This month's Frame: Negative and positive liberty as guiding principles to measure user value
A framework to help product strategists balance users' short and long term goals.
In 2011, Facebook introduced a radical change to users' feeds. Instead of showing posts in purely chronological order, they were now ordered based on a recommendation algorithm. The objective was to present users with the most interesting content to them, based on their past interactions with the platform.
This feature ended up being, possibly, the most important turning point in the history of digital content platforms.
Since then, the ability of a platform to present users with content they will engage with is the "secret sauce" that makes or breaks the product. Following Facebook, YouTube introduced a recommendation system algorithm that was seen as the gold standard. It was later dislodged by TikTok, which grew its user base to 1 billion users in less than 4 years, half the time it took Facebook.
If the KPI for success is user engagement, digital content platforms are as effective as they have ever been.
This framing, however, overlooks two crucial related dimensions—users' sense of agency and their long-term self-interest.
Let's examine the example of TikTok in more detail to understand why.
TikTok's success can be attributed to the combination of two key features:
Its recommendation algorithm, which determines desirable and watchable content for a user based on their past behaviour.
Its immersive frictionless UX, which determines how easy it is for a user to deviate from the optimal content path determined by the platform.
If you combine these two features, you get an experience where user choices are:
Narrowly framed—the universe of videos recommended will tend to shrink over time.
Difficult to diverge from—the frictionless UX will make it hard to veer away from what is recommended to you.
The result is an experience where agency is limited and long-term interests are overlooked.
The framework
We can turn to Isaiah Berlin and his concept of positive liberty to help us understand what a less limiting digital experience would look like. Berlin distinguishes two opposing conceptions of liberty: negative liberty and positive liberty.
Negative liberty is when someone is free to do what they wish as they have no external barriers to contend with. It is this absence of external obstacles that defines negative liberty.
Positive liberty, in opposition, is "liberty to". It is the ability for someone to have the required agency to act in a way that is in accordance with what they would define as their long-term interest—what Berlin calls "self-realisation".
A few examples for illustration: if someone decides to buy cigarettes to satisfy a nicotine craving, nothing physically limits their choices, but they're not "positively" free. Conversely, if someone agrees that they should not drive drunk, taking away their car keys if they've had one scotch too many does not impede their positive liberty.
Berlin concludes that "positive liberty" requires an environment in which individuals are encouraged to be reflexive about what their long-term interest is. In so doing, he posits that within each individual exists a tension between different "selves", who sometimes pursue competing goals: in this case, short-term gratification or long-term self-interest.
Using the framework
Berlin's positive liberty can allow us to reintroduce some complexity in how to assess the value created by digital products and, in particular, content platforms.
It emphasises the need to develop products that create an environment in which users have the mental space needed to make decisions in full agency and according to their long-term interest. This implies:
Intentionally creating some friction in the UX, so that users can either take a break, or just pause and decide to change the type of content they want to engage with. An example of this is the Netflix popup "are you sure you want to watch another episode?"
Designing products that let users configure the experience in accordance with their long term goals, even when it might hurt engagement KPIs. For example, Instagram now allows users to choose between a chronological or algorithmically optimised news feed.
In positive liberty ethics, knowledge is a prerequisite to true agency. Investing in mechanisms that help users understand how the product works would help them make informed decisions about how to use it.
When tech players fail to deliver on these principles, users devise their own crude behavioural "hacks" as workarounds: for example, they only use Instagram from a browser, rather than the app; or they delete and recreate an account to "reset" the algorithm's recommendations. They do this because they want to regain control and because they are instinctively aware that their short and long term interests do not always align.
Optimising for users short-term interest, as measured by their current engagement, is enticing because it's both simple and efficient. Yet, over time, it can create hidden liabilities (ie. users' unexpressed frustrations) which ultimately will hurt brand equity and create opportunities for competitors / new players to exploit.
Berlin's positive liberty concept is a reminder that neglecting people's fundamental needs for agency and self-interest is a risky strategy that may not pay off over the long term.
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