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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#411

Post by cole-k »

mminer237 wrote: post #386
cole-k wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow, I figured from hearsay that it was unchanged. Thanks for letting me know. I admit to being wrong about most people not caring, at least judging from the numbers you gave.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#412

Post by diego_sandoval »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5
epivosism wrote: post #3

I wonder whether the flattening of product depth is a unique founder effect, or is destined to happen due to the eventual formation of monopolies? Take photo sharing as an example. Early Flickr was amazing. It had tons of features - great varied groups of all types, a huge licensed image search system, great tags, etc. I joined regional groups, and also criticism groups for street photos, etc. Their comment system wa…

Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier, or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?

The average user used to be an 18-40 year old person with post-secondary education, in a mid to high income country, using a laptop.

Now, The average user is a 10-65 year old person using a smartphone.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#413

Post by martey »

talldatethrow wrote: post #404
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?

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid

> SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its own site, later renamed OkCupid.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#414

Post by xkcd1963 »

gipp wrote: post #234
xkcd1963 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that occurs when invalid arguments or irrelevant points are introduced without any evidence to support them." invalid argument => x people doing y where x is "brilliant" and y is "serving Marl". Serving Marl is not brilliant. It doesn't count to work for a FAANG company to be considered brilliant, at least by my standards and view on how time is well spend.

Yeah, that's cool and all, but a) a logical fallacy is a particular pattern of invalid argument, not just an argument that is invalid. So just on like a semantic level, an individual argument can't be a fallacy, though it can commit one. b) fallacies are invalid inferences by construction. You just don't agree with the premise in this case (and are also implicitly proposing a second premise that doing something not-b…

a) I googled my description. Does it really matter if you use a verb or an adjective to convey the message?

b) One is brilliant when doing brilliant things, and stupid when doing stupid things. A chainsmoker stops being a smoker until he reaches for the next cigarette.

c) yea I explicitly wrote "at least by my standards and view on how time is well spend"

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#415

Post by MattGaiser »

xorcist wrote: post #21

Thoughtful article that doesn't even mention Youtube Shorts, perhaps the most glaring example of the trend. When online services maximizes the number of daily users, perhaps in the hundreds of millions, the vast majority of them won't be very interested. So of course any data driven service will optimize keeping uninterested users occupied. That does explain a lot actually.

Youtube doesn't gain extra from very interested users though, as long as everyone keeps watching.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#416

Post by Sai_ »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #398
galaxyLogic wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn’t they be sending left-over money ie, money after spending locally, back to their home country?

I can’t imagine a lot of people out there who send all their money back home without spending some of it locally for self sustenance.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#417

Post by sirspacey »

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…

A somewhat natural conclusion is that mobile killed the thoughtful internet. Ouch.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#418

Post by wilg »

mhb wrote: post #263
wilg wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I just don't understand how if your axioms are 1) X is an acceptable level of happiness and 2) more people are better than fewer it is in any way surprising or problematic to end up with infinite people at happiness X. Perhaps people don't see that (2) is a part of the premise?

Because 1 is not one of the axioms. The axioms are 1) There is a range of experience between worst possible misery and best possible happiness and 2) more people who are just barely happy is better than fewer people who are much happier. I don't understand why you're insisting on a binary distinction of acceptable vs. not acceptable. With that assumption there is no repugnant conclusion.

1 is one of the axioms because a binary cutoff is built into the premise.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#419

Post by spott »

munificent wrote: post #29

> 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.

This is a key point.

If you look at people, each of them have multiple different “personas” throughout the day/week/etc.[0]

Some of them, sometimes, are builders or content creators.

Some of them, sometimes, are conscientious consumers, looking to stretch their understanding or themselves and think hard about something that they are consuming.

But all of them, sometimes, are Marl.

There will always be a way to find more Marls to add to your user pool because Marl is the basest human need for a steady effortless dopamine drip. Just about everyone has some amount of time that they spend as Marl, so there is an almost limitless pool of Marl time to pull new users from.

I’m trying to find some way to say that this isn’t what you actually want, but I’m struggling. If you are making a product for everyone, Marl is the only persona that is in everyone, so you should probably target Marl.

However, if you are trying to build a product for a more constrained persona, you should probably be careful of using metrics that measure Marls. Because there are so many of them (even your users with other personas are sometimes Marls!) if you aren’t really careful, you will enshitify your product as you continue your A/B testing gradient descent into a user base of Marls, without anyone you were trying to get — even if you don’t loose your content creators and conscientious consumers, you have converted them into Marls, and lost what you were trying to achieve.

Enshitification is the conversion of your target user from any other kind of persona, to Marls.

[0] there are other personas, these were that the ones that immediately came to mind.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#420

Post by wilg »

mhb wrote: post #335
wilg wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a question of if you value other people existing or not. If you don't, focus on per-capita happiness, if you do then you focus on meeting a minimum threshold of happiness for everyone. I don't see how you couldn't value other people existing – I think they have just as much of a right to experience the universe as I do.

Has that belief led you to a lifestyle in which you are just barely happier than miserable so that you can lift as many others as you can out of misery?

No, but doing so would be consistent with my beliefs and I think it would be considered admirable to most people.
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