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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#551

Post by pickingdinner »

You need to optimize the product for the best scenarios, and guide everyone towards those scenarios.

What happened to OKCupid is typical. Founders envision the best scenarios for their users, and build a business around that product. User satisfaction drives their success.

Corporations aren't really good at that. So they need someone to override mindless acts of profiteering in favor of a better future. Someone with a vision, but also the power to enforce it. But they also have to be right.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#552

Post by mikpanko »

I worked on and with growth teams in established tech companies for a while (including Google) and am running an early stage startup right now and my experience is very different.

Mature products often focus on user retention and resurrection even more than attracting new users. Even VCs of early stage startups constantly keep asking about retention and stickiness as better metrics than new users.

As I am now working on a brand new product [1], I talk daily to potential and early users and observe the short attention spans all the time. These are smart people with college degrees. But the ever increasing amounts of information hitting every person on a daily basis leads to shorter and shorter attention spans of everybody, not just a “marginal” user. If anything, first users provide less attention to new products than later users for well-established brands.

[1] https://motifanalytics.com

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#553

Post by wbobeirne »

oxfordmale wrote: post #446
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…

Almost all internet algorithms seem to converge around maximising time spend on the app in question. A dating website simply doesn't want to be too effective, as you would lose two customers every successful match. Similar to the approach used in slot machines, you want to give the illusion of winning, but I'm reality only provide moderately succesful matches rather than perfect ones. Of course there is a human eleme…

I always push back on this argument, because it came up a lot. As someone higher up at the company once put it, if people are sufficiently convinced that you can find them what they're looking for in a dating app, there's almost no amount of money they wouldn't spend. People churn after not getting what they want out of an app. And relationships end, and people will return to apps they felt they had success with. Word of mouth successes were the ultimate marketing tool, OkCupid didn't have really any ad spend for the first year or two I was there (and apparently the hadn't in the years past.)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#554

Post by mikpanko »

OkCupid’s problem wasn’t pursuing the “marginal” user but rather not being able to capture the “mainstream” user and staying niche, while Tinder was the first dating app to bridge the divide. Tinder did it by making the experience less awkward and more casual, similar to how most people start flirting and evaluating each other offline: by looks and vibes. As a result more people were on the app and there was more choice, which sealed the dominance.

I tried OkCupid for several months in 2013 without much success. Then I tried Tinder for a few months the same year and met my wife. Very different experience from the author of the article.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#555

Post by sirspacey »

titzer wrote: post #196
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…

> Alternatively and more seriously, I do hope to see markets emerge that target power users. I'm not optimistic though. What's crazy to me is that 25+ million people on this Earth can program, and how many of them get to decide the UIs that everyone else uses? I myself, suck at UI programming. But that's because UI programming is labyrinthine, arcane, and generally requires becoming an expert in a number of extremely…

Try no/low code tools like WeWeb or Glide. Still more of a design/dev toolkit, but a leap closer.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#556

Post by makeitdouble »

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.

I've seen one A/B test in the wild run for a full year.

It was on a small part (test of a product name + description across the site), and the most interesting aspect was that it only made a small but measureable difference. Because of that there was no strong incentive to delete the AB test (not much harm to the user) nor make the B side permanent (too low of an effect).

In that respect, AB Tests that end early aren't a bad thing IMO: either there's a clear improvement or it's really bad, and the choice is obvious enough to not have to wait much longer.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#557

Post by tspike »

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.

Isn’t the parent comment saying the opposite of this? That despite rating most men as ugly, it didn’t affect their messaging behavior nearly as much?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#558

Post by DarknessFalls »

crazygringo wrote: post #464
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.

Yup. It basically started as a dating site by Brooklyn grad students, for Brooklyn grad students. Grad students love writing essays. But if you want to expand, you have to face the fact that most people aren't grad students and don't love writing (or reading) essays. The trajectory to "just another dating app" was inevitable.

I think there was a happy medium somewhere along the way. The minimum word counts on the bios were just high enough to filter people that had no sincerity for the approach. You had to pantomime something of yourself to have a presence. What exists now is just a gallery of faces that could be the result of stable diffusion algorithms.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#559

Post by webninja »

genewitch wrote: post #434
carabiner wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you're in luck! OKCupid costs ~$44 a month, and you can add on "read receipts" for about $0.50 each, superboosts for $1-$3 each, the privacy (hidden) profile for $10/month. with some creativity you can have 0 real matches for ~$100!

The matches are real. It’s just that you have to get on an airplane and fly to a new country to meet them. I’ve met my matches in person. One of the girls paid for almost everything too.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#560

Post by a-dub »

carabiner wrote: post #517
crazygringo wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It basically started as a dating site by Brooklyn grad students, for Brooklyn grad students. Grad students love writing essays. But if you want to expand, you have to face the fact that most people aren't grad students and don't love writing (or reading) essays. The trajectory to "just another dating app" was inevitable.

Well they started off in Boston and were MIT/Harvard grad students. And the backend was a DARPA project. So not really Brooklyn at heart, though some millennial New Yorkers pretended it was. They even had a personality trait for how much a user reminded them of Harvard girls. Like many "only in New York!" things it was really something that had mass appeal and gave a sense of quirkiness that was actually widespread i…

> And the backend was a DARPA project.

the similarity/CF stuff? what was the DARPA project? other than that it seemed a rather ordinary consumer webapp?

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