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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#61

Post by petsfed »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #36
postmodest wrote: post #22

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…

> 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. Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the…

There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts.

Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.

There's not really a way to do rent-seeking on matchmaking without breaking matchmaking, so maybe don't seek rent on the matching itself? Just let your revenue stream be advertising. It's fine.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#62

Post by dale_glass »

koch wrote: post #13

> Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.

I think Reddit is a bit different. They're not a company that is finding that optimizing metrics leads to targeting Marl (as per article). They're a company that decided that the optimal way forward is to intentionally push out their former users and replace them with as much Marl as possible.

And I think that makes sense. The original Reddit is full of technical people with ad blockers, weird hobbies, weird communities, and various undesirables. Keeping this herd of cats happy is extremely tricky, selling anything to them is extremely difficult, and there's all sorts of complex drama that needs managing.

So it seems that Reddit decided that to make the site more profitable, manageable and attractive to advertisers, all this weirdness needs to be pushed out over time. Drive out the technical users and weird unprofitable communities, and replace with as much mindless scrolling as possible.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#63

Post by bwanab »

postmodest wrote: post #22
lapcat wrote: post #8

> 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…

I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore.

The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like auto-repair post-warranty period.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#64

Post by ivee »

epivosism wrote: post #4

I would like more info on the factors hinted at in the article: The effect of buying and closing innovative potential competitors? Product design distortion due to companies being valued by unreal factors, so most of the market is acting on partly false data (raw MAU rather than sophisticated analysis of likely actually meaningful paying DAU) Actual errors due to not measuring user sentiment: failing to build long te…

> Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them?

No, I think you're right that Google is suffering in the long term. It's a combination of measurement difficulty and agency problems - there's no way for the VP of the product to get a credible signal about whether a change was good or not other than by looking at something incontrovertible like DAUs. You might try to introduce a metric like "user happiness" but the design space of such metrics is so large that a misaligned product manager could always use it to shove a bad change through.

Kind of like we all know GDP is a bad metric for human flourishing, but everything else feels even worse.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#65

Post by xkcd1963 »

gipp wrote: post #53
xkcd1963 wrote: post #44

"A substantial fraction of the world’s most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people ... spend their lives serving Marl" that is a logical fallacy because smart people don't waste their time on something as useless as that.

That's not what a logical fallacy is

"A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that occurs when invalid arguments or irrelevant points are introduced without any evidence to support them."

invalid argument => x people doing y where x is "brilliant" and y is "serving Marl". Serving Marl is not brilliant. It doesn't count to work for a FAANG company to be considered brilliant, at least by my standards and view on how time is well spend.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#66

Post by fsckboy »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5
epivosism wrote: post #3

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…

Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier, or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?

> Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier,

> or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?

or, in search of increased customer growth, is deeper product penetration into the bottom half of the sophistication bell-curve continually sieving ideas through fewer synaptic connections/simpler semantic nets

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#67

Post by Sharlin »

bwanab wrote: post #63
postmodest wrote: post #22

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…

I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore. The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like auto-repair post-warranty period.

Which is, of course, an argument for single-payer healthcare. (Or even semi-centralized, insurance based healthcare, for that matter). A $BIGORG has both the firepower and the incentives to ensure that your bodyparts stay healthy at minimum expense.

An anecdote: Ads like "your dentist hates this simple trick" don't work at all in a single-payer system. People are just baffled as to why a doctor wouldn't want you to be healthy!

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#68

Post by jerf »

RugnirViking wrote: post #39
fidotron wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely could do market based dating where people can bid how much a date with the other would be worth and you match everyone every few days based on the highest sum of bids, collecting the difference. So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date A the match will cost A 20 plus fees. This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.

or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument? Sorry but I have quite a viscerally bad reaction to such a proposal. Sure it could work in some sense of finding value price pairs or whatever where people's preferences aren't clear. But it also seems extremely dystopian and horrifying, particularly applied to the dating market. It would be similar with finding friends. People do…

"or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument?"

I dunno. I kinda look forward to the news stories about the Economic Collapse of 2035 being due to the market finally realizing that too many supposedly AAA Date-Backed Securities were actually Non-Investment Grade Junk Dates, and the subsequent revaluation of the Date Market caused the entire banking system to become insolvent because all the dates they were holding on their books as marked to maturity are in fact never going to be anything but immature, and consequently must be marked down to their actual market value of Zero.

I mean, it's a pretty realistic economic threat. Who doesn't have a story of something they anticipated being a AAA Rated Date turning out to have junk date status? Definitely a lot of mismatched incentives all the way around.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#69

Post by xcdzvyn »

lapcat wrote: post #8

> 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…

Google does not have a monopoly on search engines. There is abundant competition in the search engine market: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Brave, Yahoo.

Nobody uses Google because they have to, they use it because it is the best.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#70

Post by NoGravitas »

ivee wrote: post #42
freedomben wrote: post #6

> Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again. This is hilarious and sad because it fe…

"market targeting power users" is basically SaaS, right? I don't understand that market as well, but it seems to have similar dynamics where you only charge X$ / user / month and so are incentivized to grab more users instead of giving more value to existing users.

Almost. The problem with SaaS is that it doesn't actually target the power users; it targets their managers and/or purchasing departments. Basic mismatch of incentives already.
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