structural motive

A lot of confused discussion around large organizations comes from conflating individual motivations with larger-scale 'structural' motivation.

It's common to hear people criticize a company by saying that the company did X thing for nefarious reason Y. The company responds that they did X for good reason Z. For example: some people say that Google started aggregating reviews in order to put Yelp out of business and capture their revenue. Google responds that they actually started aggregating reviews in order to be helpful to users.

Who's right? Of course there's no real right answer to this question: every action has multiple causes.

It may really be the case that the people at Google doing this work only intended to be helpful to users. Really, genuinely. The team had a culture that focused on helping users, and that's what they worked towards. For every change that was made, there's a design doc and emails articulating why this choice is more helpful than the alternatives. The explicit motivation for the feature is entirely noble.

But there are a lot of other features that didn't happen. Why aren't all of those other features also represented by teams working on them? The implicit reason is that those projects were never proposed; they may never even have consciously occurred. Those other features had unfortunate business implications, and without anyone even saying anything, people avoided thinking about them because we naturally try to please the people around us.

The implicit reasons are structural. The critics may be making a real and valid point about structural factors.

This is a defensive dynamic that people at companies get into sometimes. The company is criticized from the outside. As an employee you might think "I know that this criticism is bogus, because I was there and this isn't how the decision was made". You think the people making the criticism are naive and pathetic. But the critics are still right. You can say, "we never talked about this", but that doesn't mean it wasn't in the culture.

What made Google add this feature it?

• A1: Who cares? The point of a market is to align the incentives so that a selfish entity also ends up being good for the world. As the incentives align, they pull in the same direction.
• A2:
• Incentives will never be entirely aligned. To the extent that Google can