Feature Chum

You know how when a tech company pushes a feature onto its users and it’s evident that the feature is just a way for the company to collect more user data or for some other nefarious business goal? You can tell that the feature results from some c-suite demand for world domination, and the marketing department sort of backed into whatever user benefit they’re touting.

There isn’t a great word for that.

In tech, some call it “growth hacking,” but I think that term is far too generous for what it is and divorced from what the practice entails. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and have a name for it.

Feature chum.

I might do a proper write-up on my main blog, but for now, I want to flesh out the concept here.

Feature chum is a shady business goal presented to consumers as a useful feature to a company’s product line or feature set. Feature chum always benefits the company’s objective of obtaining more power and growth, but not necessarily valuable for the end user.

For example, do you remember Facebook’s like button for external websites? You could add a like button to any webpage using a snippet of code. At the time, Facebook touted the like button as a way to increase engagement, traffic, and even sales.

This claim, and the like button itself, was a strategic misdirection. Years after it was released, we learned two things about that button.

One, Facebook’s true intentions were to increase its ability to track Facebook users off its platform and gain a treasure trove of user data.

Two, we learned that the like button did not, in fact, increase engagement, traffic, or sales for the websites that used it.

Feature chum often debuts to the market highly subsidized and widely available so that it may achieve mass adoption quickly. This strategy is helpful because feature chum often has no inherent value to the user but is imperative to meeting the company’s objective.

Because the specified business goal is the true motivation of feature chum, any potential user benefits are necessarily contrived and thus secondary, if such benefits exist at all.

The purpose of the “feature chum” method is to meet a specific business objective that would overwise be considered by the user base as outside the norm of acceptable business practices. No one would’ve installed that like button if we knew Facebook’s true intentions. And, of course, looking back on it, that button didn’t do shit. We all just went along with it for some reason.

Feature chum obfuscates the primary business goal within a feature until mass adoption and full dependency on it are realized.

Again, I’ll likely do a more in-depth analysis and write up with more examples. But consider how this framing might change how we look at the Enshittification life cycle or how we can prevent it from happening in the future.