Once upon a time, there was a world wide web without interactive elements… . Besides questionable recommender systems, web development seems to be the field where machine learning is used in the least intelligent way possible. More and more websites have little “pop-ups” (not in a technical sense, but similar annoying) asking us to rate our experience. Really? Why should I even waste the energy of a mouse click on that? I give zero fucks about user ratings, mainly because I have absolutely no idea why people think that they can be trusted. But let’s have a look what I encountered at YouTube recently. They ask about my YouTube experience today, and these are my choices:
- Absolutely outstanding
- Extremely good
- Very good
- Good
- Not good
Really? 80 % of these sound somewhat positive and “Not good” is not really something really negative. I miss choices like “Awful” or “So bad that I’m going to write a blog post about it” ;). YouTube belongs to Alphabet (or Google?). They pride themselves with being an AI company. They should be able to come up with better solutions for evaluating user experience than this.
Why do I care? Because it is another bad example of how not to do things. We can always come up with “fake metrics” that somehow please managers or even worse customers, but this leads to great paper results instead of solving underlying problems.