21–30 of 840 posts
When online services maximizes the number of daily users, perhaps in the hundreds of millions, the vast majority of them won't be very interested. So of course any data driven service will optimize keeping uninterested users occupied. That does explain a lot actually.
> OKCupid, like the other acquisitions of Match.com The article seems to just glance over this crucial fact. Online dating sites have gotten worse because the Match Group monopolizes them. There's hardly any competition. Same with Google Search. Monopolies suck. They start out good, in order to attract all of the users, and then once they've acquired all of the users, they turn to unchecked profit maximization and st…
OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.
Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to survive, they HAVE to be bad at the service they purport to provide. They don't want people to have long term relationships, they want people to use a dating site.
There are "societal good" functions that companies might provide, for which a profit motive is wholly un-applicable without destroying the function itself.
There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms.
I recall years ago (maybe this was late '00s or early 2010s) when Facebook changed their interface to be much more "Twitter like", i.e. a semi-random list of items in your feed. Before that, for me it was much easier to actually follow conversations with my real friends. After that it was just a sea of posts - and by the way if you scrolled past a post and wanted to find it again, good luck. After all everything must be new and fresh to keep you engaged!!
This type of architecture has helped to lower the value of online relationships, and has continued to destroy our attention spans. I guess the only good news is that I feel like it's gotten so bad I can hardly use apps like FB or Instagram anymore, which is probably a good thing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://old.redd...>
In terms of impacts on software / application complexity, capability, and suitability to the needs and interests of advanced users, I feel somewhat similarly. I do take exception however with the notion that serving the needs of the much larger set people with less-advanced skills or interests is necessarily bad. In general I do support the effort of expanding access to computers and digital technologies.
A large part of the degredation Vendrov describes is less an element of the people using these tools as it is the financial and economic incentives of the entities providing them, encapsulated in Cory Doctorow's ever-more-widely-known term enshittification. That's driven by the dynamics of winner-take-all monopolies, advertising, surveillance capitalism, and the inherent challenges of monetising information goods.
What I would very much like to see, though, is a world in which both general and advanced-skills access are available and supported. A general characteristic and problem of media and information goods, going back to the advent of printing, is that popular tends to equate to degraded quality. This shows up in other products and services as well, though I'd argue it's most pernicious with information and media.
Feels like this is tyranny of easily measured metrics. If your north star metric is something more focused (number of fun dates!) that incentivizes features and experiments that push that number up, but if the number is DAU, suddenly you've decoupled "success" from the actual intention of the website or app. Obviously, "number of fun dates" is a lot harder to measure, relying as it would on surveys with low response…
So you want me to give up my mid-six figures job so your dates go a little bit better?
I wonder whether the flattening of product depth is a unique founder effect, or is destined to happen due to the eventual formation of monopolies? Take photo sharing as an example. Early Flickr was amazing. It had tons of features - great varied groups of all types, a huge licensed image search system, great tags, etc. I joined regional groups, and also criticism groups for street photos, etc. Their comment system wa…
It's probably safe to claim that part of it (and what likely killed Flickr) is that the original owners are usually more able to make coherent product features and explorations. They built something in the field because they knew something about the field. Once they're bought up by some other company, in particular any conglomerate, it gets worked on by a bunch of people who are experts at building products in genera…
Thoughtful article that doesn't even mention Youtube Shorts, perhaps the most glaring example of the trend. When online services maximizes the number of daily users, perhaps in the hundreds of millions, the vast majority of them won't be very interested. So of course any data driven service will optimize keeping uninterested users occupied. That does explain a lot actually.
> OKCupid, like the other acquisitions of Match.com The article seems to just glance over this crucial fact. Online dating sites have gotten worse because the Match Group monopolizes them. There's hardly any competition. Same with Google Search. Monopolies suck. They start out good, in order to attract all of the users, and then once they've acquired all of the users, they turn to unchecked profit maximization and st…
It should also be noted that match.com knows that it's business isn't "connecting people in stable relationships" but "luring people to pay for match.com by promising them connections that never work out." OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again. Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to survive, they HAVE to be bad at the servi…
This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article.
It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should also be noted that match.com knows that it's business isn't "connecting people in stable relationships" but "luring people to pay for match.com by promising them connections that never work out." OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again. Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to survive, they HAVE to be bad at the servi…
It sounds like a build-to-flip startup idea is to create a dating service geared towards creating LTRs and growing it to the point where you get on Match's radar.