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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#421

Post by ThinkBeat »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #384
feoren wrote: post #164

Earlier 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…

Your scenario leaves a lot to be desired.

Yeah two people only.

Well Your scenario can easily be countered with the imaginary scenario that you have a town with 1 billion residents, far too little housing, no green space left due to trying to provide housing and the city only has natural resources for perhaps 300.000.000.

Now 100.000.000 immigrants arrive. There is not enough food, water, hygiene. Hopefully, opening delis will solve the issue.

Yes, it is absurd. But no more so than a world of 2.

History though does prove your theory right. When proud and brave Europeans immigrated to what would become the United States.

"When they arrive 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!""

Thankfully for the native people's immigrants came in to create a consumer capitalist culture.

Can you imagine the utter horror if they native peoples were allowed to keep their versions of society going and develop it the way they wanted. They sure were blessed by the immigrants. A lot the natives' peoples also became xenophobes and we sure now what bastards' xenophobes are.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#422

Post by raisedbyninjas »

dale_glass wrote: post #340
wmichelin wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.

Yeah, but what's the point of hosting them? Like what do you sell on r/dragonsfuckingcars? (no, I'm not joking) And what does the existence of such a place at all mean to a prospective advertiser? Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts. But okay, let's ignore porn. How about subreddits that deal with subjects like depression, gender issues, politics, etc? What do you sell to those? Maybe a book…

They don't need to monetize every sub. Most subscribers to dragonsfuckingcars probably sub to several other subs that can be monetized. Keeping all the weird niche stuff around keeps users scrolling longer. Just keep them off /r/all.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#423

Post by spott »

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?

Because there is an endless amount of human time spent like this, but we all have limited attention for other things.

If you try to appeal to someone’s better parts, then there is a limit to the amount of attention that they can apply to your product.

If you try to appeal to someone’s base need for dopamine, then the limit of attention is much higher.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#424

Post by shrimpx »

ssss11 wrote: post #366
shrimpx wrote: post #362

The problem is that short-term profitability isn't compatible with the long-term health of society, because often the easiest way to make a lot of money quickly comes as a form of societal exploitation. The most direct examples being chemically addictive products like painkillers and cigarettes, and now ad-based attention sinks like TikTok and Instagram.

The question is how would we (and can we) change corporations to value things other than short term profit? I’ve seen B-corps - those seem good, social/environmental focussed. No idea how widespread they are. Are there other corporate structure models that could become mainstream and solve some of these issues? At least for the companies adopting them and therefore customers signed up to them.

I think it's hard because we have GDP growth as the #1 KPI, and VCs seeking large-multiple exits in single-digit years, with no major concern for negative effects on society.

Veering too deeply into pure capital acquisition will destroy capital though. A zombied out, addicted and unhealthy population isn't a source of capital. Ad revenue and demand plummets as nobody has the money or will to buy shit. But there's a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone passes the buck to some abstract "other" who will work on keeping society healthy.

Traditionally, government is the balancing force that puts limits on capitalism and makes sure some profits are re-invested into society. But when top capital holders become political power brokers, government power recedes.

I think the best hope is a new vision where young generations are intrinsically motivated to build a healthy society, and not just to push private capital acquisition as far as it can go.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#425

Post by scoofy »

I honestly see the tyranny of Marl is part of the original sin of the internet, zero-sum online consolidation of existing business models. If that's the model, Marl is the only user who matters. If you're bootstrapping something for an intended and limited audience, Marl can fuck off.

My personal project, https://golfcourse.wiki is basically founded on my attempt to stop Marl from making golf-on-the-internet shitty.

My religion is basically that Wikipedia is the only website that I don't hate after 20 years of internet growth, so that's my model. I've attempted to do this by having nearly no expectations for the site for 5 years (we are in late-year 2, with a year of causal development before that). I do this by running on the thinnest budget I possibly can. There is no handy interface (yet), if you want to add your course, it isn't too hard, but it isn't too easy. The site is ugly simplicity.

Anyone who doesn't understand or care that I'm trying to build a database to then give it away for free will tell me the site sucks, and they're not wrong. It sucks because I am not paying for the data, so I don't have to charge for it. Still, I'm slowly-but-surely growing my google imprint, and increasing my (consumptive) user base.

Anyone who has spent the time to add to the project I'm extremely thankful for. I will never focus on Marl, because the consumption side of the site is not the target audience for me, it's the contribution side. It's a hobby, and at a few dozen dollars a month to operate, if the side doesn't snowball, it's no big loss.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#426

Post by Panzer04 »

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

Geeze, I didn't realise there was such a precipitous drop - I wonder how bad it is for smaller subs.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#427

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Clamchop wrote: post #351
apetresc wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, given the relatively high cost of streaming high-quality video, you'd think Netflix makes substantially more money from the 0-hour viewer compared to the 100-hour viewer.

There do seem to be "churners" out there subscribing to services only for as long as they need to watch the show they want to see, and I'd guess a wide middle of customers who are at least prepared to cancel if they feel that they're not using the service enough or that they will get better value from an alternative. To keep these customers, you need to keep them continuously hooked on your programming.

If I was Netflix, and I was optimizing for this type of customer, I would want to have them moving through my content as slowly as possible! My goal would be 2-4 hours of Netflix per week, preferably spread across different days—just enough to ensure they haven't lost interest! Autoplay Next Episode would not be a thing, and I certainly wouldn't release new seasons all at once.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#428

Post by pdonis »

at_a_remove wrote: post #389
pdonis wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Even "two functions, in tension" still assumes that you can capture values as functions at all. But the reason ethics and morality are hard in the first place is that there are no such functions. We humans have multiple incommensurable, and sometimes incompatible, values that we can't capture with numbers. That means it's not even a matter of not being able to compute the "right" answer; it's that the very concept of there being a single "right" answer doesn't seem to work.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#429

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?"

I once asked someone this question and he replied with a single word. "Greed", he said.

I wanted the opinion of someone who was not biased, i.e., who did not believe, AKAIK, that, as stated by the author of this blog post, "software is getting worse".

This person was longtime shareholder in one of the companies that engages in what's being described here and their success has been his success.

If anything, I thought, he should be biased in favour of "modern" software not against it.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#430

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

The active user metrics doesn't come from the company though, it's what the advertisers and investers will look at first glance, before going deeper and check what they really care about.

Let's face it: in general we're not good at nuance and that has downstream effects in many places.

The escape hatch is probably to have businesses that mostly stand on their own, sustained by their users and don't need to convince random marketers and crypto bros that they're worth paying attention to.

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