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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#721

Post by ChefboyOG »

zmmmmm wrote: post #370
intended wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit ads sadly didnt work well. They really tried all sorts of things. I feel that they may have been a media firm, and not a platform. When Victoria conducted AMAs, Reddit was a burgeoning cultural force. Maybe if they had gone that route they would be their “ideal” state. However that leads to no billionaire club IPO/Exit.

it's an interesting counter narrative then to the currently in vogue idea that you can stop individual ad targeting and instead target people based on their high level interests. Reddit is like a distillation of that, the logical end point of it ... if that is a dead end, Google is in for a rough time with the pathway they are pursuing with Chrome.

My experience with Reddit ads (years ago now) wasn't that subreddit-level targeting was bad—there's a reason sponsored content is such a big marketing channel, after all—but rather that the ads platform just never worked very well.

And by "never worked very well," I don't just mean "We ran ads without good results." The whole experience was just sort of confusing and underwhelming, especially when compared to other channels like FB or Google. We suspected that the majority of our clicks were bots, based on our own analytics. The targeting always felt unreliable. Support interactions were weird. In general, the platform always just felt kind of... janky.

Don't know if that's still the case now, but at least as of a year or so ago, I knew a lot of people working in digital marketing who felt the same about the platform.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#722

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #491
frereubu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn’t heard that about Singer’s philosophy (unsurprisingly as I’ve read very little of his work). It’s interesting for me in that it lines up with Kahnemann & Tversky’s “losses loom larger than gains” heuristic in psychology.

Singer publishes his book, "The Life You Can Save" for free -- it was revised for the 10th anniversary. It is available in various formats, including an audio book. It is a short, easy read. It is also one of the most impactful books I've ever read. https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/ Along the header there is an item "free book" if you want to get the book. In short, there are a few theses in the book that combine in…

I don't know who to be more angry at: the idiots who think that Sam Bankman-Fried is effective altruism rather than the version of it above, or SBF.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#723

Post by yencabulator »

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…

OKC even early on had lots of new users that didn't necessarily fit well in the site culture (/formed different subcultures). Those people had more visually-oriented profiles, focused less on funny writing, would largely not use the quizzes, and if they did they'd answer quizzes very differently from you, and you'd still get your great >90% match dates filtering them out, and it didn't really matter! The filter worked!

(I found my literal 99% match before OKCupid went too wrong, so I don't really know how it fell. I'm assuming overt monetization poisoned the well.)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#725

Post by trelane »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #718
johntiger1 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

to paraphrase a director: "any club that would let me be in it is a club that I probably shouldn't be in"

It's never gauche to quote Marx.[1] Especially Groucho. He wasn't a director, though, as far as I can tell.[2]

[1] https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000050/quotes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#726

Post by jimbokun »

opsimist wrote: post #606
lovich wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that just Eternal September? At least in the internet

Can we reverse Eternal Eptember? Can we create IQnet just for nerds?

Has anyone invented a captcha that filters for high IQ humans?

Of course then it would be mostly bots as it would probably be trivial for modern LLMs to solve.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#727

Post by glorioushubris »

dghughes wrote: post #456
geraldwhen wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also met my wife on okcupid. I wonder how many of us their are.

I'd be curious if you're all over 6' tall. I never had any luck on OKCupid.

I met my wife on OKCupid (back when it was, according to this article, good). I'm 5'6".

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#728

Post by zbentley »

spott wrote: post #419
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.

This is a key point. If you look at people, each of them have multiple different “personas” throughout the day/week/etc.[0] Some of them, sometimes, are builders or content creators. Some of them, sometimes, are conscientious consumers, looking to stretch their understanding or themselves and think hard about something that they are consuming. But all of them, sometimes, are Marl. There will always be a way to find m…

Absolutely. I think there are two business behaviors that underly this phenomenon: growth culture and fear of being outcompeted.

The culture of growth-at-all-costs has been condemned plenty in other threads here, I won't restate how/why. It's the problem that brings about, for example, "your A/B testing gradient descent" as the gravitational pull towards enshittification: the idea that robotically optimizing for greater growth/income/engagement is the right thing for a business to do. This ignores the huge range of ethical, profitable businesses that inhabit the space in the size/growth spectrum between "lifestyle boutique that pays the employees' bills and not much more" and "virally growing global superphenomenon". The presumption that those two extremes are the only inevitable outcomes for a business is poison. Unfortunately, sustainably inhabiting that middle ground requires a resistance to extreme greed on the part of a business's leadership/leadership culture--and again, the presence of some greed is just fine in non-hypergrowth businesses! There are loyal, lucrative, and sizable markets for carefully targeted products whose focus doesn't drift; "niche" is not a pejorative, and many niches are wide enough to be worth absolute shitloads of money! Unfortunately, continually resisting the extremity of greed is not something humans are good at.

There's also the fear of outcompetition: the idea that a Marl-serving competitor will grow so large that they extinguish your non-Marl-focused business. That's sometimes true, but not inevitably so--and enduring the risk of that "sometimes" is one of the grit-your-teeth-and-stick-to-your-ethics behaviors that distinguishes beloved minority members of a market from self-immolating enshittification chasers. Remember, Apple was a beloved minority player in personal computing, staying (and generally performing well) within a luxury/loyalist niche, for more than a decade. Enduring risk in the face of the fear of outcompetition does require bravery from leaders, but can yield benefits both in the form of profits/loyalty and--rarely--by converting Marls into non-Marls by showing an example of how much better things can be.

Short version is a cold take: the intersection of hypergrowth-legend-induced greed and outcompetition fear, applied across large groups of people with communication impedance, leads to crappy outcomes. As usual.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#729

Post by robotresearcher »

rglullis wrote: post #601
robotresearcher wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In apps: Ten Percent Happier and Headspace? In meatspace: Nike, Adidas?

Sport gear companies? Just selling you a lifestyle and an identity. Meditation apps feel more like someone exploiting a fad than some with an actual interest in your wellbeing.

I dunno, I think that might be overly cynical. You might as well complain that a brain surgeon only removes tumors because they get money for it.

Does Nike want me to run and jump less, to participate in sports less, to work out less often? No, they run expensive ad campaigns encouraging me to make exercise a regular part of my life. To sell apparel, yes, but they aren't telling me to eat more cheeseburgers or drink more booze like other corporations.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#730

Post by jimbokun »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #716
opsimist wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we use separate root DNS server as technical barrier to entry? Or NNTP protocol. Or client side SSL certificate, which must be won in a complex game. There are plenty of options to separate smart people from regular crowd. IMHO, a separate DNS server, which unlocks alternative Internet, is the easiest way to move away from regular people, because it's a bit complicated to switch DNS on a mobile device.

Someone will quickly monetize the idiots with a simple ad-ridden subscription based app that "Unlocks the Alternet!"

I doubt the non-nerds will want to join.
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