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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#221

Post by saint_fiasco »

mvdtnz wrote: post #201
saint_fiasco wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case, it's because the success of an ad-funded service depends on the amount of users it has. If you don't like the repugnant conclusion you have to change something in the conditions of the environment so that you make it not be true. Arguing against it and calling your refutation obvious doesn't do anything.

That is an incredibly long bow to draw. Corporations are optimising for their own profits, not anyone's happiness.

I agree. The math that applies to corporate profits is not the same that should apply for human happiness.

But we have to acknowledge that the weird philosophical thought experiment that can't possibly convince anyone except weird philosophers turned out to be convincing to other entities after all.

Compare the trolley problem, a famous thought experiment that people used to laugh at, up until a couple of years when suddenly important people began to ask important questions like "should we relax the safety standards for potentially life-saving vaccines" and "how much larger than Y does X need to be so that preventing X functionally illiterate children are worth the price of Y dead children"

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#222

Post by coldtea »

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…

AKA the Repugnantly Ignorant in the Human-Ways Nerd's Idea of Ethics conclusion!

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#223

Post by shmde »

xcdzvyn wrote: post #69
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…

Google does not have a monopoly on search engines. There is abundant competition in the search engine market: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Brave, Yahoo. Nobody uses Google because they have to, they use it because it is the best.

> Nobody uses Google because they have to, they use it because it is the best.

Oh yeah, you sure its not because its the default browser on Android ?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#224

Post by scythe »

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…

The problem is that the "repugnant conclusion" is a matter of definitions. A moral theory is (basically) freely chosen: you can change the definitions whenever you like.

Not so for B2C SaaS. The utilities are always measured in dollars and they always aggregate by simple addition. You can't simply redefine the problem away by changing the economic assumptions, because they exist in physical space and not in theory space.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#226

Post by scythe »

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…

> such as monopoly power.

The article does mention monopoly power, but it uses instead the term 'network effects'. These are not exactly the same, but in the realm of social media and similar platforms, they're very close.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#227

Post by kridsdale3 »

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.

There is a reason Patagonia is consistently rated as the most favorable brand in America.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#228

Post by coldtea »

tyre wrote: post #156
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…

The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics. Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population. Merging it with natalism isn’t realistic or meaningful, so we end up with these population morality debates. The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!) Comp…

>The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics.

Not even for academics. It's something for "rational"-bros.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#229

Post by kridsdale3 »

bad_user wrote: post #218
hyggetrold wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sustainable growth means prosperity. Unsustainable growth is taking out a loan against the future without any certain plan that it can be paid.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#230

Post by nequo »

bad_user wrote: post #218
hyggetrold wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Japan hasn’t had much GDP growth since 1990. You could say that its economy is stagnating. Yet starvation is hardly a defining phenomenon for its population. They have one of the highest life expectancies. Healthcare is widely available. Technological progress did not stop. And wealth inequality in this economy is among the lowest in the world.
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