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98% isn't much

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Re: 98% isn't much

#21

Post by BigRedEye »

I think this single fact is a major source of enshittification in large software products, especially in the era of ML/AI. If your quality is 99%, it sounds like "you have solved your task", but in reality there is a long tail that over time affects nearly every customer.

I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboard panes load normally (so a dashboard with 20 panes is broken in nearly 1 in 5 loads), and so on. If your LLM gets 99% of tool calls right, nearly every session will contain a malformed tool call.

Probabilities are hard for humans, probably.

Re: 98% isn't much

#22

Post by abap_rocky »

> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?

This reminds me almost precisely of the dynamics of pro sports in the US and how fans are getting priced out of attending games or even watching teams on TV as organizations shift to bespoke streaming platforms.

Re: 98% isn't much

#24

Post by levmiseri »

eknkc wrote: post #8

I agree the general premise but do not agree when it comes to browser support. I feel like we should be building for the 98% or even 95% and force the remaining to upgrade their browsers. I've built for the IE6 - IE11 era for a painful and long time. I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.

This is very context dependent. It's 'fine' having such attitude when it comes to a hobby project or personal website – not so much for ecommerce site. And imo you are missing the key part of the article – graceful degradation.

Designing for the ideal (or for the <98%) is fine. As long as the experience is gracefully degraded for the rest.

Re: 98% isn't much

#25

Post by wccrawford »

Alternatively, 98% is plenty.

If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen.

As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update their browser once a year or better.

The tradeoff is code complexity and engineering time, vs having a larger market. And that's going to be an individual situation for every company.

Re: 98% isn't much

#26

Post by mewpmewp2 »

There's likely always a line somewhere where effort becomes way out of proportion compared to getting that last mile effort.

Arguably, if you only have a website, that won't work for anyone without access to the Internet. So then you should have a physical presence in each of those people's location, and arguably you shouldn't provide any improvements that give me more than physical presence does, so you should not have the website in the first place, since people without the Internet can't use it or you have to keep your website without any improvements over the physical office.

If you only have a website, arguably 2+ billion people currently wouldn't be able to access it.

And it seems odd to bring 150 mil people as an example, when the baseline should be at least 2+ billion with website only.

Re: 98% isn't much

#27

Post by huqedato »

What about those 30% of audience to update their browser? On our web platform, the team currently displays a message along the lines of: 'Please update your browser; this site relies on features incompatible with your current version'.

Re: 98% isn't much

#28

Post by z3c0 »

BigRedEye wrote: post #21

I think this single fact is a major source of enshittification in large software products, especially in the era of ML/AI. If your quality is 99%, it sounds like "you have solved your task", but in reality there is a long tail that over time affects nearly every customer. I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboa…

When measuring and reporting models to the non-saavy, I usually reframe them into odds. One failure for every 49 successes is a scary failure rate when operating at a large scale.

This is largely why I don't condone LLMs in operational pipelines. Your workflow? Fine. The company's? Hell no.

Re: 98% isn't much

#29

Post by 101008 »

eknkc wrote: post #8

I agree the general premise but do not agree when it comes to browser support. I feel like we should be building for the 98% or even 95% and force the remaining to upgrade their browsers. I've built for the IE6 - IE11 era for a painful and long time. I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.

Some people are locked in old devices and can't upgrade. Basically you are doing class discrimination...

Re: 98% isn't much

#30

Post by buntp »

Isn't this obvious?

In some categories, certainty and percentages make a lot of difference--surgeries, accidents. In some, they don't--surveys, grades.

It just depends on the category.

This is akin to saying something as obvious as more percentages are more than less percentages.

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