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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#371

Post by Miraste »

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.

The user won't leave simply because the product doesn't work; they'll leave if they believe it won't work. For dating apps, tricking users is more profitable than trying to match them. Hence all the psychological warfare: fake profiles, new account boosts, fake likes, blurred out likes, paid boosts, swipe stack interface, etc. etc.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#372

Post by LAC-Tech »

I found this article pretty insightful. The big successful companies all focus on the marginal user, and everyone wants to ape FAANG. Wonder if that's the disconnect I see in some smaller SAAS based companies, aping companies who design for the marginal user which is *not* their bread and butter.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#373

Post by tqi »

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?

I think the problem is there isn't a clear delineation between "traps" and "meaningful improvement."

Take Signal for example - early days they had a ton of success with a core group of users, in spite of a number of product warts. Ever since then, they've been making usability improvements to lower friction and appeal to more and more marginal users. Is that good or bad? Based on the hn threads I've seen, it seems like the jury is pretty mixed?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#374

Post by Murfalo »

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…

Thank you for this! I have very similar thoughts. Felt like I was going crazy each time I saw these types of conversations sparked by mention of the "repugnant" conclusion...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#375

Post by pcthrowaway »

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.

> If a dating site can't get people to match, they're likely to stop using it

And if it succeeds in getting people to match, they definitely stop using it.

"Likely to stop using it" is the better outcome for them in terms of customer retention

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#376

Post by ryandrake »

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.

If you remember Fark, they did the exact same thing. At some point in these sites' growth/success they always seem to have this irresistible compulsion to do The Grand Redesign which always, always shittifies itself.

I wonder if there were any dissenters inside of Reddit who have actually been on the Internet in 2007, desperately warning the designers that they were "Farking" themselves with that redesign.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#377

Post by OkayPhysicist »

wbobeirne wrote: post #349

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 upside of dating app bootstrapping is that it's an inherently local phenomenon. People want to meet people near them, which means you can gain traction one locale at a time. Maybe some kind of promotion where you cut deals with some local bars or restaurants to get some kind of discount / freebie if you match with someone (with the implication being that they'll use it for the date). Still takes capital, just not "nation-wide aggressive advertising push" levels of capital.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#378

Post by chongli »

tyre wrote: post #156
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…

The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics. Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population. Merging it with natalism isn’t realistic or meaningful, so we end up with these population morality debates. The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!) Comp…

Rawls's original position and the veil-of-ignorance he uses to support it has a major weakness: it's a time-slice theory. Your whole argument rests on it. You're talking about the "existing population" at some particular moment in time.

Here I am replying to you 3 hours later. In the mean time, close to 20,000 people have died around the world [1]. Thousands more have been born. So if we're to move outside the realm of academics, as you put it, we force ourselves to contend with the fact that there is no "existing population" to maximize happiness for. The population is perhaps better thought of as a river of people, always flowing out to sea.

The Repugnant Conclusion is relevant, perhaps now more than at any time in the past, because we've begun to grasp -- scientifically, if not politically -- the finitude of earth's resources. By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before.

[1] https://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/world-death-cl...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#379

Post by zmmmmm »

I think it's unnecessarily unkind to Marl.

The reality is, your core user base is always your easy-to-get captive market that intrinsically want what you do. A corollary of that is that gradient towards more users is always going to be eating into people more at the fringe or even totally outside the core intent of your product or service. So intrinsically, optimising for them is very unlikely to be optimising for your core users.

We can believe a fairy tale where we tell ourselves that we can optimise for new users while still maintaining equal service for existing users, but it's really just a fairy tale - invariably these things end up in competition with each other.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#380

Post by ryandrake »

hutzlibu wrote: post #328
titzer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 U…

The typical Old School Unix way to do this is to provide all of your application's functionality and business logic through a command line app or at least an API, with the UI being a thin layer on top of the command line. Then anyone can build whatever UI they want on top of it. We've fallen from the light and now the prevailing design is to deeply integrate the business logic with the UI to the point where they are codependent and inseparable.
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