Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

nothinghuman.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 840 posts

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#521

Post by grishka »

whack wrote: post #478

This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the proposed change would be killed. Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is st…

> The only way to escape this is to take on a huge pay cut and work at a company that doesn't care about growing profits. Go ahead, you first.

Gladly! Where do I sign up?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#522

Post by lyjackal »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #509
timdumol wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Marginal" in the blogpost is used in the economic sense, as in the next incremental user -- not "marginal" as in minority.

That is the way whack is using it. whack is correct that if there is a negative effect on the average user, a test will show that negative effect. That's what "average" means. To perceive an effect in new users without getting the same effect in existing users, you'd need to show different content to those two groups.

Hmm, I think the authors point is more towards attention addiction, rather than specific average types of people. It’s more a matter of setting a low bar to encourage more people to be distracted by your app when they really shouldn’t be using it. Basically increasing the number of apps that people check in on, especially when those users are in their marginal time (before bed, while cooking, etc.).

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#523

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #490
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.

It's a pretty interesting statement. I used to be fine with "microboredoms" and think about other things, such as a book I'm reading, a game I want to play, or even work. I noticed these days that I spend more time during those "microboredoms" on my phone. I have 10 seconds? Check out reddit! I've been trying to kick this habit, enjoy my surroundings more, or get lost in my head like I used to.

Carrying around a fidget toy has helped me with this. Part of the urge to scroll on my phone is just to do something with my fingers. If my fingers are occupied with a bit of string or a finger-trap, my mind is more free to wander.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#524

Post by ivee »

whack wrote: post #478

This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the proposed change would be killed. Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is st…

I completely disagree. If you walked up to Marl, built trust with him, and asked him whether he wanted more meaningful content in his life (for a definition of meaningful which made sense to him) I think he would say yes. So it's not really about Marl's preferences but about the way those preferences are collected and Marl's (sadly mostly justified) lack of trust.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#525

Post by eru »

callalex wrote: post #500
whack wrote: post #478

This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the proposed change would be killed. Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is st…

A/B tests, as they are run by current software companies, are inherently flawed. I have never, in my entire career, ever heard of an A/B test that ran for a year, let alone 3-5 years. That’s where the true power of statistics comes alive, and nobody is financially incentivized to even consider that fact.

Gwern runs tests that long.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#526

Post by wvenable »

bc11hn wrote: post #520
wvenable wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why so many companies are against simply developing a new product with a new brand instead of lobotomizing their own product. It seems to have over and over where a product and brand that makes decent profit is utterly destroyed in an attempt to acquire a new market.

Because creating a new product is harder and more expensive than changing an existing one, even if it does destroy it. Advertising, novel technical infrastructure, new branding, etc... all of this needs to be done for a new brand -- and then who knows if any one will come visit? Or, you can just make whatever short-term changes to your existing successful product, juice the metric you're looking to juice, and (in the…

New branding isn't necessarily bad; it can make a new product seem fresh. Technical infrastructure, both hardware and software, can be reused. You don't have destroy one software product to make another.

Take this OkCupid example; they had their website model. They could have just created "OkCupid Nights" as a separate Tinder-like product reusing as much of their tech as possible.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#527

Post by eru »

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…

> 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.

If that sent money ever comes back to the domestic economy, then you are back to the previous situation.

If it doesn't come back, that's even better: because then your central bank can print more money to make up for the disappearance. Essentially, you got the foreigner to perform services in return for some ink and paper.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#528

Post by carlosjobim »

whack wrote: post #478

This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the proposed change would be killed. Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is st…

> That is why every product, no matter how noble it starts off, eventually degenerate into Marl-fodder.

The big reason for that is that people do not want to pay for quality content or services. Ask any HN commenter if you doubt me. So companies instead focus on growth to get the ad cents from the millions of impressions, or trick "whales" by manipulating their addiction in the same manner as casinos.

As long as people call anybody a fool for paying for online services, don't expect things to improve.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#529

Post by eru »

chongli wrote: post #378
tyre wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics. Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population. Merging it with natalism isn’t realistic or meaningful, so we end up with these population morality debates. The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!) Comp…

Rawls's original position and the veil-of-ignorance he uses to support it has a major weakness: it's a time-slice theory. Your whole argument rests on it. You're talking about the "existing population" at some particular moment in time. Here I am replying to you 3 hours later. In the mean time, close to 20,000 people have died around the world [1]. Thousands more have been born. So if we're to move outside the realm…

> By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before.

What do you mean by ever growing inequality? Global inequality has decreased in recent decades. (Thanks largely to China and to a lesser extent India moving from abject poverty to middle income status.)

By some measures we are also using less resources than we used to. Eg peak resource usage in the US, as measured in total _mass_ of stuff flowing through the economy, peaked sometime in the 1930s.

Have a look at the amount of energy used per dollar of GDP produced, too. Eg at https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#530

Post by eru »

astrange wrote: post #465
chongli wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rawls's original position and the veil-of-ignorance he uses to support it has a major weakness: it's a time-slice theory. Your whole argument rests on it. You're talking about the "existing population" at some particular moment in time. Here I am replying to you 3 hours later. In the mean time, close to 20,000 people have died around the world [1]. Thousands more have been born. So if we're to move outside the realm…

> By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before. We aren't doing that. Increasing human populations don't increase resource consumption because 1. resources aren't always consumed per-capita 2. we have the spare human capital to invent new cleaner technology. It's ba…

I mostly agree. However:

> That's how so many countries managed to deforest themselves when wood fires were still state of the art.

It was mostly ship building that deforested eg the countries around the Mediterranean and Britain. Firewood was mostly harvested reasonably sustainably from managed areas like coppices in many places. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing

Post reply on HN