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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#191

Post by RunSet »

lapcat wrote: post #8

> OKCupid, like the other acquisitions of Match.com The article seems to just glance over this crucial fact. Online dating sites have gotten worse because the Match Group monopolizes them. There's hardly any competition. Same with Google Search. Monopolies suck. They start out good, in order to attract all of the users, and then once they've acquired all of the users, they turn to unchecked profit maximization and st…

Agreed.

https://old.reddit.com/r/LokiList/comments/s0a0w6/why_i_made...

Also:

> we took pairs of bad matches (actual 30% match) and told them they were exceptionally good for each other (displaying a 90% match.)

https://archive.ph/O2AF1#selection-421.14-421.145

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#192

Post by PaulHoule »

Totally wrong about OKCupid.

The whole point is that you're not supposed to find anybody but keep looking because if you find somebody you're no longer a customer. Match buys every dating site that gets even 2% of traction because they can't stand the possibility that somebody makes a dating site that works and destroys their customer pool.

If the government was serious about antitrust they'd break up match.com

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#193

Post by menacingly »

This is a subset of a related problem: the word "scale", in nearly every context, is a euphemism for "make stuff shitty by making the problems of 10% of users problems for 100% of users"

It applies to everything. God-awful frontend build pipelines. Everyone feeling the pressure for their regular old database to not make the cut. Sprawling, labyrinthine legal rules no one can follow because one weasel in one meeting was able to say "but what about..."

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#194

Post by kube-system »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #181
Kapura wrote: post #20

Feels like this is tyranny of easily measured metrics. If your north star metric is something more focused (number of fun dates!) that incentivizes features and experiments that push that number up, but if the number is DAU, suddenly you've decoupled "success" from the actual intention of the website or app. Obviously, "number of fun dates" is a lot harder to measure, relying as it would on surveys with low response…

And note that the incentives for the user and the company are at cross purposes with dating apps. Users use dating apps with the intent of not needing dating apps. A dating app that works well destroys it's user base. Their desired user base is people looking for hookups. Is it any wonder the apps have degraded into stuff pretty much only useful for hookups?

Yep, the ideal dating app in terms of profitability is one that makes users think they're going to meet the person of their dreams (so they are motivated to use it), but continually falls short (so they are retained). Which is exactly what the market has optimized for.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#195

Post by autoexec »

ivee wrote: post #42
freedomben wrote: post #6

> Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again. This is hilarious and sad because it fe…

"market targeting power users" is basically SaaS, right? I don't understand that market as well, but it seems to have similar dynamics where you only charge X$ / user / month and so are incentivized to grab more users instead of giving more value to existing users.

In my experience power users don't want SaaS. They tend to want control over their data, they want control over how/when the software runs, they want things to work offline, and they care about their privacy. It's the people who don't know/care about tech and just want a magical black box that love SaaS. They want all the complicated tech stuff to be someone else's problem, and they'll pay over and over and over again just so that they don't have to think about or manage anything.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#196

Post by titzer »

freedomben wrote: post #6

> Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again. This is hilarious and sad because it fe…

> Alternatively and more seriously, I do hope to see markets emerge that target power users. I'm not optimistic though.

What's crazy to me is that 25+ million people on this Earth can program, and how many of them get to decide the UIs that everyone else uses? I myself, suck at UI programming. But that's because UI programming is labyrinthine, arcane, and generally requires becoming an expert in a number of extremely poorly thought-out frameworks that are often stupendously complicated. (Web, I am looking at you.)

Why can't I rip apart the UI of an app I use every day and rearrange it the way I want? And I mean, far more than toolbars and rearranging drop down menus. (BTW, remember those? Those were great).

Seriously though, I have written many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in my day; I fancy myself not super bad at programming, yet I cannot take apart a random GUI app and make it do what I want. Even when it's open source. I feel like this is an unaddressed problem; the UI cafeteria people keep serving us an ever-changing menu of crap, and I feel powerless to even lock in the few UIs that I do end up getting good at. They'll take that away soon enough.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#197

Post by wilg »

mhb wrote: post #176
wilg wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the one packing it, the setup of the problem does it. "Barely above neutral" means you've picked an acceptable state. And then we are supposed to consider that acceptable state "repugnant"?

There's a comparison. If the scale goes from -100 to +100, the conclusion is that if we have 8 billion people in the world with average happiness of +10, it is better to immiserate them in order to have 80 billion with average happiness +1.01. It's not that the acceptable state of 1.01 is repugnant, it's that the conclusion seems counterintuitive and ethically problematic to many people, as it suggests that we should…

I guess I just don't understand how if your axioms are 1) X is an acceptable level of happiness and 2) more people are better than fewer it is in any way surprising or problematic to end up with infinite people at happiness X.

Perhaps people don't see that (2) is a part of the premise?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#198

Post by mvdtnz »

wilg wrote: post #155
mvdtnz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone think that a large overall pool of happiness is somehow better than a high per capita happiness? This seems like the kind of thing that's incredibly obvious to everyone but the academic philosopher.

It's just a question of if you value other people existing or not. If you don't, focus on per-capita happiness, if you do then you focus on meeting a minimum threshold of happiness for everyone. I don't see how you couldn't value other people existing – I think they have just as much of a right to experience the universe as I do.

There's a vast chasm between "other people deserve to exist" and "we should 100x our population in order to increase the marginal happiness pool".

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#199

Post by mdaniel »

autoexec wrote: post #184
sanderjd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

I think paying for something does encourage users to be more invested in it, but paid software can neglect their power users too if they're comfortable being "good enough for most people"

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#200

Post by iteratethis »

Marl isn't born that way, Marl is made by the same tech you're talking about. You're not a victim of Marl, you actively produce new Marls.

Whenever you introduce convenience into the world, you reprogram people. You create the short attention span and passiveness.

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