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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#671

Post by checkyoursudo »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #658
vore wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a ridiculous out of touch take. Of course young people know what desktop computing is like: they use it at school for class and use it at home for gaming. Have you considered that people might prefer mobile is preferable because it’s, well, mobile and you don’t have to lug a big ol’ machine around?

Most schools use tablets or Chromebooks, especially in the early years. Neither gives access to a system which has desktop level capabilities. Both are locked down consumption platforms.

I did not get my own laptop until I started at my university. I am now doing a Ph.D. in informatics (European meaning of the term). I had access to my dad's workstation at home, but just to play around on and I certainly did not have root or the ability to install my own software. There were computers in my computer lab at high school, but I rarely used them. They were locked down as much as any smartphone I have ever had.

At what age does someone need root access to become interested in a career in CS/IT/web dev/whatever?

Or, if not root access, like what kind of "desktop level capabilities" should I have had that I did not have, given that I did not have a desktop as a teenager or younger?

I am Gen X. I can think of exactly 0 friends who had their own desktops as teenagers. (Their own, as in were not really their parents' work computer, did not have to share with the family, could do whatever they wanted with, etc.)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#672

Post by bookofjoe »

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.

OT: My daughter (40 next month, just celebrated 10th wedding anniversary) met her husband on JDate in 2008. One day I reminded her that in the late 1990s when she was in high school, she asked me if I was doing online dating (in fact I was: Yahoo Personals, though I never met anyone of interest). She told me NOT to sign up for it because "It's for losers." Nevertheless, I persisted in stealth mode.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#673

Post by davidthewatson »

User agency is a good way to think about this but like any real, useful metric, it's difficult to measure real impact, and this leaves you needing a proxy.

The other problem is that David Foster Wallace said over a decade ago:

“As VR pornography becomes a reality, we will have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure,”

the implication for dating apps in particular, but I fear this extends more generally, is that a major part of dating, physical interaction, has been replaced with mediated experience for a significant part of the population.

The question that arises is whether a better alternative exists in the real world absent technology?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#674

Post by roel_v »

seoulmetro wrote: post #506
astrange wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nope. It's not specific to their height and obviously not specific to their race. The same way men on average prefer big boobs, women on average will prefer taller men. Both can't really be changed by the person but exist as attractiveness scores against a person. It matters to people who it matters to. Not many in the grand scheme and definitely not related to race.

I have literally not once in my entire life heard a woman in real life say 'oh he's so tall, that's so attractive'. That's only an internet thing. Or an outside-Western Europe thing, maybe.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#675

Post by dspillett »

lolinder wrote: post #448
dspillett wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particularly the one that was a tare-down of why paid dating sites like match.com where a mug's game for almost everyone. That somehow went AWOL fairly soon after the match.com take-over…

This one, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating : http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupi...

Very much sounds like the one. Can't double-check ATM as network I'm on blocks archive.org.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#676

Post by checkyoursudo »

beefield wrote: post #589
somedude895 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good point that I think some commenters here should take to heart. No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another.

This is something important that people do not seem to grasp. Intelligence is a really high dimensional thing. Even the ones that are highly intelligent in some dimensions are dumb as rock in vast majority of other dimensions. So we all are basically morons with some occasional flashes of intelligence in some individuals.

Really dumb people don't know that they are really dumb. Dumb people know that they are dumb. Below average people think they are average. Average people think they are smart. Smart people know they are smart but not highly intelligent. Highly intelligent people think they are geniuses (including in all possible fields). Geniuses, real honest-to-goodness geniuses, know that they are smart in many ways but mostly dumb.

I cannot prove it, but this is how I think it is. For the record, I think I am smart; however, because of the Iron Rule of Intelligence above, it is equally possible that I am only average.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#677

Post by checkyoursudo »

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.

I sympathise. This is a really hard habit to break.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#678

Post by account42 »

suslik wrote: post #654
gwd wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, just make something that has a barrier to entry that will filter out non-nerds. From what I can tell Ham radio is basically just a chatroom with an entrance exam, for instance. Anything done in a constructed language like Esperanto would be another filter. There's nothing stopping anyone from making a website duplicating the original OKCupid method. It's just that it requires someone willing to say "no" to the…

What is Ham radio?

Something that someone who didn't get filtered would be able to look up on their own.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#679

Post by dredmorbius »

Jensson wrote: post #602
lovich wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that just Eternal September? At least in the internet

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.

I suspect smartphones affect this in two ways.

One is that they put the Internet in everybody's hands, literally.

The other, though, is that by virtue of the interface, both display (tiny) and input (shitty, to put it mildly), the effective IQ of those participating, regardless of whatever it was initially, is severely penalised.

When I'm typing at a keyboard, I can look at the words I'm typing, or the source I'm typing from, or just off into space as I'm thinking my thoughts ... and be reasonably assured that what I think I'm typing is what's actually appearing on screen. And if not, editing to correct and fix issues is reasonably straightforward. If necessary I'll switch to a Real Editor (that is, vim, Vale Bram Moolenaar) which is another quantum leap beyond in-browser textbox editing.

When I'm typing at a virtual touchscreen keyboard, I am staring at the keys themselves and trying to hit the the keys I'm actually intending to hit. I'm not monitoring the output (which invariably has errors), I'm not looking at source text, I'm not thinking and composing my thoughts.

And then editing what I've written is also painful.

The resulting typos, losses of thought, and general incoherence in my own writing absolutely pains me to look at. From what I can tell, other people seem to suffer similarly.

I've given up using mobile devices for input (unless I can use a hardware keyboard, and even that rarely), and ... frankly it's a much improved situation.

Smartphones shallow the mind in many ways.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#680

Post by dredmorbius »

sneak wrote: post #607
Jensson wrote: post #602

Earlier 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.

You're telling us it's going to get worse then?
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