For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which case we will have been spared a philosophical debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the wrong approach. Whether something is /within our ethos/ should not be something we discuss after doing it, and even then, only if we find out that it's effective. To put that another way, "sure it might not be ethical by our standards but hey let's give it a whirl anyway". That's totally dissonant from our movement and organisation's principles.
On 2 September 2015 at 09:14, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 2 September 2015 at 01:50, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org wrote:
Just in time! http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/death-to-app-install-interstitials/
Interstitials are full-page ads where you have to click a link to get to the actual content. These are normal banners. More importantly, as you can see in the Phabricator task, they are an experiment to measure if it is possible to make more people use the app. Experiments are good. For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which case we will have been spared a philosophical debate about openness.
Is this experiment also measuring what those users do on the app, versus what the same users (or a users with a similar background) did on the mobile web? Is it a formal A/B test?
We seem to be operating under the belief that merely switching users is, in and of itself, a victory. It's not; we still have the same number of users at the end. A victory is increased activity /due/ to the features on the app that cannot be created outside that closed ecosystem.
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