Feeling Left Behind: The Comparison Illusion Created by Feeds
1. The feed does not show the industry average
It is easy to take the activity levels and achievements of the people you follow as the standard for the entire industry.
- The "friendship paradox," in which people with more connections appear more often in the social network, and the "activity paradox," in which the accounts you follow tend to post more often than you do, work together.
- This is a network bias that can arise even before recommendation algorithms get involved.
- Ranking systems that prioritize posts with more reactions make that difference stand out even more.
- The speed of a visible few comes to feel like everyone’s everyday reality.
2. It is hard to know either someone else’s pace or your own pace accurately
Your own trial and error and someone else’s finished work do not make a fair comparison.
- I remember the time spent being stuck and the mockups I threw away, but in the feed I mostly see other people’s public outcomes.
- Even the person doing the work may perceive a different pace from what measurements show.
- In the METR study cited in the original, there was a gap between developers’ assessments that AI made them faster and the actual time spent on the work.
- Rather than reading this as meaning that AI always lowers productivity, it can be read as evidence that it is hard to judge performance based only on perceived speed.
3. Whether comparison becomes anxiety or inspiration can vary
Whether the path to an achievement is visible changes the experience of comparison.
- If other people’s difficulties are invisible and only their achievements accumulate, it becomes easy to feel your own shortcomings more strongly than they really are.
- Doubting your abilities can hold back your work, and that experience can reinforce the doubt.
- On the other hand, if you feel that the gap can be narrowed, comparison can also become motivation.
- You need to be able to see the attempts and choices that came before the finished work for there to be a concrete path that says, "I can try this too."
4. A design that shows process next to results
Creating an environment where sharing process feels natural and carries little burden is also part of a product’s role.
- Like Dribbble’s finished-work-centered display, a product decides what to reveal and what to hide.
- You can think about ways to include discarded directions, revision processes, and the reasons for choices in the basic structure of a portfolio.
- Simply encouraging people to share is not enough.
- As in the original’s example of prototype copying, you also need to look at the costs creators bear when they make their process public.
