism, misinformation, and polarization. Solution: Introducing friction by slowing online interactions and giving users the chance to think before sharing information is one solution

Algorithms contribute to bias

Social media business models are built on the attention economy, in which platforms sell users’ attention for advertising. But what gets attention isn’t always good for users or society. Solution: Subscription-based models, which aren’t tied to advertising. PS: Although there is a danger if the best, fact-checked information is available only behind a paywall.

Business Models don't always serve users

A new report offers solutions to the problems that hound social media, from the spread of misinformation to the lack of competition.

Social Platforms

Researchers, policymakers, and users have identified several key issues with the social media ecosystem. These include vast power held by a few corporations, which hurts innovation and competition; the spread of false news and debates about the limits of free speech; how social media threatens privacy, election integrity, and democracy; and platform oversight and transparency.

The <a dir="ltr" href="https://ide.mit.edu/events/the-social-media-summit-mit-smsmit/">Social Media Summit @ MIT </a>brought together experts to discuss these issues and focus on solutions, which range from new oversight panels to breaking up big companies.

“Social media is rewiring the central nervous system of humanity in real time,” said MIT Sloan professor<button data-bundle="faculty_member" data-entity-id="193" data-entity-type="node" dir="ltr" href="/faculty/directory/sinan-aral" sidenote-type="faculty_member">Sinan Aral, </button>who led the event. “We’re now at a crossroads between its promise and its peril.”

A new report from the summit, now available online, takes a deep look at the range of problems posed by existing social media models, and offers 25 potential solutions to address them.

Here’s a look at seven areas of concern addressed at the summit, and just a few of the potential solutions.

1. The spread of false news and misinformation

<a dir="ltr" href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-false-news-spreads-faster-truth">False news spreads quickly </a>online, aided by social media algorithms that amplify popular, and often incendiary, content. And social media companies and their advertisers often benefit from it, Aral noted.

One solution is to crack down on the most prolific offenders, said Clint Watts, a research fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute. “We know about them, and [enforcement] needs to focus there for maximum impact,” Watts said.

2. The difficult balance between user privacy and platform transparency

Social media poses what Aral calls a “transparency paradox.” Researchers and the public have the right to know how social media platforms are accessing and using consumer data. But there’s also a need to protect user privacy and security.

Algorithmic transparency that lets researchers examine peer-to-peer information sharing without sharing personal information would lead to greater understanding about malicious use and how to prevent it, said Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington. Some platforms are already more transparent than others. “We’re able to review data patterns on Twitter because their data is public,” she said. “Facebook and YouTube do not readily share data and we can’t study them very well.”

3. Lack of regulation for social media companies

Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs at Facebook, said he agreed that independent oversight is a necessity.“We’re way beyond the stale debate of whether we need new rules of the road,” Clegg said during a discussion with Aral. Clegg also noted that if different areas of the world regulate social media differently, it could balkanize the internet.  The U.S. and European Union need to work together, he said, and bring India into the fold.

Competition is a big incentive for companies to change behavior, Aral noted, but there is market concentration in the social economy with Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

“We’re dealing with an array of issues, including concentration that is choking off innovation, harming advertisers and small businesses, and leading to less competition for quality and privacy,” said Zephyr Teachout, an assistant professor of law at Fordham Law School.

The European Union is considering the Digital Markets Act, which would address anti-competitive practices and dictate corporate responsibility for non-compliance. This might be a model for other areas.

5. Algorithms contribute to bias, racism, and polarization

Social media and search engines have become the main way people organize and access information, said Safiya Noble, co-founder of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA. But companies that run them are guided by profit, and not things like democracy or human rights, she noted, and sometimes the most popular, profitable speech promotes racism, misinformation, and polarization.

Part of the problem is frictionless systems that allow users to easily retweet and share this kind of information, said<button data-bundle="faculty_member" data-entity-id="207" data-entity-type="node" dir="ltr" href="/faculty/directory/renee-richardson-gosline" sidenote-type="faculty_member">Renée Richardson Gosline, </button>a principal research scientist at MIT Sloan. Introducing friction by slowing online interactions and giving users the chance to think before sharing information is one solution, she said.

6. Social media business models don’t always serve users

Social media business models are built on the attention economy, in which platforms sell users’ attention for advertising. But what gets attention isn’t always good for users, or society. <a dir="ltr" href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/case-new-social-media-business-models">Revising business models </a>away from the attention economy could help.

Subscription-based models, which aren’t tied to adverting, are an alternative, said Scott Galloway, an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, though he noted that there is a danger if the best, fact-checked information is available only behind a paywall.

7. The line between free speech and harmful speech is sometimes unclear

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides websites with immunity from third-party content. It needs to be reformed to make platforms more liable for the content they publish, said Richard Stengel, a former undersecretary of state for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy and former managing editor of Time magazine. “Regulations have to incentivize platforms to take responsibility for illegal content just as Time magazine was,” he said, noting that platforms are currently in a gray area when it comes to regulating content.

Renée Diresta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said policy should also <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-free-reach/">differentiate between free speech and free reach </a>. The right to free speech doesn’t extend to a right to have that speech amplified by algorithms.

“There’s always been this division between your right to speak and your right to have a megaphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people,” she said.

Problems posed by social media models and suggested solutions

The role of the editorial team(which comprises business journalists) at LinkedIn is to provide members with the news and views to talk about the things that matter today. The editors focus on the three Cs. Create. Curate. Cultivate. <ul><li dir = "auto">Create Original Content</li><li dir = "auto">Curate the best conversations happening in the professional community.</li><li dir = "auto">Cultivating people to use the platform, to have smart conversations, and to share with their community on LinkedIn.</li></ul>

Engage professional conversations

Top stories show up on search on mobile and on the top right-hand corner of the desktop experience. Editors surface the best and most interesting conversations from a variety of views that are happening on LinkedIn, sort of a broad scope of news that is vital to your professional world today. So if Donald Trump announces new tariffs on China, editors are primed to check who’s writing about that and if there’s anybody who understands trade really well who’s writing an article, then they are more likely to surface that.

Personalised feed for everyone

Users share articles, posts, and videos to establish their professional reputation. It’s about are you staying in the know about your industry? Are you sharing your expertise with others? Engaging colleagues? Being on top of what’s going on?  Content is the new resume on Linkedin.

Motivation to write and upload on Linkedin

LinkedIn employs 60 editors, and they’re responsible for everything from curating user content to producing their own original reporting.

Back in 2011, LinkedIn announced that it was hiring Dan Roth, who was then the editor of Fortune.com, to serve as its editor in chief. Given LinkedIn’s then role as mostly a repository for online resumes, the move had many scratching their heads.

Over the next few years, though, Roth’s team would roll out a number of editorial products. It started by curating outside news sources, sending LinkedIn users to articles published by business publications like The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider. Then it rolled out a blogging platform that was only available to influential users like Richard Branson and Bill Gates. Eventually, it then opened up its blogging platform to all users.

During all this time, LinkedIn was steadily hiring journalists from some of the world’s top business publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune. Today, it has an editorial staff of 60, and these editors are responsible for everything from curating user content to producing their own original reporting.

I recently sat down with Linkedin senior editor at large <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/iroughol" rel="noopener nofollow">Isabelle Roughol </a>. I asked her about how LinkedIn editors go about curating content, how they distribute this content on LinkedIn, and how they approach original reporting projects.

To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player, or you can play the YouTube video below. If you scroll down you’ll also find a transcript of the interview.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Simon Owens: Hey Isabelle, thanks for joining us.

Isabelle Roughol: Hey Simon, thanks for having me.

You’re the senior editor at large at LinkedIn. What does that job entail?

The role of the editorial team at LinkedIn is to provide members with the news and views to talk about the things that matter today. So our job is to engage the LinkedIn membership with content that will spark or cultivate smart, professional conversations on the platform. We do that in nine countries and seven languages.

I spent a few years building out our coverage outside the U.S. I was working on developing our editorial team in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America. For the past six months I’ve been the senior editor at large, which is a fancy title for being a senior editor on the team writing and creating content every day, as well as leading some projects with other teams and providing some mentorship to editors on the team. It’s a pretty broad role, which is fun, because I get to work on the things I find important.

So are you doing a lot of management of other journalists? Or are you doing a lot of the day to day editorial work yourself?

Not anymore. I was a manager for years, and I gave that up about six months ago to go back to my creative roots a little bit. I think when you’re working as a journalist, you kind of have to work on both sides and both skillsets. Now I’m in more of a day to day creative role, as well as some strategy, but not management.

What were you doing prior to taking the job at LinkedIn?

I’m trained as a journalist. I went to the University of Missouri’s journalism school. And then I was a reporter and editor in newspapers. I was a reporter at the Cambodia Daily. I was an editor at Le Figaro in France. I’m a French native. I was on the foreign desk there up until 2011. I actually then got laid off and was kind of freelancing and exploring what was out there back in 2012 when I came across this job ad on LinkedIn about being an editor. That’s when I joined the team, in 2012.

You’re not the only one with a journalism background who was hired at LinkedIn. Several years ago LinkedIn started poaching business journalists from top publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune. What was the original thinking behind this move? The person behind this entire operation is Dan Roth. What was his thinking behind hiring these journalists?

Dan was hired in 2011. He was at Fortune at the time. He’s still our editor-in-chief. The thinking at the time was that he sensed that LinkedIn was going to become more and more of a content platform, and it was important to have journalists giving it direction so you would have a quality platform and conversations. We always believe in the balance between machines and humans, algorithms and editors, together, to create really positive and quality content at LinkedIn.

The editors focus on the three Cs. Create. Curate. Cultivate. We’re creating our own original content. We’re curating — and that’s a really large part of it, since most of the content on LinkedIn is curated. So we’re trying to surface the best conversations happening in the professional community. And then cultivating, which is really encouraging people to use the platform, to have smart conversations, and to share with their community on LinkedIn.

When Dan Roth first started, he was focused almost entirely on curation at the time. I remember that some business publications, like Business Insider, started reporting that they were getting massive referral traffic from LinkedIn. It was launching these products that curated the day’s business news depending on what industry you worked in and started linking to outside sources. The idea then was to start generating native content for LinkedIn, first through the LinkedIn influencer program, and then you rolled out blogging capabilities to the rest of the LinkedIn users.

Can you talk a little about the curational aspect of the LinkedIn editorial team now? What role do editors play in finding content on LinkedIn and elevating it to a larger audience?

The product has gone through so many phases. You’re just reminding me of all the seven years I’ve spent here. It feels like a million years ago when we had just external content.

Today the editors are a big part of our content offering, what we call Top Stories. It shows up on a search environment on mobile and on the top righthand corner in your desktop experience. It’s really a curation of the top news that are vital to your professional world today, and the conversations that are happening on the platform in this professional environment.

So the editors are going to be surfacing the best and most interesting conversations from a variety of views that are happening on LinkedIn, so that you can sort of see a broad scope of the professional conversation, and you’re going to be able to see things that are happening far beyond your network. In the feed you’ll see the people you know, but you’ll see a lot more.

Right now, in the UK, we have stories about banking fraud. We have stories about British steel. And the railway system. Or AI. Or Brexit. We see LinkedIn members talking about this and sharing really important insights, because it’s the industry they’re working on, because it’s impacting their daily work.

So that top righthand widget, Today’s News and Views, that’s what you’re talking about? That seems like very general business news. I know at some point you had these individual channels, where if I worked in, say, the agricultural industry I was automatically subscribed to a channel, and then editors, if they found good agriculture content, they would distribute it on that channel and it would show up in my main feed. How much are you personalizing this content for users based on the industry they work in? How are you surfacing content that’s industry specific?

Everyone’s LinkedIn experience is going to be different. It is personalized. Because it’s based on your network, on your industry. You are going to see things that are more specific relevant to your industry, to your company, to your colleagues as well. That’s where the mix of algorithms and editors is important. You’re going to have that level of personalization and relevance coming from algorithms.

But we also see value in bursting that filter bubble. Giving you things that you don’t yet know you care about, but are actually going to be very impactful trends to the future of work, to your industry, to your professional lives.

We have editors who are focused on specific industries, like healthcare, finance, or engineering. But we also have some more broad news relevant to the professional world, and a mix of the two is important.

Where am I discovering most of that news? Is it in that widget in the top righthand corner, or is it also in the feed?

It’s going to be both. It’s going to be in the feed. It’s going to be notifications. Through the widget. It’s in the search tab on your mobile app. It’s baked in to all of your experience.

What motivates a user to write and upload an article to LinkedIn?

It’s not just articles. Posts and videos are also having massive growth. Really it’s about a couple things. It’s about establishing your professional reputation. I like to say content is the new resume. It’s not enough to have that list of accomplishments. It’s about are you staying in the know about your industry? Are you sharing your expertise with others? Engaging colleagues? Being on top of what’s going on? That’s a big factor.

It’s also people wanting to start a conversation and get informed and learn from others. One thing that I love in my experience with LinkedIn is being able to start a conversation, post something I’m thinking about, and in the comments learning way more about the topic from people who have that expertise.

The standard for looking for a job used to be that you kept your resume updated, but then you were also surfing jobs boards and applying for jobs. Would you advise someone to be also be blogging on LinkedIn, where a lot of recruiters and other industry folks are hanging out?

I think that definitely helps. You want to be out there, be a fixture in your industry. Someone people know they can come to for expertise and help. Someone who is just being social with people in their industry.

I know it can sound a bit daunting and I don’t want it to be. You don’t have to be a professional writer. There’s a lot of different formats you can use. A video can be less intimidating for people who don’t want to write. Or you can just write shorter posts and share articles. It’s really about being social, about staying in touch with your network. Not just going to them to get help. We talk about giving help and getting help. And I think, as we all know, networks are so important in getting you to your next place in your career, getting you new opportunities. I really think of content as a way to continue growing your network.

Do you see a lot of users that are publishing articles as a form of content marketing to drive business connections and leads for their businesses?

It’s definitely part of the toolbox. One thing I always caution people against is being too overtly salesy. You really want to be useful to your audience and authentic in the things you’re sharing. People can smell a fraud from a mile away. The audience is extremely sophisticated by now. Being genuine and being helpful is very important, and not just being promotional.

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Ok, back to our scheduled programming…

Can you talk about the role that LinkedIn plays in driving traffic to publishers that aren’t published on LinkedIn? That was the initial goal when Dan Roth started. How much of that is happening now?

It is happening. We’re hearing anecdotally from publishers. Our focus is really on building community and conversations. We’re seeing publishers be really successful when they’re growing a community around their content on LinkedIn. The BBC News, the Economist, those are really active and interesting pages.

Also seeing journalists take the tool in their own hands, and publishers encouraging their journalists to do that, and sharing their stories, and encouraging conversations around their stories, often getting their next story idea from the comments. And just giving professionals on LinkedIn a different point of view and a behind-the-curtains look at their careers as journalists. That’s been really successful.

What about the publishers themselves? I subscribe to a bunch of publications within my industry on LinkedIn. But I don’t know that they’re publishing a ton on LinkedIn, or promoting their content as much as they do on some other platforms. Do you feel like there’s still a learning curve, or that publishers are still slow to adopt LinkedIn in their strategy?

I think we’re still seeing adoptions. It depends on whether they’re business publishers and are publishing stories around a professional context. We’re here to really work with publishers. We’re not trying to replace them. We’re just about building a helpful, professional community.

Users are resistant to change

Why do people hate redesigns?

Monkey randomly throwing darts are better stock sellers.

Sell Better To Beat The Best Investors💰

What is conversational search?

Conversational search and optimizing for it

SINAN ARAL - PROFESSOR AT MIT

Problems posed by social media models and suggested solutions

Engage professional conversations

Why LinkedIn hired the world’s top business journalists?

.css-d7z4j9{font-family:'Source Sans Pro',sans-serif;font-size:2rem;line-height:2.5rem;letter-spacing:-0.125%;font-weight:700;}Users are resistant to change

Why do people hate redesigns?

Monkey randomly throwing darts are better stock sellers.

Sell Better To Beat The Best Investors💰

What is conversational search?

Conversational search and optimizing for it

SINAN ARAL - PROFESSOR AT MIT

Problems posed by social media models and suggested solutions

Engage professional conversations

Why LinkedIn hired the world’s top business journalists?

Users are resistant to change