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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

nothinghuman.substack.com

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#531

Post by eru »

astrange wrote: post #468
pg_1234 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Insurers are often mutually owned by their customers, so they don't need to profit.

That doesn't make much of a difference.

Profit is only one part of the overhead. They also have to pay agents, adjusters, underwriters, managers, office stationary, postage, fraud investigators, lawyers, taxes, interest on bonds etc.

Similar for hospitals etc. Profit, ie cost of equity capital, is usually (but not always) a relatively small part of an organisation's overall cost structure. And the non-profit alternatives typically don't have meaningfully lower costs.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#532

Post by eru »

selectodude wrote: post #347
pg_1234 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Insurance isn't a financially bad bet. They're providing a service (not needing to maintain the liquidity of replacement costs) in exchange for a fixed monthly fee. It's cheaper for me to grow my own food but it's not a "bad bet" to not be a subsistence farmer and buy my food at the grocery store even though many people are making money off my purchase up the chain. I get to use my money and time for something more p…

You are right for catastrophic insurance, ie insurance that covers outlays that would financially ruin you, or at least be majorly inconvenient.

Many people buy (or are forced to buy) insurance that covers minor outlays, too.

Using that kind of insurance has pretty big (relative) overheads not just in terms of money but also in terms of annoying paperwork and bureaucracy.

Some of the worst offenders are probably health insurance plans that include a fixed hundred bucks allowance towards new glasses every year. They might just as well charge you hundred bucks less in premiums and strike that allowance. (Unless in cases where that scheme is a tax dodge.)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#533

Post by qingcharles »

talldatethrow wrote: post #404
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…

I remember being on SparkMatch when I was a 14-15 year old. A dating site meant for teens, from the makers of Spark Notes. I always had this weird vague hunch that spark match become OKCupid. Any info on this?

The biggest online dating site in the 90s had a minimum age of 13 o_O. I thought that was weird, even back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchmaker.com

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#534

Post by talldatethrow »

qingcharles wrote: post #533
talldatethrow wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being on SparkMatch when I was a 14-15 year old. A dating site meant for teens, from the makers of Spark Notes. I always had this weird vague hunch that spark match become OKCupid. Any info on this?

The biggest online dating site in the 90s had a minimum age of 13 o_O. I thought that was weird, even back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchmaker.com

I remember I was 14-15 on SparkMatch because I had to convince my mom to drive me 30 miles to a mall so I could meet a girl from SparkMatch. To this day I was the most out of my league girl I ever 'dated' (only kissed a few times). I soon acted too sweet and too lame and lost her. But it taught me a lot to always be cooler and I cleaned up in the coming OkCupid/PlentyofFish revolution, and doubly so by the time Tinder came around. I still think about that girl sometimes, which makes sense, because she was somewhat unique to be online constantly back in 1999-2000.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#535

Post by bhauer »

Great article. I personally put the blame on mobile devices and the "mobilification" of every computing application. Mobile-first mentality saw application designers ruthlessly culling anything that caused even the slightest friction. The result: slipstreamed applications that do the least necessary to appeal to the broadest audience.

Sadly, the mobilification mindset even sometimes impacts desktop-first applications, what few remain. The attack vector of choice is Electron hosting a mobile-first web app with a middling desktop breakpoint.

Ultimately, the author captures the same phenomenon, but I personally think it traces more specifically to the rise of mobile devices.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#536

Post by bonniemuffin »

callalex wrote: post #500
whack wrote: post #478

This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the proposed change would be killed. Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is st…

A/B tests, as they are run by current software companies, are inherently flawed. I have never, in my entire career, ever heard of an A/B test that ran for a year, let alone 3-5 years. That’s where the true power of statistics comes alive, and nobody is financially incentivized to even consider that fact.

You're certainly correct that software companies should do a lot more year+ A/B tests. You can learn really interesting things from it that a shorter test won't capture. I know of this one: https://medium.com/@AnalyticsAtMeta/notifications-why-less-i...

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#537

Post by johntiger1 »

sneak wrote: post #451
lr4444lr wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met my wife on OkCupid. The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that's a real shame.

A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it wasn't just OKC's userbase, but it was the median of the whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated/more basic. When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today. Now that's just a median member of the general public, thanks…

The internet really took a turn for the worse once they let people like me on to it.

/s

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#538

Post by slashdev »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #510
lr4444lr wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fondly remember the one that showed men's rating of women approaching almost a perfect normal distribution, and then the men messaging mostly the hot ones anyway, whereas the women rated most men as ugly and then sloping downward toward very few as good looking, kind of like an exponential distribution, but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men…

This is basically the foundation of modern, online dating -- aka red pill. Roughly, the top 20% of men get 80% of the attention from women. (I'm pretty sure that figure comes from Tinder data.) It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is brutal in the real world. What do you do if you are average (or less) in looks and income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely existance.

You’re being downvoted, but that’s pretty well supported with data. In fact it’s more skewed than 20/80. Closer to 10/90.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#539

Post by lotsoweiners »

cole-k wrote: post #215
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.

I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user. OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed…

Those people sometimes exist in your own family too. My wife asked me to get rid of pi-hole because the sponsored links at the top of a Google results page no longer worked.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#540

Post by wk_end »

ivee wrote: post #524
whack wrote: post #478

This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the proposed change would be killed. Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is st…

I completely disagree. If you walked up to Marl, built trust with him, and asked him whether he wanted more meaningful content in his life (for a definition of meaningful which made sense to him) I think he would say yes. So it's not really about Marl's preferences but about the way those preferences are collected and Marl's (sadly mostly justified) lack of trust.

If you walked up to me, built trust with me, and asked me if I wanted more exercise in my life I’d say yes. And yet.
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