This is excellent. People do not take the time to truly understand human behavior and what it takes to shift i, along with the way that collides with the incentives corporations have.
Something I’ve started saying is “systems, not solutions.” If you aim to change the game at this point in most areas, you have to build a different system, not just a different solution. The way I define a system is also very important:
A system is a set of rules, norms, incentives, and consequences that define what is easy and what is hard.
You wanna change people’s behavior? Make the thing you want them to do stupidly easy. So easy they would feel like a fool to not do it. Then, make the thing you don’t want them to do incredibly hard, so hard that almost nobody will even try because it’s so clear to them that they’ll fail and feel terrible doing it.
Incentives are part of the story, but not all of it. Users can, and do, behave in ways that are deeply suboptimal in terms of getting the results they want. (In fact, the biggest success we had late in Triplebyte's history largely consisted of removing user agency in a way that didn't feel bad to them, precisely because users were behaving in ways that were counterproductive.)
Sophisticated users on mature platforms generally behave more-or-less rationally, but those will not be most of your users early on. That's to your benefit, because abuses take time to arise - you can get away with stuff on year one or two of your platform that would be a glaring vulnerability in year ten.
Something I’ve started saying is “systems, not solutions.” If you aim to change the game at this point in most areas, you have to build a different system, not just a different solution. The way I define a system is also very important:
A system is a set of rules, norms, incentives, and consequences that define what is easy and what is hard.
You wanna change people’s behavior? Make the thing you want them to do stupidly easy. So easy they would feel like a fool to not do it. Then, make the thing you don’t want them to do incredibly hard, so hard that almost nobody will even try because it’s so clear to them that they’ll fail and feel terrible doing it.
That’s how you shift behavior.