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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#211

Post by shadowgovt »

feoren wrote: post #164
bdcs wrote: post #98

The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics' The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10 N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100 N people with 0.111 happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the ma…

That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism. First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work all da…

All of this having been said, replacing happiness with revenue makes chasing marginal users make a lot of sense.

If you have a sure-fire way to get half the people on the planet to give you $1, you can afford a yacht. Even if it means the tool you make for them only induces them to ever give you that $1 and not more... Why do you care? You have a yacht now. You can contemplate whether you should have made them something more useful from the relative safety and comfort of your yacht.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#212

Post by saint_fiasco »

YouSuck2 wrote: post #59
saint_fiasco wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms. Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the…

And do they return the money in the case of divorce?

Probably not. If they got to the point of needing a divorce that means the relationship looked like it was going to work, so much so that the people involved agreed to marry.

No online service can possibly promise to be more thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans who chose to marry each other.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#213

Post by s0rce »

I think Youtube is a counter example. There is absolutely amazing content and it hasn't turned into a feed, although it does have that stuff (personally, I find TikTok more enjoyable for that type of content/experience).

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#214

Post by s0rce »

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?

That's true for a lot of business that still can be a good business model, lots in medicine, for example: lifetime vaccinations, and cures for diseases like HepC.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#215

Post by cole-k »

koch wrote: post #13

> Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.

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 that the majority of them don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they have to exist for ads to generate any revenue.

I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care about different things.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#216

Post by autoexec »

postmodest wrote: post #22
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…

It should also be noted that match.com knows that it's business isn't "connecting people in stable relationships" but "luring people to pay for match.com by promising them connections that never work out." OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again. Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to survive, they HAVE to be bad at the servi…

Generally, the things that are valuable to society, but can't be delivered by corporations who are only interested in maximizing their own wealth and power are good candidates for something that would be better run by government.

Maybe a dating site actually would make for a good social service... Assuming that what we'd gain in terms of the stability and happiness of the population is worth more than what it would cost to run the service it might not be a bad idea. Especially in areas where dating is uniquely difficult like Iceland where apps exist to make sure you're not dating someone closely related.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#217

Post by tikkun »

Related concept: Enshittification (I've seen this mentioned on HN)

A company starts out focused on building a great product.

Then, they reach product-market fit.

Then, they raise money.

Now, the best way for them to grow is to go upmarket. Sell to enterprises.

Unfortunately, then the resources of the company are directed to features that enterprises buyers care about, because that's the best way for the company to make more money.

The actual product stagnates.

(This does leave an opportunity for bootstrapped founders to come in and swim in the "wake" of B2B startups that built a great product, then let their product stagnate while they went upmarket. Eventually some of those bootstrappers might choose to get bigger and move upmarket themselves, and then the opportunity opens up again for new bootstrappers. Or the bootstrapper can remain niche, focused on winning users who choose the best product and who don't require enterprise features, which is a smaller market but still can be quite profitable and would be a much smaller and simpler to run business.)

Examples: Airtable (it's a great product, I still love it, but it hasn't really improved for me as an end user since about 2016), Notion, Docusign (maybe it wasn't ever a great product, I'm not sure, but it sure hasn't improved for me as a user).

Instead of going from "good to great" it unfortunately seems like many startups go from "great to good"

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#218

Post by bad_user »

hyggetrold wrote: post #141
efitz wrote: post #31

The article doesn’t mention a number of contributing problems such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a problem. Perhaps Ycombinator is the wrong place to bring up such a point, but the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company almost certainly contributes significantly to the problems discussed in the article. What happened to community? The businesses I like to deal…

If you read the writing of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, he calls out growth as the underlying cause of these issues. Our current economic system is oriented around growth and the assumption that it can continue indefinitely.

Growth means prosperity.

Also, the idea that the economy requires growth is BS, it's just that economic stagnation or recession currently means some people are going to be starving. And if you actually look at the world, with its still growing population in some countries, or an aging population in others, it's pretty clear why people starve when growth stops, and it has nothing to do with capitalism, or The Man.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#219

Post by zaphar »

wilg wrote: post #197
mhb wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's more that after seeing that result of starting with those premises they don't like the 2 premises anymore. It would be like me really liking the experience of eating potator chips all day right up until the point that I discovered it had a lot of adverse health effects. I might no long like eating them as much.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#220

Post by [deleted] »

tikkun wrote: post #217

Related concept: Enshittification (I've seen this mentioned on HN) A company starts out focused on building a great product. Then, they reach product-market fit. Then, they raise money. Now, the best way for them to grow is to go upmarket. Sell to enterprises. Unfortunately, then the resources of the company are directed to features that enterprises buyers care about, because that's the best way for the company to ma…

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