Why we lose out if we leave everything to algorithms

“Bad Romance”—an amazing piece of journalism by Sarah Jeong at the Verge—implicitly answers this question. It’s about the romance genre on Kindle Unlimited, and the royal rumble that’s been happening this year. It’s a story about how “rampant algorithmic tricks” have ripped apart an author community. Deep down, the cause of the controversy is about data, automation, and how people try to game systems that are too focused on KPIs.

The story is about over-reliance on algorithms and KPIs. Royalties and high ranking on the Amazon stories are everything, and authors do whatever they can to get there. When Amazon paid according to books read, authors published shorter and shorter books. Amazon’s fix was to pay based on number of pages read. The outcome? Books got longer and longer, and authors jumped people to the last page on opening the book.