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

701–710 of 840 posts

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#701

Post by mlyle »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #629
mlyle wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But even this doesn't work: if you are continually making choices that erode your users' trust in you, there will eventually be an impact. It happens outside of the experiment (e.g. communications between users, general sliding changes in sentiment, etc). And you can't just spot in the time series whether you're going too far or not.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#703

Post by broguinn »

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.

Your point is a good one - what you're describing I've heard referred to as "the novelty effect". In fact, a lot in this article reminds me of another essay critical of the short-sightedness of many A/B tests:

https://www.zumsteg.net/2022/07/05/unchecked-ab-testing-dest...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#704

Post by superbiome »

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.

I would agree. I too met my wife on OkCupid and she happens to be the smartest woman I know. Her whole family is incredibly smart.

I had another OKC date from that era where the woman had a very high IQ, her father was a prolific author and her late 20’s brother was VP of ask.com at the time.

I had just assumed it was the Silicon Valley bubble clientele (and still just might’ve been). But only 3 years later I recall younger male coworkers describing how much dating apps declined and how terrible the dating scene had become with “swipe culture”.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#705

Post by whynotminot »

roel_v wrote: post #674
seoulmetro wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a short man, I have heard height directly or indirectly referenced as a point of attraction more times than I can count. I’ve even had women say literally to my face I wasn’t tall enough for them.

I’m glad you haven’t had that experience. Doesn’t discount that it’s a real thing.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#706

Post by titzer »

lifty wrote: post #664
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you listen to Frances Haugen's testimony, you see that it is very much deliberate. There are probably thousands of psychology grads that went to school, hoping to help people, that are, instead, designing dark patterns. But they are probably making a lot more money than they would, helping people. Evil pays cash.

It's as deliberate as a cow eating grass. The cow deliberately eats the grass but because of the game theory involved (lack of information, lack of coordination, incentives etc.), the pasture disappears. The point of my comment (and the article's, I think) was that companies want the revenue, but don't deliberately want to harm us.

Companies aren't cows. They know. Big companies always have people studying the larger economic trends of the markets they are in and looking into the future--you know, people who are always ignored if they point out anything or advocate anything that would be counter to this quarter's profits.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#707

Post by Communitivity »

Is the marginal user marginal though, in terms of marketing? Put another way, could you put a filter in place to bar marginal users and still have a commercially viable product without prices too high? I'd think the answer is yes, but perhaps the business would need to be aim toward a successful lifestyle business rather than a unicorn valuation.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#708

Post by whynotminot »

barrysteve wrote: post #666
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.

[flagged]

Well this is the most toxic thing I’ve read today.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#709

Post by gwd »

opsimist wrote: post #668
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…

Can we use separate root DNS server as technical barrier to entry? Or NNTP protocol. Or client side SSL certificate, which must be won in a complex game. There are plenty of options to separate smart people from regular crowd. IMHO, a separate DNS server, which unlocks alternative Internet, is the easiest way to move away from regular people, because it's a bit complicated to switch DNS on a mobile device.

The thing is, that won't duplicate the original Internet, because the Internet exists. This new filtered internet won't contain all the smart tech people; it will contain all the smart tech people who wanted to join an alternate internet of smart tech people. Those are different sets of people.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#710

Post by broguinn »

mminer237 wrote: post #386
cole-k wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user. OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed…

I can't say what percentage of Reddit users cared, but I can definitely say that the majority of Reddit participants—the people actually posting the content Reddit is trying to sell—have left. Reddit activity has dropped off a cliff: https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit

Are you sure this data is accurate? By the site you reference, r/nottheonion has ~30 comments a day: https://subredditstats.com/r/nottheonion

But if I actually visit the subreddit, I see many posts from within the last 24 hours with 300+ comments each. Is it possible subredditstats.com had some kind of regression in its counting around that time? It could be related to the API changes.

Post reply on HN