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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#451

Post by sneak »

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.

A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it wasn't just OKC's userbase, but it was the median of the whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated/more basic.

When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today. Now that's just a median member of the general public, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#453

Post by at_a_remove »

pdonis wrote: post #428
at_a_remove wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that's what it will approach in the limit, yes, if you are talking about humans. For AIs, I think it will be somewhat less so, and that it would be preferable for the sake of predictability.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#454

Post by lr4444lr »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #401
switchbak wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I fondly remember the one that showed men's rating of women approaching almost a perfect normal distribution, and then the men messaging mostly the hot ones anyway, whereas the women rated most men as ugly and then sloping downward toward very few as good looking, kind of like an exponential distribution, but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#455

Post by qingcharles »

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.

Content quality seems to be inversely proportional to subreddit size.

If you find a much finer-grained niche subreddit you will probably find the quality is still 2010 Reddit.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#456

Post by dghughes »

geraldwhen wrote: post #442
switchbak wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I also met my wife on okcupid. I wonder how many of us their are.

I'd be curious if you're all over 6' tall. I never had any luck on OKCupid.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#457

Post by astrange »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #401
switchbak wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main effect of those data posts seems to have been to cause people to spread a lot of misinfo like "women aren't attracted to 80% of men".

(What they actually said was that women rate men much lower than men rate women, but the women still respond the same way despite rating them lower, so it doesn't mean anything.)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#458

Post by pbj1968 »

ryandrake wrote: post #376
dimal wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.

If you remember Fark, they did the exact same thing. At some point in these sites' growth/success they always seem to have this irresistible compulsion to do The Grand Redesign which always, always shittifies itself. I wonder if there were any dissenters inside of Reddit who have actually been on the Internet in 2007, desperately warning the designers that they were "Farking" themselves with that redesign.

What killed Fark was the founder ran for office and we all found out what a terrible person he is. It’s still fun to visit that ghost town and look at the tombstones occasionally.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#459

Post by sneak »

ryandrake wrote: post #393
allarm wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I recommend that everyone read Stanley Milgram's book Obedience to Authority about his fake shock experiments.

Some people simply suspend moral judgement entirely in circumstances where someone else is calling the shots. They no more regard themselves as culpable for the bad outcomes as they do an automobile operated by a drunk driver. At a certain point, many people just switch off the moralizing, automatically assigning all of the responsibility to the order-giver.

It's an interesting phenomenon. A side effect, I find, is that people get very very upset when you name and shame individual employees doing unethical things at work that are legal and fall under the umbrella of "corporate initiatives" such as implementing antipatterns. The guilt for such seems to be perceived to fall with management or "product people", not developers, even though the developers are the ones who wrote the code.

Same for, say, warfighters. People don't regard the conscripted infantrymen at fault for the deaths, even though it is often literally their hand on the trigger.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#460

Post by astrange »

dghughes wrote: post #456
geraldwhen wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also met my wife on okcupid. I wonder how many of us their are.

I'd be curious if you're all over 6' tall. I never had any luck on OKCupid.

That height fetish stuff is the domain of 5'0" white women. Basically message taller women and it doesn't matter.
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