Tech companies stopped making products for their users and started making products for their investors instead. It's devolved to the point tech companies don't even care about profitability anymore, only marketability to the investor class and Wall St. It's just a shell game of metrics and markets now.
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
331–340 of 840 posts
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Indeed, given the relatively high cost of streaming high-quality video, you'd think Netflix makes substantially more money from the 0-hour viewer compared to the 100-hour viewer.
Maybe they prefer dominance over profit. Make less money but maximise revenue. They want you to spend 100 hours a month not 50 even if you pay the same so that you are not spending time at a competitor such as Disney or hanging out with friends at a bar.
Eventually they may go like Amazon with infinite upsells and hunt for whales.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#333The 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 have found a hack around facebook that partially works: remove yourself from all groups. So only friends are in your feed. Then every time a friend shares something from one of their group go hit "block all from [group]". Facebook now has less junk to show me as I've blocked most of it, and so I see my friends. I've also set a rule that when I block two groups I'm done for the session. Anytime I share something on Facebook I make sure the privacy settings is "friends of those tags only" - if I'd want more or less than that it is either too private to share at all, or it should be on a better public forum.
I hope more of you start doing the same. There is value in a Facebook type private place to communicate with friends and family (this need not be facebook, but that is where my friends are), and everything else clutters it. The more people who follow similar rules to me the more likely Facebook is to notice in their metrics that people only want Facebook for personal friends, hopefully they adjust to enable that better.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#334I was one of the early users of ok cupid, even before it was dating and more just a kind of social media for questions and tests. I met some amazing people on that site. At some point something changed though and the quality plummeted.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#335Earlier 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.
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.
Has that belief led you to a lifestyle in which you are just barely happier than miserable so that you can lift as many others as you can out of misery?
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#336The 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…
I think it's probably because it's extremely hard to understand what *content* keeps users subscribing, and "hours spent watching this content" is maybe the lowest-hanging (or only?) "clean" metric you can use to determine what content to keep, how much to spend on content, etc. I watch a smattering of shows on netflix and so keep a subscription, but I don't watch very much. How the heck are they supposed to know whether a piece of content will keep me subscribing? And how much should they spend to produce/acquire that content? It's a very difficult supply-side question.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, given the relatively high cost of streaming high-quality video, you'd think Netflix makes substantially more money from the 0-hour viewer compared to the 100-hour viewer.
Maybe they prefer dominance over profit. Make less money but maximise revenue. They want you to spend 100 hours a month not 50 even if you pay the same so that you are not spending time at a competitor such as Disney or hanging out with friends at a bar. Eventually they may go like Amazon with infinite upsells and hunt for whales.
How could this be good business?
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he's saying the exact opposite - that the company's revenue-driven goals and the user's goals are not in alignment. It is definitely possible for those things to be in alignment, that's how products have worked for the majority of modern human history.
It's a bit more complex than that right? If no part of the user wanted this, it wouldn't drive up engagement. Clearly it causes me to use the product more. Companies can try to optimize for stuff like "satisfaction after using the product" but it's genuinely much harder -- and not tying work to business outcomes is not scalable.
Most drug addicts don't want to be addicted, they just want the high. Most video watchers want to continue their current shows, but if you make it easy they will get addicted to shows they didn't know they liked yet. People get on facebook for their friends, and then the infinite scrolling keeps them on long past when they have seen almost everything their friends have done.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company This is a straw man. The primary source of value is the future cash flow. Since a long future is considered, growth is highly prized. I consider this a major achievement of mankind, to be able to value the future, today. Without this reasoning, financing for new businesses would cease to exist.
That's a good point. I think you're referencing a Present Value calculation? My big issue with a lot of valuation techniques is they are based on exponential growth. That strikes me as overly optimistic, leading to decisions that overlook profitable businesses that do not grow exponentially.
They're based on constant growth. I guess over a long enough time frame, constant growth is exponential, but not in the windows that an investor expects to be paid back.
Exponential growth is only expected in software because the development costs are so high and the marginal costs are so low. There's zero cost to growth, which makes it a winner-take-all market.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#340Earlier 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…
Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.
Yeah, but what's the point of hosting them? Like what do you sell on r/dragonsfuckingcars? (no, I'm not joking)
And what does the existence of such a place at all mean to a prospective advertiser? Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts.
But okay, let's ignore porn. How about subreddits that deal with subjects like depression, gender issues, politics, etc? What do you sell to those? Maybe a book or two but probably not very much. And they're also ripe for "hilarious" ad/content mismatches.
It seems to me that from the advertising point of view, Reddit would be a lot more desirable to advertise on if it was nothing but endless cute cat pictures.