Airbnb uses nights booked as a metric because it shows an actual commitment to using the platform for the services it provides. This also indicates that users are choosing Airbnb for accommodation, potentially instead of hotels, which is one of the company’s biggest challenges. Airbnb could game this by offering extremely discounted nights to encourage more nights booked, but this could reduce the profits for both the company and the hosts.
Facebook used 7 friends in 10 days as a metric because it indicates that someone had established a large enough social network to have an incentive to return to the platform, which is a proxy for the strength of a user’s social connections. One way that Facebook could game this is by sending automatic friend requests to everyone in a user’s contact list, but this could have a negative impact as this would not necessarily create more genuine connections and could overwhelm new users with a large number of unwanted posts, potentially causing them to use the product less.
Slack chose 2,000 messages from a team as a metric because this number shows that a team has adopted slack as a main channel of communication, instead of simply using it occasionally in addition to email or other forms of communication. This number of messages indicates that Slack has become integrated into the team’s workflow and communication. Slack could game this by offering incentives or rewards for users to send a certain amount of messages, but this could result in a large amount of unnecessary messages and notifications that could push teams back to using more formal communication methods such as email that reduce the amount of unnecessary pings.
