I strongly believe A/B testing users without their knowledge and enthusiastic consent is unethical. If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all. Users don't want their shit changing all the time.
Hmmm, I am curious about which aspect of this you find unethical.
Is it unethical to do phased rollouts (where a small percentage get the new version) as a way to do safe deploys? If the issue is that two users making requests at the same time might see different things, then this would also be unethical? Yet, these sorts of phases rollouts is the best way to release something safely. When I worked at a large CDN with 50,000 servers around the world, we ALWAYS did phased releases, to make sure we didn't take down everything all at once, and to make sure we caught any performance regressions right away.
Is your issue that the user might be getting a version that won't stick around? That seems always the case, whether you do A/B or not. You might rollback if there is an issue, and you will certainly roll forward at some point, meaning users will get a new version at some point.
Would it be an issue if the A/B test was temporal? Like all users got one version today, and a different version tomorrow?
I guess I am just confused by this statement:
> If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all.
This seems contrary to so many other complaints we see all the time, that companies push changes out without taking into account what users actually want. So, do we want companies that push out changes with no user feedback because they are confident that they know what users want, or do we want companies that get feedback from users on whether new changes are helping or hurting.
Obviously phased rollouts are fine and even necessary like you said. That’s not really “experimenting on people”, it’s experimenting on the network/system.
I constantly experiment on users in my work. It’s all around extracting the most money you possibly can. Meanwhile we have mountains of UX interview material where people tell us exactly what’s wrong with our site, and we don’t implement any of it lol.
Profits are up though! In a big way! And our users continue to hate us more and more.
OkayPhysicist · · focus · HN ↗
cortesoft · · focus · HN ↗
Is it unethical to do phased rollouts (where a small percentage get the new version) as a way to do safe deploys? If the issue is that two users making requests at the same time might see different things, then this would also be unethical? Yet, these sorts of phases rollouts is the best way to release something safely. When I worked at a large CDN with 50,000 servers around the world, we ALWAYS did phased releases, to make sure we didn't take down everything all at once, and to make sure we caught any performance regressions right away.
Is your issue that the user might be getting a version that won't stick around? That seems always the case, whether you do A/B or not. You might rollback if there is an issue, and you will certainly roll forward at some point, meaning users will get a new version at some point.
Would it be an issue if the A/B test was temporal? Like all users got one version today, and a different version tomorrow?
I guess I am just confused by this statement:
> If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all.
This seems contrary to so many other complaints we see all the time, that companies push changes out without taking into account what users actually want. So, do we want companies that push out changes with no user feedback because they are confident that they know what users want, or do we want companies that get feedback from users on whether new changes are helping or hurting.
carljungslabtek · · focus · HN ↗
I constantly experiment on users in my work. It’s all around extracting the most money you possibly can. Meanwhile we have mountains of UX interview material where people tell us exactly what’s wrong with our site, and we don’t implement any of it lol.
Profits are up though! In a big way! And our users continue to hate us more and more.
dgently7 · · focus · HN ↗