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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#71

Post by koromak »

rurp wrote: post #60
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…

While there are some perverse incentives, I think this is overstating it. Millions of people enter the dating market every year by aging into it or ending a previous relationship. That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business. Of course there is the temptation to increase the churn rate, but it doesn't have to be exploitative.

It literally does, if you're a publicly traded company.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#72

Post by wiremine »

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…

> Online dating sites have gotten worse because the Match Group monopolizes them. There's hardly any competition.

I recently helped a group look at launching a dating app over a six month period. Here are a few take aways:

1. Nobody really likes the dating app experience. Most users have a few dating apps installed at any given time.

2. Therefore, it's relatively easy to break into the market. You start with a single geography and a single niche, and use marketing to gain a pre-launch group of a few thousand individuals.

3. The MRR is not great, and churn is around 2 months. Therefore, it's a hard market to scale into effectively without a lot of money.

4. Beyond the financials, the ethics are interesting. You're either selling your users to advertisers, or you're you're nickel-and-diming your users for low-value features.

Ultimately the group we were involved with decided to invest their money and time into other projects.

That all said: Match.com has a monopoly because most startups want a quick exit, and not actually solve the core problems. If someone like Facebook really wanted to enter the market and win, they could crush Match.com, IMHO. (Not saying that would be a good thing, just pointing out it's possible.)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#73

Post by NoGravitas »

robert_tweed wrote: post #35
davio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mixed on the shorts. I like it when they do a "you fix this by pushing this button here" in 15 seconds instead of it being 8+ minutes so they can get mid roll ads.

I'd be fine with shorts if they didn't disable the normal player controls.

Yet another reason to use NewPipe or SmartTube rather than the YouTube app or the browser.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#74

Post by vimax »

malfist wrote: post #25
Kapura wrote: post #20

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…

> say something, and leave So you want me to give up my mid-six figures job so your dates go a little bit better?

Do you really want to spend your life adding dark patterns to a dating website?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#75

Post by com2kid »

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.

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

Dental problems are two fold, genetic and habitual.

There are people who brush and floss 2x a day and have miserable teeth, their personal biome and genetics have screwed them.

Then there are people like me, I skipped the dentist for 2 years and when I went the dentist said my teeth looked perfect. (Though being on a keto diet for that time might have helped, one dentist I had said keto is the perfect diet for dental health! :) )

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#76

Post by ghaff »

ivee wrote: post #32
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…

(author here) I agree monopoly & market power is a big part of the story here, but I feel like that is already well-understood; I was trying to describe what the incentives feel like from the inside. I guess more anti-trust in tech would probably be good, but the reality of network effects & the advertising economy mean it's actually nontrivial for government to intervene in a way that's clearly net good for users. G…

>Had OKCupid stayed separate they might have had to tinderify anyways just to survive.

I never used them but I did read their blog and my sense is that they leaned a bit towards that demographic anyway.

As I wrote elsewhere, a lot of people jump to the conclusion that a company was ruined by a buyer or that a company let themselves stagnate. But I'd argue (agree?) it's often the case that the "marginal user" (or mainstream audience) have no real interest in what appealed to the early adopters.

And the early adopters may have moved on as well. I was pretty into eBay as an auction site at one point and I mostly lost interest.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#77

Post by fsckboy »

vsskanth wrote: post #12
candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think its because you need feature parity with smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity, otherwise it becomes too hard to use with just your fingers, compared to a desktop website where you have a keyboard and mouse to use outside the screen.

> smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity

this is a good hypothesis, except smartphone apps have much less UI feature complexity than is possible on a smartphone, i.e. it still seems to be a conscious choice to dumb down smart phone apps beyond what the UI and users can handle. A familiar example is banking apps, I have accounts at a number of large US banks, and in every case the phone apps leave out swaths of capabilities that their websites have, things like letting me see what Zelles I've sent to a particular person, "contact the bank" messaging, etc.

image editing apps are another example, 100's of them in the app stores, but they're less feature rich than Windows Paint from 30 years ago. when they do something fancy, it's frequently because they are an app for doing that one thing.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#78

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

That's not the tyranny of the Marginal User, that's a primitive mindset of growth at all costs, which doesn't realize growth is a phase of the existence of an entity, and just like teenagers stop growing eventually, so should companies, once they find their niche. Instead they keep overaddressing their audience, until entropy takes over and destroys the company altogether, to be replaced by another startup that has the same infinite growth one bit mentality.

Our understanding of how to create systems is primitive. Our understanding how to effectively maintain and refine them over time is broadly speaking non-existent. Collapse and destruction is not inevitable, it's plan B when the entity in question cannot maintain its own constitution. Our companies, products, cultures, nations, civilizations don't know how to do that. So they keep collapsing and get replaced.

It's massively wasteful, it causes endless pain and suffering, immense waste, it's the tragedy of our existence. And the hope is we'll learn eventually, before our entire species collapses. But so far I don't see it. We keep making the same mistakes over and over, but faster and faster, at higher and higher scale. That light at the end of the tunnel is not what you think it is.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#79

Post by pc86 »

wiremine wrote: post #72
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…

> Online dating sites have gotten worse because the Match Group monopolizes them. There's hardly any competition. I recently helped a group look at launching a dating app over a six month period. Here are a few take aways: 1. Nobody really likes the dating app experience. Most users have a few dating apps installed at any given time. 2. Therefore, it's relatively easy to break into the market. You start with a single…

Facebook Dating has been around for years, and I've only heard it spoken of in the wild once, with derision.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#80

Post by amelius »

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…

See also doctors and medicine.
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