Yuvraj’s approach
Identify key guardrail metrics to track: Negative feedback rate: the frequency with which users take action to hide posts, unfollow accounts, or report content. Use Sentiment score: Data gathered from periodic in app surveys asking users how they feel about time spent on platform. Active VS Passive Consumption Ratio: The ration of meaningful engagement-comments, share, like, message, etc and passive scrolling.
Justify why each metric is essential: Negative feedback rate directly signals that the algorithm is serving material that users find irrelevant, offensive or harmful. Sentiment score captures emotional impact that raw engagement metrics miss. High passive scrolling consumption is often related with lower long term satisfaction.
Assess potential tradeoffs between engagement and user satisfaction: Optimising purely for time spent can inadvertently reward sensational, devisive or addictive content. While this boosts short term ad revenue, it might lead to long term user fatigue and churn. Balancing these requires accepting a potential slight decrease in daily active minutes in exchange for a healthier and more sustainable user base.
Recommend a primary guardrail metric to prioritize: The primary metric to prioritise is the negative feedback rate. Unlike survey data which can be delayed, this metric provides real time actionable feedback. If an increase in average session length correlates with spikes in negative feedback, the algorithm can be adjusted immediately before more dissatisfaction occurs.