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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#341

Post by grotorea »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #287
szundi wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to point out that whatever you could make helping your clients happily leave you forever, you can make 5x that making them suffer. It is simple math.

This is not a convincing argument. If a dating site can't get people to match, they're likely to stop using it, just like any other product/service you pay for that doesn't work.

Yeah I think this is the missing part. Even if enshittification is more profitable, people should still be able to just change services to a better one.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#342

Post by Crusoe123 »

bluGill wrote: post #333
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…

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…

You can filter your feed to only show friends stuff (and it's chronological)

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#343

Post by hbn »

volkk wrote: post #321
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 :)

But doesn't that inherently imply you try to keep users from making long-term connections? Users having lots of fun dates are not doing them with the same person and continuing to use your app. It's a bunch of dates that ultimately went nowhere.

That's the thing with dating apps/sites. If you succeed too well, you've lost 2 users.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#344

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#345

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #344
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…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#346

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#347

Post by selectodude »

pg_1234 wrote: post #284
tasty_freeze wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reinforcing your point, Peter Singer, philosopher and noted utilitarian, has explicitly said that he weights misery far more than happiness in his own framework. From a personal level, he said he'd give up the 10 best days of his life to remove the one worst day of his life (or something like that). All of his work with effective altruism is aimed at reducing suffering of those worst off in the world and spends no ti…

As an aside, this is why buying insurance, despite being a financially bad bet (or the insurers would go out of business), actually is a sensible thing to do from a quality of life perspective.

Insurance isn't a financially bad bet. They're providing a service (not needing to maintain the liquidity of replacement costs) in exchange for a fixed monthly fee. It's cheaper for me to grow my own food but it's not a "bad bet" to not be a subsistence farmer and buy my food at the grocery store even though many people are making money off my purchase up the chain. I get to use my money and time for something more productive.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#348

Post by quickthrower2 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #337
quickthrower2 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe the LTV is higher. Or it attracts more shows to Netflix than competitors. Ot it secures a moat.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#349

Post by wbobeirne »

I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It's not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.

OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.

I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#350

Post by grotorea »

Karunamon wrote: post #106
koromak wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally does, if you're a publicly traded company.

No it bloody well does not. The "maximize shareholder value" thing has never been read that strictly by a court of law (otherwise, Apple would have been ripe for a suit when they told off an activist investor rep who was upset they were pursuing environmental goals at the expense of better ROI [1]). Companies hollow out (or enshittify) their products because it is easy and because it guarantees results at least in th…

Yes but it doesn't have to be upheld in a court of law. It just has to be what corporate officers are ordered, selected and incentivized around. It doesn't need to be legally required for people to do something.
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