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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#301

Post by lowbloodsugar »

JohnMakin wrote: post #266
mrshoe wrote: post #258

The real problem is industry-wide adoption of metrics-driven design. When I studied cognitive science, the method we employed for HCI was User Centered System Design. Granted, this was a backronym for UCSD, but the point remains — design should be user-centered, not metrics-driven. When I launch Netflix, it is abundantly clear to me that their design is driven by their metrics. What I want to see at the top is my “co…

This brings to mind my experience as an early facebook adopter (when it was still college email invite-only), to some point a while ago when they went from a chronological timeline/feed to a "curated" one. Users overwhelmingly did not want or like this, because the main use of facebook at that time was to connect and chat with people you knew in real life. However, that does not drive ads as well as what exists curre…

>I can't even remember the last time I saw a close friend's post on my feed.

It’s probably because they aren’t on Facebook any more.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#302

Post by mananaysiempre »

carlossouza wrote: post #19
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…

Totally agree: it's hilarious because it's true. Good startups target power users. By "good" I mean companies that find true PMF and grow exponentially at near-zero CAC (i.e. the ones that earn - not buy - their growth).

> Good startups target power users.

Growth-oriented startups then run out of power users and start targeting the wider population; when the latter outnumber the former, power users fall by the wayside at best and are explicitly told to fuck off as uneconomical at worst.

Acquisition-oriented startups sell their power user base to a large company that’s unlikely to care about them and proceeds to tell them to fuck off (usually after some large-company-scale fleeting instant, like a couple of quarters).

That is why, most of the time, I now preemptively fuck off when I see a (VC-funded) startup targeting me as a power user of whatever they’re making. I’ve been burned too many times, and with all due respect to the cuddly techies running things at the moment, they don’t own the company.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#303

Post by jacobn »

ecshafer wrote: post #163
dale_glass wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communit…

Reddit seems to have easy sales. Specific subreddits can be targeted with specific ads really easily. So it should be easy to sell things there and easy to keep the users happy.

I've tried buying reddit ads. Maybe I was selling the wrong thing, or my ads sucked or whatever, but boy those ads didn't just not perform, they were just completely useless.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#304

Post by intended »

npsimons wrote: post #282
somedude895 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good point that I think some commenters here should take to heart. No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another.

> No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another. While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do better? If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?

Spitballing -

Perhaps due long tail effects.

Tech (platforms) will always be advertising focused, because information systems scale with compute. marginal costs are so minor, that the limit becomes human attention.

Which is also why apple may be able to focus on user centric design better. They are product + tech.

Then again I can see other physical product firms delving into advertising - so its most likely corporate behavior/values.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#305

Post by Terr_ »

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…

> infinite people with barely any happiness

That reminds me of the SMBC "Existifier" comic, which satirizes the idea that merely helping something exist is morally positive.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/existence

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#306

Post by bsenftner »

nequo wrote: post #230
bad_user wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth means prosperity. Also, the idea that the economy requires growth is BS, it's just that economic stagnation or recession currently means some people are going to be starving. And if you actually look at the world, with its still growing population in some countries, or an aging population in others, it's pretty clear why people starve when growth stops, and it has nothing to do with capitalism, or The Man.

Japan hasn’t had much GDP growth since 1990. You could say that its economy is stagnating. Yet starvation is hardly a defining phenomenon for its population. They have one of the highest life expectancies. Healthcare is widely available. Technological progress did not stop. And wealth inequality in this economy is among the lowest in the world.

I'm a N. American developer who worked in Tokyo for 6 months back in '94. The most striking aspect of Japanese culture that is not present in N. America is a shared identity that everyone collaborates to make Japan and Japanese culture better. The common everyone, it seemed, held that value. Which is 100% absent from N. American culture; here our cultural value is "get mine, from you if possible, f everyone else" it seems.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#307

Post by intended »

dimal wrote: post #285
Night_Thastus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proppe…

It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.

They were a YC team. They were always on VC funding - and they were not exactly a tale of profit and success.

Essentially, Reddit always had to IPO.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#308

Post by charlie0 »

pxc wrote: post #231
hyggetrold wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the writing of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, he calls out growth as the underlying cause of these issues. Our current economic system is oriented around growth and the assumption that it can continue indefinitely.

> Our current economic system is oriented around growth and the assumption that it can continue indefinitely. It's worse than that. For the present system to function correctly, growth must continue indefinitely. Even just a slower pace of growth constitutes a crisis under our current economic system.

Embedded debt obligations

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#309

Post by Wowfunhappy »

mrshoe wrote: post #258

The real problem is industry-wide adoption of metrics-driven design. When I studied cognitive science, the method we employed for HCI was User Centered System Design. Granted, this was a backronym for UCSD, but the point remains — design should be user-centered, not metrics-driven. When I launch Netflix, it is abundantly clear to me that their design is driven by their metrics. What I want to see at the top is my “co…

> Their metrics prove to them that getting me hooked on new shows will increase my engagement and increase the amount of time I spend in their app. Guess what? As a user, those are not my goals!

But here's what I find odd about Netflix. Up until extremely recently—and even now for most customers—Netflix did not and does not display ads. Netflix makes money from subscription fees, which means they get the same amount of money whether you spend zero, 10, 50, or 100 hours per month in their app, as long as you keep paying for your subscription.

Netflix has apparently concluded that users who spend more time in their app are more likely to remain subscribed. I wonder why that is, or if Netflix is even correct. I would think that for most users, the quality of their time matters more than the quantity.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#310

Post by intended »

ecshafer wrote: post #163
dale_glass wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communit…

Reddit seems to have easy sales. Specific subreddits can be targeted with specific ads really easily. So it should be easy to sell things there and easy to keep the users happy.

Reddit ads sadly didnt work well. They really tried all sorts of things.

I feel that they may have been a media firm, and not a platform. When Victoria conducted AMAs, Reddit was a burgeoning cultural force.

Maybe if they had gone that route they would be their “ideal” state. However that leads to no billionaire club IPO/Exit.

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