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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#761

Post by gnicholas »

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.

I remember hearing the founder of The League dating app talk about her platform, back when she was first starting out. She said it was made so that women could be assured they were dating men who were verifiably (1) well-educated (the name is a nod to the Ivy League), (2) made good money, and (3) were tall. The way she talked about the latter sounded a bit anti-Asian, to be honest.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#762

Post by cole-k »

foogazi wrote: post #731
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 left Reddit after the API changed and Apollo died. Last week I realized I still kept doing a bunch of reddit searches so I went back and tried the app. The app is not that bad, hope the users stick around

This is what's been somewhat hard about quitting/boycotting Reddit for me. Ultimately the community comes before the platform and Reddit happened to house a lot of good communities. I admit to breaking my boycott when the only answers I can seem to find for my exact question lie on Reddit. The same goes for my boycott of Stack Overflow, which I have to break even more often due to its ubiquity.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#763

Post by mato »

sanderjd wrote: post #746
mato wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responding to your comment, but should have used less cut and paste. You wrote: > This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free. Navionics Boating is a paid application, and it's not cheap. There is no free tier, just a 14-day trial period. Despite that, it seems to have gone down the same route of Marl-ifying the interface as a free app would have…

Ok yeah I get it now! Thanks for clarifying. So, I guess it would require a lot more research to make a real argument about this, but to me, this just sounds like an application that isn't very good, but I don't think is the same phenomenon described by the article. I definitely don't think charging money is any kind of guarantee of quality. Software is hard to make and lots of software sucks just because it sucks. B…

> Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.

I think that only holds if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.

I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.

Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:

(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).

(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.

I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).

To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).

TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics, there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#764

Post by carabiner »

a-dub wrote: post #560
carabiner wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they started off in Boston and were MIT/Harvard grad students. And the backend was a DARPA project. So not really Brooklyn at heart, though some millennial New Yorkers pretended it was. They even had a personality trait for how much a user reminded them of Harvard girls. Like many "only in New York!" things it was really something that had mass appeal and gave a sense of quirkiness that was actually widespread i…

> And the backend was a DARPA project. the similarity/CF stuff? what was the DARPA project? other than that it seemed a rather ordinary consumer webapp?

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/okws-usenix04.pdf

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#765

Post by bookofjoe »

jimbokun wrote: post #739
bboygravity wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crazy idea: dating site that forces all users to communicate through a second language. How to ascertain it's legitimately a second language, and not their native language, would be the tricky part.

Especially now that there's this: https://kottke.org/23/09/ai-assisted-language-translation-of...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#766

Post by Cthulhu_ »

wvenable wrote: post #481
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 don't understand why so many companies are against simply developing a new product with a new brand instead of lobotomizing their own product. It seems to have over and over where a product and brand that makes decent profit is utterly destroyed in an attempt to acquire a new market.

Well, the existing product already has critical mass, a new product - like the various Instagram clones, then the various Tiktok clones, then the various Twitter clones - all have to acquire their own customer base.

That said, other point: Why not just accept you're no longer growing? The company would've stayed solvent for years yet, with a steady group of users coming in and out over time as the brand becomes synonymous with thoughtful dating profiles instead of the rapid fire hot-or-not that is Tinder.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#767

Post by wvenable »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #766
wvenable wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why so many companies are against simply developing a new product with a new brand instead of lobotomizing their own product. It seems to have over and over where a product and brand that makes decent profit is utterly destroyed in an attempt to acquire a new market.

Well, the existing product already has critical mass, a new product - like the various Instagram clones, then the various Tiktok clones, then the various Twitter clones - all have to acquire their own customer base. That said, other point: Why not just accept you're no longer growing? The company would've stayed solvent for years yet, with a steady group of users coming in and out over time as the brand becomes synon…

The endless pursuit of growth is incredibly destructive. A consistent profitable business is considered a failure.

Instragram was able to pull their users into Threads pretty easily without making Threads a direct part of Instragram. It is still it's own thing with it's own brand.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#768

Post by tremon »

jimbokun wrote: post #730
Workaccount2 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone will quickly monetize the idiots with a simple ad-ridden subscription based app that "Unlocks the Alternet!"

I doubt the non-nerds will want to join.

They will want to join once it reaches a certain size/notoriety. Same with reddit, gmail and twitter, and same with open source in general.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#769

Post by solatic »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #398
galaxyLogic wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post reminds me of xenophobes who lament the arrival of immigrants. The immigrants are taking their jobs they are saying. Such a viewpoint can be countered with the imaginary scenario where you live in a country with only 2 people. How well are they doing? There are no stores to buy goodies from because who would create such a store for just 2 people? Perhaps an immigrant, could open a deli! When there are more…

> What do they do with that money? They spend it, which grows the economy. Our economy, not some other country's economy. I'm going to guess you've never spoken to anyone who is sending money back to their family in their original country with every paycheck. Not really the point of this conversation I guess but... yeah. It does happen more than you probably think. To the point where malls in my area have kiosks for…

Your logic: let's reduce immigration because immigrants send remittances to family members who are not permitted by our immigration laws to join their family members in this country, which would increase immigration numbers further while reducing capital offshoring.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#770

Post by TeMPOraL »

tqi wrote: post #373
npsimons wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another. While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do better? If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?

I think the problem is there isn't a clear delineation between "traps" and "meaningful improvement." Take Signal for example - early days they had a ton of success with a core group of users, in spite of a number of product warts. Ever since then, they've been making usability improvements to lower friction and appeal to more and more marginal users. Is that good or bad? Based on the hn threads I've seen, it seems li…

Signal is a special case because it's a generic messenger app - meaning it's target audience is legitimately everyone, and with its philosophy and E2EE in general preventing interoperability, it has to capture everyone. It has to be optimized towards a Marl, or else it'll fail to network effects.

Some software is like that. Most isn't - but the enshittification culture is affecting it all the same.

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