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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

nothinghuman.substack.com

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#561

Post by webninja »

sirspacey wrote: post #497
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.

Yes and no 98% of Spotify users never take any action other than “press play” on a radio station 2% take some kind of agency (create a playlist, like a song) A vanishingly small amount create personal or public curated playlists Yes, that very small amount may also listen passively sometimes, but the difference matters. Imagine if Spotify was just a radio station.

I hate that new Spotify radios play nearly the same songs from your existing playlists and listening history. Little variety and mostly an echo chamber.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#564

Post by bboygravity »

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.

The best dates I ever had came from a language exchange site that doesn't exist anymore.

Seems to resonate with the "filter for brainy people" filter OKC seems to once have had.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#565

Post by JCharante »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #377
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…

The upside of dating app bootstrapping is that it's an inherently local phenomenon. People want to meet people near them, which means you can gain traction one locale at a time. Maybe some kind of promotion where you cut deals with some local bars or restaurants to get some kind of discount / freebie if you match with someone (with the implication being that they'll use it for the date). Still takes capital, just not…

Nationwide is much easier in countries with a large primacy index, for example Thailand where Bangkok has 9x the population of Thailand’s second largest city, and Moscow where it has 4x the population of St Petersburg.

Everybody is nearby when you have subway trains connecting half the people in your country together in under an hour.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#568

Post by mlyle »

makeitdouble wrote: post #556
callalex wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen one A/B test in the wild run for a full year. It was on a small part (test of a product name + description across the site), and the most interesting aspect was that it only made a small but measureable difference. Because of that there was no strong incentive to delete the AB test (not much harm to the user) nor make the B side permanent (too low of an effect). In that respect, AB Tests that end early aren…

What I think the grandparent is getting at:

You can measure the direct effect of a change now on something like conversions. But you can't measure the second order effects: things like trust from your users, or the effects on community quality and composition, etc.

This is a good part of why enshittification happens: lots of changes with immediate "good" impact that can be measured quantifiably, but there's also readily foreseeable negative consequences to them.

Of course, just running the test longer doesn't really address this for most possible changes.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#569

Post by lelanthran »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #513
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…

This post reads like Eternal September[1], and I write that without any cynicism or snark. It makes good sense that text-heavy web apps would fall prey to image-heavy mobile apps. I still think there is potential for dating apps that target higher intellect users. Most of the dominant apps today are mobile-first, largely visual, and disappointing for both sides. One idea: Could speech-to-text technology help to allow…

I think that there is a reason that dating apps, dating sites and dating services all converge on a model which downranks intellect: the few humans who care about that characteristic are not enough to build a sustainable business.

Literally everyone says that they are different and want a smart partner, but when they actually hook up they aren't ranking high intellect.

I liked okcupids blogs. The maintakeaway I had from reading all of them was:

1. How much appearance played a role in being attractive.

2. 90+% of women attempted to hook up with the same 10% of men, while men were much more open to women not in the top 10%.

3. What people claimed they wanted in a partner had almost no relation to what they actually wanted, when looking at who they messaged, who they viewed, and who they responded to.

All apps now are very aggressively tracking everything, so they have a much better idea of what makes people open their wallets, and intellect apparently isn't one of those things.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#570

Post by deanCommie »

slashdev wrote: post #538
throwaway2037 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically the foundation of modern, online dating -- aka red pill. Roughly, the top 20% of men get 80% of the attention from women. (I'm pretty sure that figure comes from Tinder data.) It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is brutal in the real world. What do you do if you are average (or less) in looks and income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely existance.

You’re being downvoted, but that’s pretty well supported with data. In fact it’s more skewed than 20/80. Closer to 10/90.

They're being downvoted because the very comment they're replying to contradicts it: "but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.

OKCupid's own data showed that women rate men is ugly but message them anyway.

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