The case against Google reveals the power of defaults

🔮 For any astrology heads reading this, one writer on Medium catalogs Kamala Harris’ running mate prospects by sign and vibe — Harris is a Libra and Walz is an Aries, two highly compatible signs. Take it with five grains of salt, but it’s fitting as this is the “vibes election.”
Issue #137: making a police sketch of the Boogeyman and writing for fun
By Harris Sockel

On Monday, a judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search (Google will appeal). One witness revealed that in 2022 Google paid Apple $20 billion to be Safari’s default search engine. In his decision, Mehta zeroes in on that arrangement, dedicating seven pages to the importance of default settings, and writing: “the field of behavioral economics teaches that a consumer’s choice can be heavily influenced by how it is presented.”

Reason #2983 why I love reading court decisions in full: Sometimes they veer into abstract principles of psychology and consumer behavior.

The “default effect” is a well-established cognitive bias: Basically, humans are lazy. We do what our environment nudges us toward. For example: In 2017, 60% of all Google searches flowed through defaults — most of us didn’t actively navigate to Google.com, we simply started typing.

Way back in the Medium archive, Chris Oslund, a designer at Microsoft obsessed with defaults, unpacks two highly influential examples: Apple’s decision to scrap CD/DVD drives, which normalized downloading apps from the internet, and Slack’s bias toward public channels. It’s dead simple to blast a message to a large group on Slack, but if you want to communicate privately, they make it harder. As a result, more of us started making work decisions in public.

For another perspective, UX designer and strategist Michalina Bidzinska analyzes the default options in Animal Crossing, which grossed $2 billion in its first year (the fifth-highest amount of video game revenue ever). Never underestimate the power of a well-placed default to drive billions in revenue and subtly change our behavior.

💤 One more story: about career breaks

Engineer Wei Ann Heng quit her job of five years in an effort to finally stop viewing life through the lens of business. Heng woke up one day and realized she’d been sprint-planning life so hard she was barely living it — mapping out long-term goals chopped into smaller ones, with R-A-G statuses (red, amber, green) for each. While planning is usually a good thing, it can also be a crutch — especially when you begin to fixate more on how to work than actually working.

I also loved Heng’s hilarious (and dark) depiction of what being a software developer is actually like:

A big part of our job is giving point blank estimations and elaborate blueprints for future plans on almost zero information. It’s like being asked to make a police sketch of the Boogeyman based on a crying child’s description of its nightmares.

As a non-developer who’s asked how much work it might take to accomplish vague, ambitious projects (“say, what if we rebuilt Medium’s editing tools next year?”), I empathize.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about writing for yourself

Sci-fi and fantasy writer Brittany Amara pushes back against the pressure to write what’s useful, timely, or even thought-provoking. Instead, Amara advocates for creating from a place of joy, irreverence, and whimsy. If you write what is genuinely fun for you to write — not what you think will “do well” — you’ll inspire the same emotions in others.

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a highly zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

Yesterday’s winner: Nicolas Baudet for the correct answer of “part of the ear of Aristotle.” It’s a Roman copy of a Greek Bronze bust of the philosopher, originally created in 330 BC. Thanks for reading, Nicolas!

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com