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The Tyranny of the Marginal User
391–400 of 840 posts
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There's no commons on a commercial website. This is deliberate.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most things you can work on are equally bad, so why not? We all want to survive, and survival in America is expensive.
Mid-six figures have absolutely nothing to do with survival.
Sadly, I've worked with software engineers who had absolutely no ethical qualm with implementing basically anything their boss wanted them to implement. Dark patterns, Benchmark cheating, Excessive user data collection, I'm sure they wouldn't even balk at writing Malware or Ransomware. This is why ethical engineers opting out of the project or job will never work: There's always someone lined up willing to write the unethical code.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#394More like the tiranny of people whose job title matches .*[Pp]roduct.*
They are the real scourge of our industry; I never met one who wasnt hellbent on raising some kind of meaningless number that people who don’t talk to the customer decided was important for the next 90 days.
Get them out of the industry as fast as possible, keep only the good ones
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
In some ways web apps act like this: all (most) of the buisness logic and data is on the server.
And you get the data through API calls - so in theory one can build your own UI on top of a known service. There are rare examples of this done succesfully (for HN for example), but usually you won't get very far in a reasonable amount of time, because often it is a mess behind the shiny UI. (And because this is not encouraged behavior by the service provider)
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#396Is this related to the phenomenon where, as the smart phone market got larger the diversity of options decreased? Naively, I would have assumed the opposite. Seems to be similar in lots of large hardware markets where I would expect there to be a large enough total customer base to justify serving at least a few groups with niche interests, but it often seems like that doesn't happen and you get a very small number o…
yeah this is strange and I don't fully understand it. perhaps the options exist and we just haven't heard of them (like there's a chrome extension or an OSS library that solves every conceivable problem)? Or that the nature of the modern smartphone software stack encourages too much bundling of functionality?
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#397And the tyranny extends because most of the money goes to those who can (theoretically) get geometric growth - get lots of us during our Marl moments.
If the pendulum swings the other way - meaning we each have less Marl moments - more of us willing to pay for an experience with dollars than time, then expect more OKCupids to start and to persist. Theoretically without venture money.
I think LLMs may help swing the pendulum in the OkCupid direction but in two very different ways - curious how others see it.
1. Lots more Marl courting apps developed, faster. Causing more fatigue. Less time to go to any single Marl app; reluctance to try new ones. Push pendulum away from Marl apps - each of us cuts our Marl moments.
2. Ability to develop OkCupid apps with less investment and target smaller circles (which often means i can deliver a better experience to that small circle, and not need VC funding/geometric growth to keep the lights on). Pull pendulum towards OKCupid apps.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> What do they do with that money? They spend it, which grows the economy. Our economy, not some other country's economy.
I'm going to guess you've never spoken to anyone who is sending money back to their family in their original country with every paycheck.
Not really the point of this conversation I guess but... yeah. It does happen more than you probably think. To the point where malls in my area have kiosks for wiring money to other countries for cheap.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#399> 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.
As Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."[0] [0] https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-me...
To Pogo: 'What do you mean "us"? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?'
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#400I 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 would pay $100/month for a site like the original okcupid, but I want Max Krohn, Christian Rudder and the rest of the original team running it.