At that time I saw it as a nice, fun project.
too my knowledge I was one of the first in my market on corporate state who took on this topic. which later came to be called search engine optimization.
I was definitely one of the first who gave corporate lectures, workshop, whitepapers, books about it.
20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.
Not a very dramatic example, but it made me so proud that I decided then and there on the career path I'm still on today.
> How do you feel about its impact
Even though it's not healthy, I let it happen to a point. I reach out by email about the health impacts. Some people say, "I plan to stop at the end of the month".
> have you taken steps, like focus groups or educational initiatives, to address the issue?
I set limits to how long they can be on the leaderboard, and I reach out personally to those who overdo it.
My next project is wonderful.dev [1], where I promise to never email any dev users (we don't even store your email) and have a focus on usability even if it means slower growth. This is in contrast to most apps these days trying to hook users with addictive patterns, always competing for your attention.
They really liked the dashboards so we were tasked to build some more visualizations for them, one of which was a google-maps visualization of all the antennas with active alarms/errors and the field technicians they had in the country who went to fix those antennas. They had all the GPS info in their database from the technicians company-issued phone, but couldn't see it.
The people in the operation center said the biggest problem they had was technicians pretending or taking a long time to go to the antennas. The technicians apparently often stopped for 1-2 hour breaks at coffee shops[2]. They wanted to be able to track them live so they could see if they were actually working.
After a few months that map visualization got so popular that the COO of the org came directly to us (we had no interaction with him beforehand). He tasked us to build some dashboards to be used exclusively by him. He claimed that the biggest issue he had was people from lower layers hiding information from him and we, being a 3rd party, were trustworthy to give the right info.
This was very early in my career and I was surprised by how much cloak and dagger all the layers of the org treated each other. That telco was a massive company, sometimes I wonder if they still use the dashboards we built.
We used to joke that we probably got a lot of people fired. In retrospect that was the whole goal to begin with, but we didn't realize before we delivered those projects.
[1]: They had an array of 3 by 2 1080p 42'' TVs (6 total) in which they would put our dashboards on. The TVs were arranged as a single external monitor on their operations center. Being a single web application we had a lot of performance problems trying to render one browser tab in a 6k display in 2014.
[2]: Another big issue was a technician would claim that the weather was bad and they couldn't climb the antenna for safety reasons. So we added weather information to that map visualization.
[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-01-tank-tactics-the-prototy...
[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-01-tank-tactics-the-prototy...
Both of those were an early wake-up call for me that the shit we were playing with where digital meets reality and human behaviour, was way more than just "entertainment".
Had to takedown some stuff
> By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, didn’t want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, “worried about my well-being.” His tweets became darker and more cryptic. “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine,” read one. “But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.” He realized there was one thing to do: Pull the game. After tweeting that he was taking it down, 10 million people downloaded it in 22 hours. Then he hit a button, and Flappy Bird disappeared. When I ask him why he did it, he answers with the same conviction that led him to create the game. “I’m master of my own fate,” he says. “Independent thinker.”