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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#571

Post by kmac_ »

webninja wrote: post #561
sirspacey wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It works for me: Discover weekly + song radio + similar artists + genre and user playlists. I can listen to new songs until I'm tired. I love Spotify.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#572

Post by uoaei »

kromem wrote: post #447
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 feel a twinge of guilt whenever I see things about how OKC got crappy. Not that long before the acquisition a certain jackass brought in as a consultant ( ahem ) happened to point to OkC as the leading competitor against the acquiring company's properties specifically for mobile. Sorry everyone... If it makes it any better, I've had to use the product since then too, and suffered alongside all the rest of you.

I appreciate your candor. Though I am upset, I realize this is the kind of thing that would be hard to see coming.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#573

Post by flangola7 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #510
lr4444lr wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

That data had poor epistemology, and was only really true if you're only looking at cishet monogamous men and cishet monogamous women.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#574

Post by csomar »

sneak wrote: post #459
ryandrake wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 assi…

I think, the reason for that, is that management/leadership gets compensated fairly well for it. If this management doesn't have any particular talent or skills that can justify their compensation, then it's the responsibility that they are holding.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#575

Post by User23 »

sneak wrote: post #451
lr4444lr wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100.

Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about.

That’s also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to talk about many more cases would become apparent.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#576

Post by friendzis »

tspike wrote: post #557
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.

Isn’t the parent comment saying the opposite of this? That despite rating most men as ugly, it didn’t affect their messaging behavior nearly as much?

No, they are saying a bit tangential things.

Tinder's data shows "chance of approach", which is brutal for men who are not too good looking.

IIRC, OkCupid's data shows a bit different thing. The distribution of ratings determines chance of messages/likes - the larger stddev the better chances. IIRC, the most messaged men were ones with ratings characterized by bimodal distribution. Therefore, the most messaged men were not the ones with highest visual rating. I do not recall the distribution of messages, so can't comment much on that.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#577

Post by robotresearcher »

rglullis wrote: post #508
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.

Now, let's find any single company/product that actually is successful by encouraging us to become better versions of ourselves.

In apps: Ten Percent Happier and Headspace?

In meatspace: Nike, Adidas?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#578

Post by uoaei »

lelanthran wrote: post #569
throwaway2037 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135317/http://blog.okcupi...

I don't think you're characterizing the results accurately, particularly point #2. I don't think they really had a way to measure #3. #1 is just obviously true but doesn't add much.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#579

Post by Roark66 »

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.

These were different times... I met my partner of 25+ years on my town's IRC channel. Imagine that happening now.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#580

Post by uoaei »

waffletower wrote: post #399
andrewmg wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."[0] [0] https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-me...

To Pogo: 'What do you mean "us"? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?'

Is it really so hard to consider? Do you believe that intentions and outcomes are always aligned?
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