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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#321

Post by volkk »

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…

i work at a dating app and number of fun dates (worded slightly differently) is our north star metric! it's one of the major ones, and it has helped it stay relatively non predatory :)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#322

Post by intended »

com2kid wrote: post #83
afarrell wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dating site could work sustainably if it was a site for planning date nights. Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do. Revenue sources would include: - Ads for local businesses, classes, and events. - Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants. Once you get the site to work for date nights, let p…

I ran a startup making something similar to this pre-covid, it wasn't just date night, it was "find something to do in under 5 minutes". Groups of 4 to 6, partnering with local businesses who hosted the events. You opened the app, said what you wanted to do and when, and you were automatically put into a group. You could select how many people you already had going with you (date, or just a group of 2 friends who nee…

Theres a YC video that goes over tar pit problems. If i am not mistaken, this exact scenario is covered as a tar pit.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#323

Post by revscat »

hinkley wrote: post #297
JohnMakin wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Welcome to enshitification.

This seems to be almost synonymous with metrics-driven design.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#324

Post by bawolff »

fidotron wrote: post #37
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…

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.

So prostitution with extra steps?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#325

Post by mschuster91 »

efitz wrote: post #31

The article doesn’t mention a number of contributing problems such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a problem. Perhaps Ycombinator is the wrong place to bring up such a point, but the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company almost certainly contributes significantly to the problems discussed in the article. What happened to community? The businesses I like to deal…

> The article doesn’t mention a number of contributing problems such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a problem.

Indeed, and it shows when you look at how and where money is invested. Transoceanic fiber cables [1]... on paper it's a Good Thing that Africa and other historically piss poor regions get access to fast Internet, no doubt there. Or that Facebook pays many millions of dollars to regional ISPs for zero-rating, which helps them build out infrastructure.

But IMO, this is not genuine. The priorities for the mega tech companies clearly are to get more users hooked to their walled gardens, as the Western markets are already saturated and no further growth of the MLM pyramid/snowball scam is possible. Receiver nations are grasping at straws, it's obvious why - they need the infrastructure and have no way to pay for it - but it's going to bite them in the ass in the mid future.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-facebook-giant-unders...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#326

Post by oconnor663 »

> Of course, “Marl” isn’t always a person. Marl can also be a state of mind. We’ve all been Marl at one time or another

This is an incredibly useful and healthy way of thinking. I think this is how we fight the actor-observer bias in practice.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#327

Post by intended »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #36
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…

> 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…

In a free market an inefficient model loses market share and gets bought out. Then it’s converted to the efficient model.

That said, firms exist with that model.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#328

Post by hutzlibu »

titzer wrote: post #196
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…

> Alternatively and more seriously, I do hope to see markets emerge that target power users. I'm not optimistic though. What's crazy to me is that 25+ million people on this Earth can program, and how many of them get to decide the UIs that everyone else uses? I myself, suck at UI programming. But that's because UI programming is labyrinthine, arcane, and generally requires becoming an expert in a number of extremely…

"Why can't I rip apart the UI of an app I use every day and rearrange it the way I want?"

Because it is very hard to do something like this, so common people can do it. (you can change every html UI in theory)

I tried to make something like this and basically failed (though in the very long run I might get there eventually). GUI editors are hard to get right and the ones I liked, like Adobe Flex Builder (with Flash UI as a bonus) are gone. But those were also no newb tools. But flash itself was and that was the main reason for its success.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#329

Post by mhb »

Sharlin wrote: post #67
bwanab wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is, of course, an argument for single-payer healthcare. (Or even semi-centralized, insurance based healthcare, for that matter). A $BIGORG has both the firepower and the incentives to ensure that your bodyparts stay healthy at minimum expense. An anecdote: Ads like "your dentist hates this simple trick" don't work at all in a single-payer system. People are just baffled as to why a doctor wouldn't want you to b…

It's an argument for having dentists compete, as they do, and picking the one who does a good job.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#330

Post by lifty »

npsimons wrote: post #280
munificent wrote: post #29

> We’ve all been Marl at one time or another This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article. It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.

> It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people. That is incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate goal, especially of people.

It’s not deliberate. It’s the tragedy of the commons. They are tapping into a shared resource (our well being) and everyone else is doing it.
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