Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

nothinghuman.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 840 posts

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#131

Post by ghaff »

MostlyStable wrote: post #119

Is this related to the phenomenon where, as the smart phone market got larger the diversity of options decreased? Naively, I would have assumed the opposite. Seems to be similar in lots of large hardware markets where I would expect there to be a large enough total customer base to justify serving at least a few groups with niche interests, but it often seems like that doesn't happen and you get a very small number o…

My theory would be that as the market grows and matures and the mainstream offerings are refined, niche offerings are marginalized. Most people probably adapt to the mainstream even if they'd really prefer a somewhat smaller laptop for traveling given the 13" one is pretty light and refined. Some people will buy whatever phone is smallest but most won't.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#132

Post by footy »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #112

The margins are always where the interesting stuff happens. The interesting people gather there. The interesting ideas are shared. The new fashions. Think of Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street, Notting Hill, Bloomsbury, Mercer New York.... Sure, Capitalism always devours it, but by then the party has moved on somewhere new. Marginals know how to find each other. By the books we read. By the fact that we're the only ones…

Unlike you, the article is using "marginal" in the economic sense.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#133

Post by lapcat »

xcdzvyn wrote: post #69
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.

> There is abundant competition in the search engine market: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Brave, Yahoo.

DuckDuckGo and Yahoo both use Bing's search index. (Which sucks whenever Bing randomly removes your website for no reason.)

Brave Search is a very recent addition, just within the past year or two.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#134

Post by jjkaczor »

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…

Ding ding ding, I met my current partner on OKCupid 9 years ago, don't think I will ever need to return. (fingers-crossed, knock-on-wood, [insert-platitude-here)

Seeing as I have a "face for radio", I doubt I would ever manage to date seriously on "swipe right/left" platforms.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#135

Post by no_wizard »

petsfed wrote: post #61
saint_fiasco wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

Unlimited PTO is poorly worded and always felt like a scam to me

It’s not really unlimited and people tend to take less overall

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#136

Post by wilg »

bdcs wrote: post #98

The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics' The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10 N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100 N people with 0.111 happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the ma…

I've never understood this problem. To me, it seems that since you've defined a minimum "worth living" amount of happiness and unbounded population, it makes complete sense that the answer would be that it is better to have lots of people whose life is worth living rather than fewer. Is it not tautological?

Like it seems like you have to take "worth living" seriously, since that is the element that is doing all the work. If it's worth living, you've factored in everything that matters already.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#137

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

> OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.

This wasn't necessarily true. I actually met my wife on OkCupid, all the way back in 2007 originally, and she wasn't even the first long-term relationship I ended up off of the site, which was back in 2004. OkCupid used to have social features, allowing you to maintain a personal blog and follow other user's blogs. A whole lot of us had a pretty nice community, couchsurfing, visiting each other when we traveled for work. That was even how I met my wife, through the blogs, not by direct solicitation of a date. We didn't even live on the same coast when we met, but eventually moved to the same city by chance and ended up together.

When Match Group bought the site, they killed these features and there was no longer any reason to stick around, but a lot of us had stuck around long after pairing off and marrying. For a long time, we even stayed in touch via other means and continued meeting up in person when we had the chance. Unfortunately, Facebook was the main place they all settled, and I did not want to stick around on Facebook, so mostly I've lost touch with these people now. But we had a nice community for a long time, even a nearly global community, with people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Heck, even the reason I originally joined OkCupid wasn't with the intention of finding dates. It was because of an old vBulletin forum I was on for Armenians in Los Angeles where a bunch of people took the personality tests and compared results, so I joined to do that. But things were different enough in 2004 that I didn't need to seek out dates. Women just messaged me and asked me out because they weren't yet overloaded with spam and jaded from the Internet turning to shit.

The Internet was different in a lot of ways back then. OkCupid was founded by nerd grad students that mostly wanted to prove they could apply math to romance. But then they discovered math could actually make them rich, and Match Group never gave a shit and only cared about money from the start. I suspect much of what eventually became shit started that way. Larry and Sergey were probably legitimate math nerds, too. Mark Zuckerberg probably just wanted to hot-or-not his classmates. But then they all discovered they could get rich and investors killed the fun.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#138

Post by masukomi »

akira2501 wrote: post #96
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…

> This is hilarious and sad because it feels too accurate. To me it's a disappointing effigy that the author is conjuring up and then burning because they're unwilling to address the fact that the corporation they work for and the ceaseless chase of "social media platforms" drives this behavior more than the imagined "Marl's" of the world ever did.

> because they're unwilling to address the fact that the corporation they work for and the ceaseless chase of "social media platforms" drives this behavior more than the imagined "Marl's" of the world ever did.

the fact that the corporations are doing that, and chasing the Marls is the foundational premise of the article. He's not blaming it on the Marls. He's blaming it on the companies chasing them.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#139

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #123
bdcs wrote: post #98

The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics' The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10 N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100 N people with 0.111 happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the ma…

Many versions of utilitarianism never specified the function to compute the sum for the many. Your example assumes that the function is simple addition, but others have been proposed that reflect some of the complexities of the human condition a little more explicitly (e.g. sad neighbors make neighbors sad).

Yeah, utilitarianism means you want to act in a way that's beneficial to most people.

There's many ways you can interpret that, though.

But I think if you say, before we had 1 apple per person, and now we have 2x as many apples, but they're all owned by one person - that's hard to argue it's utilitarian.

If before you had 100 apples, and everyone who wanted one had one, and now you have 10,000 apples distributed to people at random, but only 1 in 100 people who wants one has one - that also seems hard to argue as utilitarian.

Businesses are value maximization functions. They'll only be utilitarian if that happens to maximize value.

In the case of software - if you go from 1m users to 10m users - that doesn't imply utilitarianism. It implies that was good for gaming some metric - which more often than not these days is growth, not profit.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#140

Post by nonrandomstring »

footy wrote: post #132
nonrandomstring wrote: post #112

The margins are always where the interesting stuff happens. The interesting people gather there. The interesting ideas are shared. The new fashions. Think of Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street, Notting Hill, Bloomsbury, Mercer New York.... Sure, Capitalism always devours it, but by then the party has moved on somewhere new. Marginals know how to find each other. By the books we read. By the fact that we're the only ones…

Unlike you, the article is using "marginal" in the economic sense.

different dialect
Post reply on HN