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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#201

Post by mvdtnz »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #153
mvdtnz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is an incredibly long bow to draw. Corporations are optimising for their own profits, not anyone's happiness.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#202

Post by diegof79 »

The article puts a lot of emphasis on Marl, the marginal user. However, it's a two-way relationship: the society (culture, media, and products) created Marl. If you watch YouTube since you were a kid and see video recommendations all the time, it's hard to develop a good attention span as there is always something attractive and new in the corner of your eye. Then you read online articles that are incredibly shallow and almost generated by a bot, with the sole purpose of gathering clicks. Over time, you get used to skimming the text contents.

The article is a good example; nobody wants to spend too much time creating a long blog post. So, a short text and a catchy title work better to attract your audience. For me, software is about products like an operating system or an editor; for the author, "software" is about websites like Google or Reddit. It's not the same. The incentives are different, but making a distinction requires more analysis, an analysis that Marl will not read. Marl will complain that macOS quality seems lower on each release without realizing the article is about something different.

Most people reading HN work in the software industry. In one way or another, we are also responsible for creating Marl. That's why having a better education in social topics should be an essential part of any engineering curriculum.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#203

Post by rbultje »

phkahler wrote: post #101
rurp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business. Sure, but VCs and big companies want to maximize profit, not just be profitable. When a profitable startup sells out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".

> When a profitable startup sells out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".

Or just "I'm done with this shit". It's remarkably difficult to run a small (software) business in the US. Section 174, multi-state income tax filings. It's a bloody pain if your goal is not just to operate the business and be overhead, but to actually do stuff. Regulatory/tax complexity thresholds depending on business size would be a welcome improvement.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#204

Post by wilg »

mvdtnz wrote: post #198
wilg wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a vast chasm between "other people deserve to exist" and "we should 100x our population in order to increase the marginal happiness pool".

Alternately, there isn't.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#205

Post by julianeon »

feoren wrote: post #164
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…

That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism. First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work all da…

Here's a simpler way to phrase the problem.

The current world population is about 8 billion.

By this argument, and also by your argument, it should actually be 999 billion. Or a number even higher than that.

The conclusion boils down to:

1. Find maximum population number earth can support.

2. Hit that number.

I do think that, when put this way, it seems simplistic.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#206

Post by dsm4ck »

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?

hey in this instance does this mean you are making ~150,000 or ~500,000?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#207

Post by xnx »

lapcat wrote: post #133
xcdzvyn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many consider OpenAI, Amazon, and TikTok to all be competitors to Google Search.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#208

Post by sanderjd »

autoexec wrote: post #184
sanderjd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

I think paying for something does encourage users to be more invested in it, but paid software can neglect their power users too if they're comfortable being "good enough for most people"

Yeah I guess it's more of a continuum than a binary. But I do feel like there may be a discontinuity between free and cheap, where the business model totally changes in a way that (in my view) better aligns the incentives between the business and its customers.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#209

Post by saint_fiasco »

amelius wrote: post #84
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…

Nope because this can easily be gamed, since getting married doesn't need to cost much. Also the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs.

> this can easily be gamed

There are other online services like Uber and AirBnB in which it is much easier to cheat by communicating with your counterpart outside of the app, that way you don't have to pay commissions and so on. It's a serious problem for them.

But this hypothetical online service marries people. Fraud is much riskier there, because divorce can be extremely expensive if your partner-in-fraud doesn't cooperate.

> the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs

Isn't marriage a relatively centralized institution? The central authority that marries people can easily provide proof that they indeed married some people.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#210

Post by Karrot_Kream »

tshaddox wrote: post #185
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Which conceivable method of summing is the least problematic? Depending on the summing method you might find yourself advocating creating as many people as possible with positive utility, or eliminate everyone with below-average utility, etc.

Utility is very complicated and summing might not even be possible. Folks have argued for completely different utility systems, such as cardinal utility where utility is modeled purely as relations instead of something that is isomorphic to a real. Even going by the mainstream view of ordinal utility, utility tends to be a convex function (simplistically, having 1 food is much better than having no food, but having 1000 food isn't that much better than having 500 food.) Modeling utility as something purely isomorphic to reals gives it all the fun paradoxes that we know the reals have and can be used to create some really wacky results. The "repugnant conclusion" is a direct consequence of that.
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