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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#31

Post by efitz »

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 with are rooted in my area, owned and operated by local people with faces, and I willingly go interact with them.

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.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#32

Post by ivee »

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…

(author here) I agree monopoly & market power is a big part of the story here, but I feel like that is already well-understood; I was trying to describe what the incentives feel like from the inside.

I guess more anti-trust in tech would probably be good, but the reality of network effects & the advertising economy mean it's actually nontrivial for government to intervene in a way that's clearly net good for users. Google has gifted the world amazing free-to-use software that gives me probably thousands of dollars of consumer surplus yearly. Had OKCupid stayed separate they might have had to tinderify anyways just to survive. Same with YouTube and Instagram had they not been acquired.

If I had to point my way to a solution it would be something at the protocol or operating system level. Apple, for example, mostly doesn't make money from ads and could set up their OS in a way that makes apps compete to satisfy user intentions rather than hijack their attention.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#33

Post by oooyay »

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…

> OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.

That was OKCupids claim, but was this claim ever proven through data that directly affirmed that as an outcome?

Often these websites have tiered profit schemes that can milk a user for $100+/m. Sometimes they gamify it, like loot boxing, to make it more lucrative. I don't remember OKCupid being any different.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#34

Post by Groxx »

esafak wrote: post #26
Groxx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably safe to claim that part of it (and what likely killed Flickr) is that the original owners are usually more able to make coherent product features and explorations. They built something in the field because they knew something about the field. Once they're bought up by some other company, in particular any conglomerate, it gets worked on by a bunch of people who are experts at building products in genera…

You raise a good point but you are too generous. The buyer tends to be mercenary. I think generic "professional" management only ends well in mature products and companies, where the main task is to increase efficiency. I don't expect the buyer to innovate the product.

Conglomerates are IMO almost always mercenary and damaging, yeah.

They're far from the only company purchases happening though, e.g. many small companies that grow too quickly sell to something larger to simply have the manpower and money to handle the new scale, and sometimes that ends up better for everyone. You just don't usually hear about these because they quietly work, and they don't involve globally-recognized names.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#35

Post by robert_tweed »

davio wrote: post #27
xorcist wrote: post #21

Thoughtful article that doesn't even mention Youtube Shorts, perhaps the most glaring example of the trend. When online services maximizes the number of daily users, perhaps in the hundreds of millions, the vast majority of them won't be very interested. So of course any data driven service will optimize keeping uninterested users occupied. That does explain a lot actually.

I'm mixed on the shorts. I like it when they do a "you fix this by pushing this button here" in 15 seconds instead of it being 8+ minutes so they can get mid roll ads.

I'd be fine with shorts if they didn't disable the normal player controls.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#36

Post by saint_fiasco »

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…

> 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 couples you suggest.

I think companies don't try this strategy because it would be too expensive for the end user. You would need to charge thousands of dollars to make up for the hard work of matchmaking and the risk of bad matches. Not something an internet startup can do at scale.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#37

Post by fidotron »

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…

You absolutely could do market based dating where people can bid how much a date with the other would be worth and you match everyone every few days based on the highest sum of bids, collecting the difference.

So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date A the match will cost A 20 plus fees.

This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#38

Post by afarrell »

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…

A dating site could work sustainably if it was a site for planning date nights. Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do.

Revenue sources would include:

- Ads for local businesses, classes, and events.

- Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants.

Once you get the site to work for date nights, let people be open to getting matched based on similar activity interests. Then you can solve the problem of two users finding a specific joint activity.

Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex with? No, but computers are bad at sex.

Would this solve the problem married couples have of picking a place to eat? Hopefully.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#39

Post by RugnirViking »

fidotron wrote: post #37
postmodest wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You absolutely could do market based dating where people can bid how much a date with the other would be worth and you match everyone every few days based on the highest sum of bids, collecting the difference. So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date A the match will cost A 20 plus fees. This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.

or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument?

Sorry but I have quite a viscerally bad reaction to such a proposal. Sure it could work in some sense of finding value price pairs or whatever where people's preferences aren't clear.

But it also seems extremely dystopian and horrifying, particularly applied to the dating market. It would be similar with finding friends. People do this naturally and normally on their own for free no problem if you put them in a big room together. It neeeds no incentive

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#40

Post by marcosdumay »

ftxbro wrote: post #10
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…

> We’ve all been Marl at one time or another - half consciously scrolling in bed, in line at the airport with the announcements blaring, reflexively opening our phones to distract ourselves from a painful memory.

And I want to do different things when I'm this way than what I want when I'm in a conscious state.

Why is it that every single company only wants to serve the same one of those personas?

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