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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#151

Post by bakugo »

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…

> 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. Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.

Whenever I express a negative sentiment about some aspect of modern software that takes away power and choice from the user in favor of baby-tier handholding and get the usual reply that goes something like "well the average user doesn't need or care about that so it shouldn't exist!", this is who I imagine typing out the comment on the other side of the screen.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#152

Post by ben_w »

krisoft wrote: post #115
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.

> This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want. I think you just reinvented sex work, but somehow made it more icky? The main and big problem with this if anyone would consider it for dating for real, which probably they wouldn’t so no big worry, is what is in the price? So A just paid 20 dollars for the pleasure of having a date with B. What did A buy? Does B have to stay at the date for…

> I think you just reinvented sex work, but somehow made it more icky?

Or possibly expensive engagement/wedding rings in non-jewellery form.

On a separate point, some of my socialist (and in a few cases literally communist) friends assert that the issues at the intersection of sex work with consent also apply to all other work under capitalism; I don't have a strong counter-argument to this.

Money is fundamentally unnatural, so it's not surprising that it feels wrong and icky in a lot of situations.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#153

Post by saint_fiasco »

mvdtnz wrote: post #149
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…

Why would anyone think that a large overall pool of happiness is somehow better than a high per capita happiness? This seems like the kind of thing that's incredibly obvious to everyone but the academic philosopher.

In this particular case, it's because the success of an ad-funded service depends on the amount of users it has.

If you don't like the repugnant conclusion you have to change something in the conditions of the environment so that you make it not be true. Arguing against it and calling your refutation obvious doesn't do anything.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#154

Post by 1letterunixname »

Blaming any particular user is victim blaming and shifts responsibility away from those responsible: creators. (Let's assume commercial apps with paying users rather than volunteer freeware.)

Whoever acts as the product manager or manager for UX needs to concurrently field input from users as signals rather than directly actionable feedback AND not be so self-absorbed with coding, grand feature plans, or what they "want" that they cannot prioritize use-cases of users in the real world (e.g., user-centric agile-ish development).

Another issue is that popular apps backed by major corporations tend to drift away from their roots because their developers and product managers tend to be rewarded for features and appearances of work than steady consistency and usability rather than fixing bugs, maintaining what already exists, or improving bad UX.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#155

Post by wilg »

mvdtnz wrote: post #149
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…

Why would anyone think that a large overall pool of happiness is somehow better than a high per capita happiness? This seems like the kind of thing that's incredibly obvious to everyone but the academic philosopher.

It's just a question of if you value other people existing or not. If you don't, focus on per-capita happiness, if you do then you focus on meeting a minimum threshold of happiness for everyone.

I don't see how you couldn't value other people existing – I think they have just as much of a right to experience the universe as I do.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#156

Post by tyre »

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…

The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics.

Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population. Merging it with natalism isn’t realistic or meaningful, so we end up with these population morality debates. The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!)

Compare to Rawls’s Original Position, which uses an unborn person to make the hypothetical work but is ultimately about optimizing for happiness in an existing population.

We really shouldn’t get ourselves tied into knots about the possibility of pumping out trillions of humans because an algorithm says they’ll be marginally net content. That’s not the end goal of any reasonable, practical, or sane system of ethics.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#157

Post by [deleted] »

mvdtnz wrote: post #149
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…

Why would anyone think that a large overall pool of happiness is somehow better than a high per capita happiness? This seems like the kind of thing that's incredibly obvious to everyone but the academic philosopher.

[deleted]

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#158

Post by Night_Thastus »

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.

Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem - Reddit is social media that succeeded.

This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit.

It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc.

So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows.

You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#159

Post by mhb »

wilg wrote: post #136
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 w…

If you pack the whole problem into a definition of "worth living", then you're right. But the premise is that there is a range from extreme misery through neutral through extremely happy. The repugnant conclusion is that it is better to have many people in a state that is barely above neutral.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#160

Post by burnished »

mvdtnz wrote: post #149
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…

Why would anyone think that a large overall pool of happiness is somehow better than a high per capita happiness? This seems like the kind of thing that's incredibly obvious to everyone but the academic philosopher.

They do not, thats the point. If you start with a simple and reasonable sounding premise ('it is ethically correct to choose the option that maximizes happiness') but it leads to obviously absurd or inhuman outcomes then you might not want to adopt those principles.

Your second sentence rankles the hell out of me, you're only able to make that snap judgement to this because of your exposure to academic philosophy (where do you think that example that demonstrates the problem so clearly comes from?), but are completely unaware of that.

The bullshitters aren't puzzling at seemingly simple things, they're writing content free fluff.

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