Engagement maxing is a gravity well almost every scaled consumer business tends to fall into.
- Engagement maxing is a gravity well almost every scaled consumer business tends to fall into.
- It's an auto-intensifying trap.
- Things that users "want" but don't "want to want" tend to increase engagement.
- Things that are bad for people and society, but good for engagement.
- Sycophancy in chatbots is a thing that users want but don't want to want.
- ChatGPT's recent sycophancy problem was caused partly because of an over-reliance on thumbs-up responses on answers, which tend to naturally bias towards sycophantic answers.
- People have started to call out that OpenAI is falling into the engagement maximizing trap:
- "You have a problem you haven't addressed or answered. Sycophantic model behavior is good for your business. You are falling into the gravity well of engagement maxing and you don't seem to care.