A/B testing seems very greedy in practice -- even in the purely economic sense (not in the user satisfaction sense).
For example, say you "A/B tested" product pricing naively. I would expect demand to have a momentum component. If you set your prices to a large value abruptly, you will probably keep getting a similar sales rate for a while, until demand starts dropping over long term (could be years for all I know -- enough time for most opinions around information sources to have shifted, for example). Compare this to a strategy like Optimal Pricing[1] based on more refined methods.
Overall, I can locate at least 3 large scale problems here:
(1) Short term behavior of websites (maximizing ads, poor experience)
(2) Poor industrial coordination: surely this practice brings the entire (web) industry down. If most of what you see is plagued by ads and infinite popups, you will seek alternatives.
(3) Regulation failure. Sometimes even industrial coordination is insufficient, because joint efforts are still limited to a single domain, and not all of society. In this case usually regulation is necessary.
Privacy is great and all, but clicking a cookie disclaimer for every website seems such unnecessary friction. Most inexperienced users I've met did not know what cookies meant and couldn't make the privacy-convenience decision effectively.
For example, say you "A/B tested" product pricing naively. I would expect demand to have a momentum component. If you set your prices to a large value abruptly, you will probably keep getting a similar sales rate for a while, until demand starts dropping over long term (could be years for all I know -- enough time for most opinions around information sources to have shifted, for example). Compare this to a strategy like Optimal Pricing[1] based on more refined methods.
Overall, I can locate at least 3 large scale problems here:
(1) Short term behavior of websites (maximizing ads, poor experience)
(2) Poor industrial coordination: surely this practice brings the entire (web) industry down. If most of what you see is plagued by ads and infinite popups, you will seek alternatives.
(3) Regulation failure. Sometimes even industrial coordination is insufficient, because joint efforts are still limited to a single domain, and not all of society. In this case usually regulation is necessary.
Privacy is great and all, but clicking a cookie disclaimer for every website seems such unnecessary friction. Most inexperienced users I've met did not know what cookies meant and couldn't make the privacy-convenience decision effectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand#Opt...