amazing essay, does anybody have a list of sites that promote human agency instead of decreasing it?
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
621–630 of 840 posts
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#622> What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?
Capitalism.
It’s capitalism.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#623I've also met my wife on OkCupid at the beginning of 2016. It was by far the best dating site ever existed. Basically, of "no alternatives" type... I have a deep respect to everyone who have made it possible. Thank you.
It's extremely sad it was destroyed...
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#624I 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 still think there is potential for dating apps that target higher intellect users.
Apps are not developed for the sake of the users. Apps are developed in order to make a profit.
If your higher intellect users are not ready to pay good money for your product, it can only be one of two things: either they are cheap, or your product is not that great. Considering that there is no correlation between intellect and cheapness, I would exclude the first hypothesis.
Then you end up with a crappy product (and it was your higher intellect users who voted it crappy) and a bunch of advertisers ready to pay you bread crumbs for your users' attention, and you suddenly realise that you need a lot of crumbles to get a sandwich.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#625I 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 would pay $100/month for a site like the original okcupid, but I want Max Krohn, Christian Rudder and the rest of the original team running it.
> I would pay $100/month for a site like the original okcupid, but ...
That you would not pay $100/month for a site like the original OkCupid.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#626I 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…
Thanks for sharing Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model
You mean: another thing destroyed that a few people used to enjoy when the developers had no chance to have it economically better!
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smartphones was the final nail, after that close to 100% of young adults are active online participants. The good thing is that things aren't getting worse at least, all the idiots are already online.
Only about half the humans are on the internet.
Then there's still hope!
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
you're in luck! OKCupid costs ~$44 a month, and you can add on "read receipts" for about $0.50 each, superboosts for $1-$3 each, the privacy (hidden) profile for $10/month. with some creativity you can have 0 real matches for ~$100!
The matches are real. It’s just that you have to get on an airplane and fly to a new country to meet them. I’ve met my matches in person. One of the girls paid for almost everything too.
is that where you disappeared to for 3 years?
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 read…
Generally you'll have a quarterly holdout to measure total impacts but I agree that yearly would be better.
Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User
#630I worked on this problem for more than a decade, as co-founder of what became the Center for Humane Tech, and in other roles.
One way to break it down is different users, but as Ivan notes towards the end, we all have Marl in us. So, another way to get at the same thing is to exclude certain engagements from the metrics — the things we click on but would not reflectively endorse as meaningful. You get a lower engagement number that represents meaningful choice, rather than just "revealed preference" / engagement.
This is what I work to align LLMs with at the Institute for Meaning Alignment[1], and Ivan is helping! I also have a paper[2] on the difference between revealed preference and meaningful choice.
(It's also worth noting that this process of enshittification doesn't just happen in software. Markets and voting also have this revealed preference vs meaningful choice problem. So, making this distinction is a chance to upgrade all of our large-scale systems.)
[1] https://meaningalignment.org/ [2] https://github.com/jxe/vpm/blob/master/vpm.pdf