They're perfectly capable of making that decision on their own.

But they won't, because the amount of knowledge transfer required for them to make that decision is beyond what they're willing to invest.

Take the dating site example - for the user to act optimally (view many profiles and message many people), they'd have to understand not only the full mechanism of the website (pretty simple to do), but also usage trends, psychology and attitudes towards online dating, social attitudes towards dating in general, and a slew of other topics.

All in all, the "here's what you should do and here's how we know" conversation is several hours long. If there was a Matrix-like way to jack your users' brains in and explain the full scope of why they should be behaving a particular way in an understandable, absorbable way, I'm all for it.

But alas, we can't do brain-downloads. Yet.

But what about simply informing them without the messy explanations? Well, it turns out this is what we did in the infancy of consumer websites - and it never worked. "You should message more users" falls on deaf ears - even after many, many attempts to reframe the message in more compelling ways.

This occurs for many reasons, and differs depending on the exact message being conveyed. For dating sites one persistent trouble is getting your users to upload good photos of themselves. We know from an insane amount of data that people make online dating decisions in a highly visual way, and that anyone without a picture is basically shit out of luck - but yet you wouldn't believe how many users think that rule applies to everyone but themselves. Even explicitly throwing up big warnings about not uploading a photo only convinces a small chunk of users to do it - and in the end you'd resort to tactics like holding their search results hostage until a photo is uploaded. And it works. And it improves their experience dramatically because no one replies to someone who doesn't have a profile picture.

I can keep rambling and naming examples like these. There is no shortage here.

I don't think you'll find anyone who thinks that hiding your users' data behind a mouse click is the best thing in the world, but you will find many people who have actually been in the trenches, who have done it the "right" way, and in the end found that the "wrong" way is a necessary (and very minor) evil.

You've also made the assertion elsewhere in this thread that people who work on these products don't care about user satisfaction. This is pretty far off the mark - user satisfaction is one of those things that's pretty easy to measure... and the unfortunate truth is that, in most circumstances, the minor loss in satisfaction from having your message hidden behind a link is more than made up for by the overall improvement in experience.

It's a somewhat common stance from people who haven't worked in consumer web before to assume that these strategies are the result of arrogant people looking down and disrespecting their user base. The reality is that no one I know assigns any value judgment to any of these observations - but we will follow where the data leads us.

> It's a somewhat common stance from people who haven't worked in consumer web before to assume that these strategies are the result of arrogant people looking down and disrespecting their user base. The reality is that no one I know assigns any value judgment to any of these observations - but we will follow where the data leads us.

You can either target the high road, and the customer base (and margins) that come with that, or target just the data while aiming only for mass appeal. I've always worked for companies that target the high, but to each their own.