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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#831

Post by wauter »

User23 wrote: post #575
sneak wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I hereby submit “regression to the population mean”.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#832

Post by swacket »

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 OKC. (we initially dated for a year, then split up, then got back together many years later after we both did some growing up). I moved someplace that OKC had no userbase in the intervening time and tried to use tinder. It was an absolute dumpster fire. Just a miserable experience. I was so sad to see it consume market share at the expense of sites like OKC. Ultimately OKC pulled through for me in the end!

Anyway all of which is to say 1. OKC was great and thank you for working on it, and 2. your story resonates so much with my experience and observations from the other side of the equation.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#833

Post by tqi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #770
tqi wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think signal is an especially special case. While it may be clear and obvious to you which apps are which, I think that the reality is that its never a clear delineation.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#834

Post by mighmi »

Numeral4072 wrote: post #252
mighmi wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You weren't able to scale enough initially to be profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate? This is a fantastic project. I also briefly worked on something similar, but left when I learned more about my coworkers.

I agree the idea seems solid enough, but accommodating the increased complexity of scaling it up sounds quiet difficult. Out of curiosity what did you learn about your coworkers? Something about their motivations for creating such an app or what?

One guy liked to send dick pics, another was doing a lot of drugs and sent deranged messages for 48 hours straight to random people and the last was "just" a compulsive liar, who seemed to invite a prostitute to the office who then stole servers. I wasn't even sure why we even had the servers, since we barely bad any software written yet.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#835

Post by pvdoom »

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.

Nope, not really, not only it makes zero sense from evolutionary perspective (especially that of humans), but it also is very specific to one specific platform, and very much determined on the way it is structured and its target audience, business model, etc.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#836

Post by strgcmc »

mlyle wrote: post #818
strgcmc wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement, through methodologies internally called HVA/DSI and DSE (to name just a couple). - High Value Action / Downstream Impact == using a "twins" comparison, estimate the 12-month impact of a customer taking a particular action (e.g. sign up for Prime, watch their first Prime Video, etc.), compared to one who doesn't. HVAs are ba…

> Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement It's funny-- Amazon is the exact case I'm thinking of. I went from spending high five figures to a few hundred, and I'm seeking to eliminate that. The exact impact of these kinds of data-driven management practices has lead me to expending a whole lot of work to figure out how to give Costco, Target, and Walmart my busines…

There's a lot of good feedback to chew through, but I'll refrain from diving in too deep, and just mention that, as important as the HVA/DSI methodology is, there's been a comparatively lower amount of research done in "negative HVAs". In theory, one can do the same type of analysis to compare "twins" and pick out the NEGATIVE value of having repeat payment problems or repeat unsuccessful customer service interactions. Optimizing for growing the positive HVAs, is fundamentally different from optimizing to reduce the negative ones, but Amazon has the tools to get there or to do both, if it wants/needs to.

And yes, 12 months is arbitrary and doesn't capture everything, and longer windows of analysis are possible, but waiting even longer just throws the signal-to-noise ratio too far in the direction of noise.

FWIW, I no longer at Amazon, but I've yet to see a company of significant scale apply this level of econometrics so rigorously in day to day business decisions, or that they would evaluate 12 months as a baseline (most companies and most A/B tests are much shorter, obviously). I'm sorry you've had bad experiences, and anyways I think it's overall good for society to cultivate strong alternatives to Amazon, but as invisible as it may be to you as a consumer, your data and your lost value as a customer are definitely accounted for within these methodologies, even if no visible changes are happening or they're not winning you back.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#837

Post by mlyle »

strgcmc wrote: post #836
mlyle wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement It's funny-- Amazon is the exact case I'm thinking of. I went from spending high five figures to a few hundred, and I'm seeking to eliminate that. The exact impact of these kinds of data-driven management practices has lead me to expending a whole lot of work to figure out how to give Costco, Target, and Walmart my busines…

There's a lot of good feedback to chew through, but I'll refrain from diving in too deep, and just mention that, as important as the HVA/DSI methodology is, there's been a comparatively lower amount of research done in "negative HVAs". In theory, one can do the same type of analysis to compare "twins" and pick out the NEGATIVE value of having repeat payment problems or repeat unsuccessful customer service interaction…

I appreciate your comment. I guess what I'm saying is:

I love statistics and econometrics and testing beliefs with data.

But at some point, you do need to think about how to relate to human beings and what is, overall, "good business." That is, data are not replacements for clinical judgment about what is reasonable.

Coming up with ever-more-sophisticated ways to measure what is revenue maximizing but "not quite too abusive" isn't how we keep a good reputation or create a good world to live in.

Of course, completely ignoring indicators and making choices purely based on intuition and values isn't great, either.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#838

Post by webninja »

genewitch wrote: post #628
webninja wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s not where but yes it is why.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#840

Post by dubya »

gwd wrote: post #709
opsimist wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MensaNet :(
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