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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

nothinghuman.substack.com

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#271

Post by Hizonner »

nelblu wrote: post #268
mrshoe wrote: post #258

The real problem is industry-wide adoption of metrics-driven design. When I studied cognitive science, the method we employed for HCI was User Centered System Design. Granted, this was a backronym for UCSD, but the point remains — design should be user-centered, not metrics-driven. When I launch Netflix, it is abundantly clear to me that their design is driven by their metrics. What I want to see at the top is my “co…

For netflix : I only watch it on my browser (my TV is basically a monitor connected to a PC), and the way I work around is by having a bookmark : https://www.netflix.com/browse/continue-watching Problem solved! (well until netflix starts blocking that too, in that case I might as well delete their membership)

That kind of criminal behavior on your part is why Netflix wants you to use the app, you lowlife. How dare you?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#272

Post by can3p »

This is not a tyranny if’s marginal user, this is corporate mechanics and metrics at play. Every big company has a number of North Star metrics. If you move them in right direction you get promotions and recognition, since the metrics are used as a proxy for customer benefit

The problem though is that it’s relatively easy to game the metrics, especially in short term hence the popular sport is to pump the metric, get promotion and move on to a different project before the negative consequences are evident.

Eg if your metric is conversion you can exploit it in lots of really dark ways

In even bigger companies like google it’s possible to repeat this action many times and the result is obvious. You can see how this could work with acquired products - of course the first changes will be to bring them to Xcorp scale, stack or standards which can mean years without new features

It works completely differently with hobby projects because of different incentives. I’m 100% sure that the best things in the world are created when their authors do them just for the sake it using their vision.

Unfortunately you cannot really grind in this way. So if you have to implement a login using 100 different auth systems, the approach should be different

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#273

Post by Gibbon1 »

greiskul wrote: post #260
skybrian wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, more generally, I’m reminded of David Chapman’s essay, “No Cosmic Meaning” [1]. Thought experiments are a good way to depress yourself if you take them seriously. But I think that utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up? There are times when adding things together and doing comparisons makes a kind of sense, but it’s an abstr…

The big problem with utilitarinism, is that people think that a preference function for the utilitariam that is creating a given world is something simple. Then some people are like, no, it's more complex, we need to take into account X, Y and Z. But the truth is, no human being is capable of defining a good utility function, even for ourselves. We don't know all the parameters, and we don't know how to combine those…

Also utilitarinism was created by people who were utterly unaware that the world is fundamentally chaotic. Instead they thought it could be represented by a system of linear equations.

It's fundamentally broken in practice.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#274

Post by doctor_radium »

notpachet wrote: post #241
ahstilde wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this would mean for many companies Marl is the power user

I think for many companies, Marl is the CEO

I worked with a Marl once and couldn't do more than look on in disbelief. This was on the job (tech company), not after hours or standing in a customer service queue. He wasn't the CEO, but maybe had more potential than I thought?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#275

Post by Ensorceled »

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…

Every time I've engaged in debate over this, it always comes down to believing that the world is zero sum and there is a limited amount of "happiness" that can be distributed.

That may be true for some things, but for many decisions it is not true.

There is enough food to feed everyone if we choose to distribute it properly. There is enough housing to house everyone. etc. etc.

There may not be enough cardiologists or Dali originals ...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#276

Post by mastema »

JohnMakin wrote: post #267
brap wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that your goals are aligned with the company’s goals. They’re not. There is no “problem”, it’s all working as intended. From the company’s point of view, they actually are doing the right thing. They’re making money (which, I’d argue, is ultimately a good thing for everyone involved). Netflix and Apple are no different, the goal is always $$, Apple just sells different things.

No, he's saying the exact opposite - that the company's revenue-driven goals and the user's goals are not in alignment. It is definitely possible for those things to be in alignment, that's how products have worked for the majority of modern human history.

I think the broader point is that the User's goals and Capitalism's goals are not in alignment and the company, who is caught in the middle, has an obvious and legally required option to choose if they are shareholder owned. The user loses this fight every time.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#278

Post by npsimons »

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…

> I have no such loyalty to large faceless internet companies, and negative loyalty to companies that enshittify everything as a way to eke out profit when bound to forever growth fantasies.

You do, sure. But you're not a marginal user.

A lot of the fine article reads to me as a sort of elitism, albeit one I find myself falling prey to: the tyranny of the masses, the normies, the filthy casuals, that ruin everything.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought (possibly derailed, or just no steam), but I'd like to throw in that elitism is not always a bad thing.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#279

Post by didibus »

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…

I really don't see the issue with your happiness split. You have 10 people, and they're are equally unhappy.

This is perfect, because now they are all equally incentivized to do something about it. They're motivated to work together and collaborate for change.

If you do any other split where some people will be very happy and others very unhappy, you've now created certain category of people who are incentivized to maintain the current system and repress any desire for change from the unhappy people.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#280

Post by npsimons »

munificent wrote: post #29

> We’ve all been Marl at one time or another This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article. It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.

> It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.

That is incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate goal, especially of people.

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