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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#281

Post by seizethecheese »

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…

> the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company

This is a straw man. The primary source of value is the future cash flow. Since a long future is considered, growth is highly prized. I consider this a major achievement of mankind, to be able to value the future, today. Without this reasoning, financing for new businesses would cease to exist.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#282

Post by npsimons »

somedude895 wrote: post #166
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 a very good point that I think some commenters here should take to heart. No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another.

> No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another.

While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do better?

If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#283

Post by npsimons »

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…

> Open source seems like the only real hope there.

Pretty much, yeah.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#284

Post by pg_1234 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #145
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many versions of utilitarianism never specified the function to compute the sum for the many. Your example assumes that the function is simple addition, but others have been proposed that reflect some of the complexities of the human condition a little more explicitly (e.g. sad neighbors make neighbors sad).

Reinforcing your point, Peter Singer, philosopher and noted utilitarian, has explicitly said that he weights misery far more than happiness in his own framework. From a personal level, he said he'd give up the 10 best days of his life to remove the one worst day of his life (or something like that). All of his work with effective altruism is aimed at reducing suffering of those worst off in the world and spends no ti…

As an aside, this is why buying insurance, despite being a financially bad bet (or the insurers would go out of business), actually is a sensible thing to do from a quality of life perspective.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#285

Post by dimal »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #158
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.

Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem - Reddit is social media that succeeded . This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit. It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all proppe…

It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#286

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

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…

There is a minimum happiness threshold mH. We can increase population P until happiness H reaches mH, give or take some depending on how close you want to get to mH.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#287

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

szundi wrote: post #117
rurp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there are some perverse incentives, I think this is overstating it. Millions of people enter the dating market every year by aging into it or ending a previous relationship. That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business. Of course there is the temptation to increase the churn rate, but it doesn't have to be exploitative.

Sorry to point out that whatever you could make helping your clients happily leave you forever, you can make 5x that making them suffer. It is simple math.

This is not a convincing argument. If a dating site can't get people to match, they're likely to stop using it, just like any other product/service you pay for that doesn't work.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#288

Post by dkarl »

I think the author took the wrong conclusions away from his experience. All the questions, all the personalization, all the stuff that apps tried to add to make things better actually made things worse. All they could measure was similarity. They encouraged him to double down on choosing people based on their tastes in entertainment and how they answered cheesy questions, ignoring three factors that perhaps should have been obvious from the beginning:

1. People are already effectively segregated by similarity in their real and online lives, and a dating app does them a disservice by doubling down on this.

2. Difference is an essential part of relationships. How many successful relationships do you know of where one person is spontaneous but liable to do foolish things, and the other person is steady and reliable but maybe a bit boring if left to themselves? Or where one person is an introvert but loves to cook for people and the other person is an extrovert who loves to throw parties?

3. People who try to get to know each other online are often surprised (and disappointed) when they meet in person. Online, you can only get very, very rough indicators of in-person romantic capability, no matter how much time and detail you have to work with. A month of getting to "know" someone online is worth less than five minutes of in-person conversation.

If you agree with these things, why in the world would you use any dating app whose basic premise runs contrary to them?

Tinder was accidental genius. A simplistic swipe left / swipe right app does exactly what you want. You show up knowing you don't know anything about the person, but vaguely excited. It's like glimpsing somebody from across the room and walking over to talk to them, except it's not just for people who enjoy spending time in crowded rooms striking up conversations with strangers who might not be interested in them.

People bag on Tinder because it's superficial. Tinder is genius because it's superficial. It sticks to the only thing that any dating app has ever been good at, and it leaves everything else in human hands. That's why dating apps are converging on the Tinder model. When apps stop doing what apps are terrible at, and stick to what apps can actually help with, there's very little left, but it's extremely useful.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#289

Post by autoexec »

PeterisP wrote: post #270
autoexec wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If this were true, the app probably wasn't worth having in the first place. An app that actually does something Marl needs, or enables him to do something he wants to do doesn't need to catch his attention with shiny things. The th…

If the app actually does something Marl needs or enables him to do something he wants to do, then that's great, but all that means Marl simply isn't the marginal user for that app that the article is talking about, he's a core user of it - and there exists some other user, let's call him Narl, who has slightly different needs than Marl, doesn't really need that app, but would use it if you catch his attention in thos…

> it makes all economic sense to make the app worse for Marl to catch Narl. Marl will use it anyway (since for him the app was worth having in the first place), but your effort will make a difference in getting Narl.

I guess you're right. Marl wouldn't be a marginal user. The economic sense of attracting the marginal user Narl still only holds true to a point. Make the app bad enough by appealing to Narl and you'll lose Marl to a competing app that doesn't suck as bad. Narl is fickle, doesn't really need the app, and will be easily tempted to move on to other apps. Not a great long term investment. Marl needs the app and as long as it does what he needs without pissing him off the app has got a user they can profit from. It seems very shortsighted to drive away your core users to temporarily attract the less interested marginal ones.

Thankfully, I can't think of many apps that have gotten worse by aggressively targeting the Narls of the world. When apps get worse, it's usually greed that gets in the way. Anti-features that even narl hates, but which stuffs the developer's pockets with cash.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#290

Post by pwatsonwailes »

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…

Apple absolutely does do this. I have first hand knowledge of doing it for them.
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