Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

nothinghuman.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 840 posts

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#351

Post by Clamchop »

apetresc wrote: post #311
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their metrics prove to them that getting me hooked on new shows will increase my engagement and increase the amount of time I spend in their app. Guess what? As a user, those are not my goals! But here's what I find odd about Netflix. Up until extremely recently—and even now for most customers—Netflix did not and does not display ads. Netflix makes money from subscription fees, which means they get the same amount…

Indeed, given the relatively high cost of streaming high-quality video, you'd think Netflix makes substantially more money from the 0-hour viewer compared to the 100-hour viewer.

There do seem to be "churners" out there subscribing to services only for as long as they need to watch the show they want to see, and I'd guess a wide middle of customers who are at least prepared to cancel if they feel that they're not using the service enough or that they will get better value from an alternative.

To keep these customers, you need to keep them continuously hooked on your programming.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#352

Post by 9dev »

pwatsonwailes wrote: post #290
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.

Sounds like something you probably should not be talking about on the internet with your real name?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#354

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#355

Post by ncruces »

sanderjd wrote: post #146
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…

This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

People need to realize that the sales business model does not necessarily lead to better outcomes.

I (pretty much single handedly) made a reasonably profitable mobile app. It was my bread and butter for a decade. It has millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. It's a “power” tool, not a game.

Unfortunately, it depends on servers for a lot of it's core features. There are no accounts, data passes through my servers and, aside from caching, gets deleted as soon as feasible. I really wish I could avoid it, tried to reduce this as much as possible, and made servers as cheap as possible in the process. But it's still in the $100s/month, which I can't justify without compensation.

I tried donations, and have ad free paid versions: they don't cover costs. Ads are 95% of revenue.

People who paid $1 half a year ago will complain that I killed their pet if the server is down for an hour on a weekend. They've paid their hard won $1 after trialing the product for a month, and feel entitled to forever support of something that has running costs, in both hardware and brain power. Whereas I've made my buck, and have every incentive to tell them to f-off.

People on ads will give me a tenth of a cent everytime they use the app, so I have the incentive to keep then coming back. Of course I can be sleazy and trick them into clicking ads, or drown them in popup hell, or whatever.

But the point is, if $0.001 is enough to make a nice profit from each use of my app, there's no better model than ads. A $1 sale means I'm loosing money on a power user after a few years. A $1 yearly subscription is something users just won't do, especially without fancy upgrades. And, in all models I've tried, 95% of revenue is always ads. Sales don't even cover the costs of the sales channels.

That's why ads took over the internet, and you won't be turning that back.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#356

Post by andrewmg »

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.

As Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."[0]

[0]https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-me...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#357

Post by grotorea »

hooverd wrote: post #30
pohl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a build-to-flip startup idea is to create a dating service geared towards creating LTRs and growing it to the point where you get on Match's radar.

Nationalize it. 'partner.gov' here we come.

I think this is going to start in East Asia if anywhere

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#358

Post by mato »

sanderjd wrote: post #146
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…

This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

Err, nope.

As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:

Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.

This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#359

Post by Iulioh »

wbobeirne wrote: post #349

I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It's not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But…

Thanks for sharing

Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#360

Post by Miraste »

s0rce wrote: post #214
LorenPechtel wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are plenty of vaccines and treatments you can't get because they're not profitable to manufacture.
Post reply on HN