Mr. Lehr demonstrates one of the quintessential shortcomings of business management, channeling Drucker with "what gets measured gets managed."

You could even build leaderboards for different topics based on the content of the books and articles you read. Or think about a score that indicated how balanced your reading behavior per topic was (to incentivize users to read takes on political topics from different perspectives).

Unfortunately, I think it’s unlikely that we will see a product like I described anytime soon. The world’s largest bookstore, most popular eBook reader, and biggest social network for books are all owned by a company that has very little competency in design and user-facing product innovation.

Right - if there's a trillion dollar company whose products are eponyms for the subject you're discussing, and they haven't moved on your idea, it's because they suck at innovation.

Jane McGonigal, Ph.D bigthinker from the I-shit-you-not "Institute for the Future" in Palo Alto, wrote a book called Reality is Broken about the stunning power that gamification presents to all of us. Set aside for a moment that she opens her book by quoting Heroditus as if he wasn't an abject liar about everything - she also seriously underplays the reality that gamification works for about two months on average. Pokemon Go? Most people played it for two months. Runkeeper? Two months. Calorie counting? Two months. Whatever magic pointquest you're on, 80% of the participants are gonna give up after two months.

But proof of work! That thing that you're actually doing to doing it we'll describe as the captcha you need to work through if you want to increase whatever metric is easiest for the coders to catalog. "I want to show my friends this picture of me in Greece" is obviously a chump's desire, so let's steer the engagement to insist that total strangers need to see this picture of me in Greece so that we can do whatever the algorithm wants because the algorithm is going to favor whatever metric we want it to count. That's obviously why Flickr failed - it was mostly a place to put your photos where your friends could see them. There was no good way to draw "influencers."

It's the basic problem with social media: the coders want it to do this thing that they can gauge, while telling people they should use it for stuff they can't. It's fucking dumb. It's like telling people they should buy cars so they can get to work in comfort and then making fun of them if they don't go through four sets of tires a year.