Answering Reader Comments: Big Tech, Men and Women, and Fighting Porn

Today I am debuting a new kind of post for paid subscribers. Every week or couple of weeks, I will round up some of the best comments left on posts and reply to them.

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A Response to Matthew Schultz’s Review of “Digital Liturgies”

Michal Naka:

I long for a digital world that Matthew Schultz describes where one can go online to pay the bills or find a recipe without having to worry about the liturgical design behind them. Unfortunately I don't think that world exists anymore. To the extent it does, it's fading away with the advances in software technology, growth marketing tactics, and internet enabled business model innovation.

I habit the world of Silicon Valley, we may not call them "liturgical design" but we do call them business OKRs and KPIs that guide our product design, engineering, user experience, and content decisions. Although it may not look like it on the surface, there is much attention put in the user experience of things as innocuous as a recipe website or bill paying flow. Am I saying that every website or tool has nefarious purpose hidden in its design? No I am not making that claim, but it's important to know many of these digital products have overarching business goals embedded in their design and that these products don't stand in isolation in the digital world.

That free baking recipe you looked at? Next time you look for one, take a pause and glance around. Many recipe websites are clickbait farms with AI generated SEO to gamify google search rankings to garner eyeballs and generate revenue off of penny ads. Or it is a giant CPG company (i.e. Betty Crocker) trying to nudge you to sign up for an account with them to "save your recipes" with the goal of getting user information to target you with products down the line. Or NYT trying to entice you to pay for a yearly subscription. Or it could be a startup (i.e. Instacart) trying to get you to sign up for grocery or food delivery. Yes, you might have pure motives with wanting to bake a cake for your neighbor! That is great! But I can ensure you there's companies on the other side of the divide trying to capture and convert that attention for objectives other than just baking a cake for your neighbor. As for the Bill Pay example, I could expound on all the ways financial platforms are trying to get you to convert to higher margin financial products behind the scenes. For further reading on this topic, check out the SV concept of "commoditizing your compliments": https://gwern.net/complement