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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#401

Post by raisedbyninjas »

switchbak wrote: post #382
lr4444lr wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Anybody else remember the data blog posts? Those were interesting and satisfying. It was another confirmation that I'd found the right dating site and probably a like-minded userbase.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#402

Post by petsfed »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #173
petsfed wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts. Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at la…

> Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over That's a good idea. In this hypothetical app, if a couple stays together for a couple of years they should forfeit the right to get their money back even if they later break up. This reduces the amount of cash the company has to keep, at the cost of merely promising years-long relationships instead of marriages. > Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed t…

Time spent dating, or in a long-term relationship, prior to marriage is positively correlated with enduring marriage. That is, people who date each other for 3 years or more prior to marriage are 50% less likely to get a divorce than those who don't[0]. Thus, it pays societal dividends to encourage people to take their time and really get to know each other before getting married. Saying "the sooner you get married, the sooner you get your money back" or worse still "stay together without getting married for too long, and you risk not getting your money back" specifically discourages the behaviors that prevent domestic violence (including child abuse). What I believe we want is marriages that uplift their members, and minimize spousal abuse. Making people feel like they can't afford to not get married is the exact same phenomenon that drove up domestic violence during the COVID lockdowns[1].

If you're telling me that more abusive marriages is better for society, I don't think we have enough common ground to discuss this.

0. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/...

1. https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/covid-19-isolation-li...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#403

Post by freedomben »

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…

You would know your market way better than me, but just anecdotally I'm usually willing to pay $5 for a useful app. Based on your numbers it sounds like that would still make you money after 10 or so years. If the app is source available, I'll go up much higher. I'm definitely not a typical user, but for a "power" tool I'd think I'm in your market.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#404

Post by talldatethrow »

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 remember being on SparkMatch when I was a 14-15 year old. A dating site meant for teens, from the makers of Spark Notes.

I always had this weird vague hunch that spark match become OKCupid. Any info on this?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#405

Post by freedomben »

hutzlibu wrote: post #315
freedomben wrote: post #6

> Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again. This is hilarious and sad because it fe…

"Damnit Marl, please for the sake of us power user minority, please change." But are you really that different? There are just too many websites amd apps and new ones are getting generated every moment and time and attention is limited. So I also open and quickly close many of them. I don't think that is the problem here. But to your conclusion I agree.

It's definitely harder to get my attention than to get Marl's, but unless I see something really off-putting I'll invest a couple of minutes into learning more about it. Getting that attention is quite difficult though.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#406

Post by skeaker »

grotorea wrote: post #341
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Change to what? Another match.com-owned service?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#407

Post by mhb »

Sharlin wrote: post #388
mhb wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK. But a single payer addresses none of those issues.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#408

Post by lallysingh »

szundi wrote: post #117
rurp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there are some perverse incentives, I think this is overstating it. Millions of people enter the dating market every year by aging into it or ending a previous relationship. That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business. Of course there is the temptation to increase the churn rate, but it doesn't have to be exploitative.

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.

Unless you have competition.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#409

Post by michaelteter »

I have my share of OKC stories, and indeed the app of today is vastly inferior than the app of years past.

What exists of OKC now is a "free" system which is utterly useless. You simply must pay to do anything that might result in a date.

This problem isn't the marginal user. The problem is the ever-growing marketing push to dangle "FREE" in front of people to lure them in, when of course there is cost later. In the case of OKC, the cost is your time at first. Then eventually you may pay (what is frankly an exhorbitant rate per month) just to be able to communicate with anyone.

Back to the point though. Think of all the garbage free apps for phones. Think of all the absurd games they play to trick or goad you into paying. That whole process IS the experience moreso than whatever the theoretical purpose of the app was. Instead of the old concept of "here's what we offer, and here's what it costs to get", we have this current state of the world.

There is a solution to all this: sell your product from day one. Do the traditional show and tell marketing to illustrate your product's value so you might gain customers. This is far better than the (VC?) approach of gathering users at a big loss and then figuring out how to monetize them. As we know, some of the monetization methods are evil...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#410

Post by freedomben »

autoexec wrote: post #195
ivee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"market targeting power users" is basically SaaS, right? I don't understand that market as well, but it seems to have similar dynamics where you only charge X$ / user / month and so are incentivized to grab more users instead of giving more value to existing users.

In my experience power users don't want SaaS. They tend to want control over their data, they want control over how/when the software runs, they want things to work offline, and they care about their privacy. It's the people who don't know/care about tech and just want a magical black box that love SaaS. They want all the complicated tech stuff to be someone else's problem, and they'll pay over and over and over agai…

Yes, exactly. SaaS tends to repel power users because it's so depriving of control. Just my experience, but the main people who pay for SaaS are usually those who don't want to invest time/effort into learning/customizing something, they just want to pay and be done. An exception to this is platform SaaS that targets tech companies. Those can be hit or miss.
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