Instrumentation
Who the number was for
Written 29 August 2026 · published 8 September 2026
A metric goes to whoever can act on it. The platforms pointed one at the person it was measuring, and called the result engagement.
Almost every page on the web in 1998 carried a counter at the bottom of it. A CGI script, a text file holding one integer, a strip of digit images. It counted reloads as visits and it counted the author checking their own site. Everybody knew both of those things and left it there anyway.
The counters that mattered were on the other side of the machine. Requests per second, load average, disk queue, error rate. You instrument a system so that whoever can act on the number gets to see it, which is most of the discipline:
Show a number to the operator, and you get a decision.
Show it to the accountant, and you get a budget.
Show it to the thing being measured, and you get behaviour.
The Like button shipped in February 2009. It took a server-side metric and rendered it on the profile of the person it was measuring, under their name, beside their face. There is nothing to do with a number in that position except try to move it, and moving it means posting more, posting differently, posting whatever moved it last time. The metric produces the thing it measures. Excellent property for a quarterly slide. Poor one for a description of anybody's life.
I have shipped counters. Post counts under usernames, a hit counter on a homepage, a leaderboard on something that did not need one. One hour, three lines of SQL each. None of it registered at the time as a decision about how people would behave, because it read as a feature.
Those counters and
the one on Instagram are the same object. Instagram puts a ranking function
above it. The number moves, the ranking reads the move, and the next thing
shown is chosen to move it again. Nothing in that circuit is waiting for a
decision.
Same three lines. Different machine.
It worked, first. The promise was connection, and for a while the word was accurate.
My own version of what happened next is short, and it is not a complaint. For about ten years, on Facebook, the friends list went up. Over the same ten years the number of people who would have noticed if I stopped posting went down, and that number was on no screen anywhere. Then Instagram moved friends down the feed and recommendations up, and the likes fell. That was the fall I could see. The invisible one had happened years earlier.
Everybody is reachable and nobody is available.
The nostalgic reading is available here and it is half right. Before the feed,
social in my part of the world meant going where the music was, and the
friendships that came out of it were mostly luck. The difference is that
nobody was counting, profiling, generating metrics.
A room filled and emptied, and kept no record of who had been in it.
Rooms keep records now.
On 26 August 2026, about a week into the trial in Oakland, Meta settled with
52 state and territory attorneys general. Their case was that Facebook and
Instagram had been designed to be compulsive for children, and that the
company knew. Meta admits none of that. A court has still to approve it. The
headline figure is 18 billion dollars, paid over ten years, which is under a
month of the company's revenue.
The share price rose on the day.
The terms read like a config file.
- Like counts hidden from teenage accounts by default
- Daily cap two hours across both apps, liftable with a parent's permission
- Night nothing between midnight and six
- School hours notifications muted from eight until three
- Continuous use a prompt after fifteen minutes
- Feed an option for one nobody ranked
- Autoplay off
- Filters cosmetic surgery blocked
- Audit an independent reviewer once a year for five years
Every line of that is a default, which is the part worth noticing. A default has a commit, an author and a date, and none of the three is a matter of opinion the way a moderation call is. It is also the shallowest layer there is. A lawyer acting for former Meta employees put it plainly in the reporting the next day: the deal reaches the features and leaves the recommendation engine exactly where it was.
The settlement turns the counter off.
It leaves the engine running.