You never know what the users mean

A couple of days ag Elon Musk tweeted (it's still called that, right?) about how their recommendation algorithm easily can get things wrong since they don't know why you are sharing content with friends. This is a great example of a problem I have to deal with on a regular basis.

This is the tweet in question (screen shot to the right in case it get's deleted). It highlights a very common problem when it comes to both abuse prevention and streamlining content for users - you cannot be sure about why users take certain actions.

Let's look at a two examples from "my world". If a user deletes an email without reading it - what does that mean? Does it mean that the user don't want to see similar content? Or does it mean that they could triage the email based on the subject and decided they don't need to read this message (but is still interested in other messaged from the same sender)? Technically we cannot know...

What about somebody who is reporting an email as spam? Does that mean that they think all emails from that sender is spam? Or only that one email? Or are they using an email client with the options "junk" and "trash" where one means "delete" and the other "spam"? We can probably figure out if the last option is happening - but we still don't know if the action was intentional.

You might think that you can just ask the users for more information about their intentions. Sadly I think that rarely works with real users. I remember when I wanted to report a fake account on twitter and because I was not the victim directly affected it took me several attempts to reach a state where I could actually report the account. At that point I would have clicked anything just to proceed so the reasons I provided had less value. Generally I think users hate clicking through wizards so they probably just give up and your system do not get feedback on how it is performing.

At the end of the day, maybe it is acceptable to be mostly right. But even if you keep the majority happy, the user experience for the minority where your system do the wrong thing can be pretty bad. And if you don't recognize the fact that users will do unexpected things you'll likely end up making a lot of users disappointed.