Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

nothinghuman.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 840 posts

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#381

Post by pcthrowaway »

jstarfish wrote: post #113
xapata wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contracts can help. Knowing that marriage is at least somewhat likely for happy couples, site users could sign an agreement that they'll pay the site $1k in the event that they become married to someone they meet through the site. Of course this could lead to freeloaders who try to avoid triggering the agreement, but that just means the contract may need optimization. Freemium models can work.

People are avoiding marriage these days and experimenting with noncontractual arrangements like polyamory. Even before the fraud materializes, the proposed system would be a total failure based on societal changes. Always get paid upfront. Net-anything just gives others time to find a way to cheat you.

I think 40-60% of people are still seeking escalator-style relationships that would result in marriage (even if they're not seeking such relationships immediately), which is an enormous number of people

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#382

Post by switchbak »

lr4444lr wrote: post #369
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…

I met my wife on OkCupid. The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that's a real shame.

As did I! OkCupid was a shining star of a product that treated its users with respect and provided a really valuable service.

I didn't realize that it's no longer. I feel old pining for the internet of yesteryear. As is obvious only in retrospect, you don't realize when the golden years are!

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#383

Post by caturopath »

coldtea wrote: post #228
tyre wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics. Not even for academics. It's something for "rational"-bros.

(Real, academic philosophers actually care about the case, too.)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#384

Post by galaxyLogic »

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…

Your post reminds me of xenophobes who lament the arrival of immigrants. The immigrants are taking their jobs they are saying. Such a viewpoint can be countered with the imaginary scenario where you live in a country with only 2 people. How well are they doing? There are no stores to buy goodies from because who would create such a store for just 2 people? Perhaps an immigrant, could open a deli!

When there are more immigrants who are allowed to work, the immigrants will make some money for themselves. What do they do with that money? They spend it, which grows the economy. Our economy, not some other country's economy.

If you were the only living person on this planet you would be in trouble. Thank God for other people being there too.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#385

Post by Nimitz14 »

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 :)

Comeon tell us what the app is!

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#386

Post by mminer237 »

cole-k wrote: post #215
koch wrote: post #13

> Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.

I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user. OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed…

I can't say what percentage of Reddit users cared, but I can definitely say that the majority of Reddit participants—the people actually posting the content Reddit is trying to sell—have left. Reddit activity has dropped off a cliff: https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#387

Post by ativzzz »

ncruces wrote: post #355
sanderjd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

People need to realize that the sales business model does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. I (pretty much single handedly) made a reasonably profitable mobile app. It was my bread and butter for a decade. It has millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. It's a “power” tool, not a game. Unfortunately, it depends on servers for a lot of it's core features. There are no accounts, d…

This is why everything now is either free with ads or is a SaaS

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#388

Post by Sharlin »

mhb wrote: post #329
Sharlin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not like a layman can have a good idea of whether a dentist has done a good job, except in cases where the job was clearly botched. People can't realistically make an informed choice based on dentist competence, so soft metrics like patient comfort and general bellyfeel dominate. Moreover, people hopefully don't need dental services very frequently, so gathering enough data takes a long time.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#389

Post by at_a_remove »

pdonis wrote: post #256
skybrian wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, more generally, I’m reminded of David Chapman’s essay, “No Cosmic Meaning” [1]. Thought experiments are a good way to depress yourself if you take them seriously. But I think that utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up? There are times when adding things together and doing comparisons makes a kind of sense, but it’s an abstr…

> utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up? Yes, it does. This is one of the most common (and in my view, most compelling) criticisms of utilitarianism.

One of the very muddled thoughts I have in my head, along with Goodhart's Law and AIs which blissfully attempt to convert the universe into paperclips, is that having a single function maximized as a goal seems to give rise to these bizarre scenarios if you begin to scan for their existence.

I have started to think that you need at least two functions, in tension, to help forestall this kind of runaway behavior.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#390

Post by sublimefire »

Article implies the subscription based model which in turn contradicts the thesis that somehow people can/will use the thing indefinitely. This might apply to something like Word or an email provider or search, e.g., a tool that is used often to do a transaction. I doubt if it applies to human relationships as they are not that transactional except when thinking about porn, onlyfans, etc.

IMO it was just a bad example because users will always stop using such an app hence it is natural to focus on new users more from the business side. You could equally say that the demise of okcupid happened purely because the newer generation of users had other expectations compared to the prior users, the model could not sustain itself without significant changes and the changes were not significant enough. Correlation is not a causation in other words.

Post reply on HN