431–440 of 840 posts
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Yeah I think this is the missing part. Even if enshittification is more profitable, people should still be able to just change services to a better one.
Change to what? Another match.com-owned service?
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…
A somewhat natural conclusion is that mobile killed the thoughtful internet. Ouch.
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Because 1 is not one of the axioms. The axioms are 1) There is a range of experience between worst possible misery and best possible happiness and 2) more people who are just barely happy is better than fewer people who are much happier. I don't understand why you're insisting on a binary distinction of acceptable vs. not acceptable. With that assumption there is no repugnant conclusion.
1 is one of the axioms because a binary cutoff is built into the premise.
Consequently you believe that it is better for a large number of people to exist in a state barely better than misery than for a smaller number of people to experience a greater degree of happiness.
Fair enough.
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…
I would pay $100/month for a site like the original okcupid, but I want Max Krohn, Christian Rudder and the rest of the original team running it.
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…
A somewhat natural conclusion is that mobile killed the thoughtful internet. Ouch.
That's the root of this blog post, the rise of Tinder, and the big shift to mobile in general. Nerds aren't the only people on the internet anymore. The average person is now on the internet. OKCupid was very much the dating site of us thoughtful nerds, those who thought text and personality tests would help them find a better match. Most singles in the West at the time just went to the bar, got intoxicated, then made base conversation with whomever engaged their base interests. That demographic moved to Tinder.
Unless you're specifically targeting a nerd-heavy demographic (e.g. academics, devs, hackers, etc) with a high margin product, if the goal is to create a mass appeal product then making nerds happy just isn't profitable. We're too small in number and too picky.
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Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.
Yeah, but what's the point of hosting them? Like what do you sell on r/dragonsfuckingcars? (no, I'm not joking) And what does the existence of such a place at all mean to a prospective advertiser? Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts. But okay, let's ignore porn. How about subreddits that deal with subjects like depression, gender issues, politics, etc? What do you sell to those? Maybe a book…
Surely there should be marketers that see "Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts." and realize that everything apart from "Imagine a viral picture of your ad" is often irrelevant.
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As did I! OkCupid was a shining star of a product that treated its users with respect and provided a really valuable service. I didn't realize that it's no longer. I feel old pining for the internet of yesteryear. As is obvious only in retrospect, you don't realize when the golden years are!
Anybody else remember the data blog posts? Those were interesting and satisfying. It was another confirmation that I'd found the right dating site and probably a like-minded userbase.
"How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?" I once asked someone this question and he replied with a single word. "Greed", he said. I wanted the opinion of someone who was not biased, i.e., who did not believe, AKAIK, that, as stated by the au…
(Another reason why free software is essential.)
> 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.
A large percentage never used e-mail because e-mail addresses are too abstract. They only began using "social media" when they could address correspondence by photograph.
There are a billion people who can speak but not read and write, and billions who can read and write but not well enough to earn karma on Hacker News.
Though smart people are sometimes Marl, they are Marl less often, or in more sophisticated ways (like wasting time on Hacker News).
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"Why can't I rip apart the UI of an app I use every day and rearrange it the way I want?" Because it is very hard to do something like this, so common people can do it. (you can change every html UI in theory) I tried to make something like this and basically failed (though in the very long run I might get there eventually). GUI editors are hard to get right and the ones I liked, like Adobe Flex Builder (with Flash U…
The typical Old School Unix way to do this is to provide all of your application's functionality and business logic through a command line app or at least an API, with the UI being a thin layer on top of the command line. Then anyone can build whatever UI they want on top of it. We've fallen from the light and now the prevailing design is to deeply integrate the business logic with the UI to the point where they are…
another one that i'd like to think has an open enough API is mastodon/fediverse, assuming they actually adhere to the activitypub spec, it should (should) be relatively straightforward to write a UI on top of the API. And it seems ok, there's quite a number of mastodon "apps", but less for stuff like misskey or pleroma.
I'm sure there are other contemporaneous examples, but suffice to say that some developers still care about this, today!