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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#771

Post by addcommitpush »

User23 wrote: post #575
sneak wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100. Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about. That’s also why u…

Chebyshev's inequality:

> for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean. Specifically, no more than 1/k^2 of the distribution's values can be k or more standard deviations away from the mean.

IQ is (if I recall correctly) normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15. So for a distance of 1.3... standard deviation (i.e. a distance of 20), you can't have more than 1/1.3...^2 = 56.25% of the population so far from the mean (below 80 or above 120), or 28.125% _above_ 120.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#772

Post by ericksoa »

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…

100%. When I play video games, I am Marl. Not going into menus or whatever to set things up, just using it to specifically not use my brain.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#773

Post by Kretinsky »

pif wrote: post #624
throwaway2037 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post reads like Eternal September[1], and I write that without any cynicism or snark. It makes good sense that text-heavy web apps would fall prey to image-heavy mobile apps. I still think there is potential for dating apps that target higher intellect users. Most of the dominant apps today are mobile-first, largely visual, and disappointing for both sides. One idea: Could speech-to-text technology help to allow…

> I still think there is potential for dating apps that target higher intellect users. Apps are not developed for the sake of the users. Apps are developed in order to make a profit. If your higher intellect users are not ready to pay good money for your product, it can only be one of two things: either they are cheap, or your product is not that great. Considering that there is no correlation between intellect and c…

It really depends on how you frame your app.

In the case of OkCupid, I did buy the premium offer, and used the possibilities (mainly see the answers to the quizz, and filter people) to make a profile that would show 99% match score with the kind of women I was looking for.

At some point, it got close to a game, which was very fun and satisfying as I could meet nice girls as a result ;-)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#774

Post by Spivak »

astrange wrote: post #462
ThinkBeat wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your scenario leaves a lot to be desired. Yeah two people only. Well Your scenario can easily be countered with the imaginary scenario that you have a town with 1 billion residents, far too little housing, no green space left due to trying to provide housing and the city only has natural resources for perhaps 300.000.000. Now 100.000.000 immigrants arrive. There is not enough food, water, hygiene. Hopefully, opening…

This is silly because you don't have to imagine any scenarios. Good economic models are based on empirical data, not on imagining things, and "immigrants don't increase unemployment or decrease wages" is just about the strongest empirical result there is. The reason being that someone moving closer to you increases demand for labor more than supply, and immigrants generally have complimentary (slightly different) ski…

And if you subscribe to MMT you should love immigrants because they're free "unemployed" people you didn't have to spend money raising so you have greater runway to print more money without inflation.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#776

Post by narag »

dredmorbius wrote: post #740
narag wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you said + progressing hypermetropia for the last 25 years. When mobile screens got half decent sizes, I already hated the medium. When people said that those text pages, around 2000, what was the name? WAP? were going to get everybody online, I was very skeptical. But of course, that was pre-iPhone.

I remember WAP, and had an early-phase smartphone with limited Web support (Palm Treo/Centro) which ... remains one of the better phones that I've had (hard keyboard among other features). You wouldn't want to read much on that, but as a quick on-the-go reference, particularly when travelling, it was handy. One of my daily drivers is a large (13.3") e-ink tablet. Reading on that is actually a pleasure, though it's le…

The eyesight I wouldn't complain at all. Until recently I didn't need glasses, except for reading. Hypermetropia is also called far-sightness for a reason. Worst period is when I only used glasses for the screen. Someone would come to interrupt and talk, I took the glasses off, then we were commenting on the screen contents, I put it on again, then back to talk and glasses off...

At home I use a 27'' screen with the regular glasses. I fear that if for a next job at some office they don't provide a similar one, the situation will repeat, now with regular glasses vs reading glasses :-m

I much prefer reading paginated media, and if at all possible, fixed-layout media (e.g., PDFs rather than ePub)

ePub didn't grow on me and I couldn't put my finger on why, I guess that's the reason.

About WAP phones, this was the one the company provided:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/comments/gefgsm...

Not bad, but not much I could do with it and they took away when I resigned.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#778

Post by nullc »

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…

If you use the internet from a phone you're pretty much forced to be Marl.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#779

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

mminer237 wrote: post #386
cole-k wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't say what percentage of Reddit users cared, but I can definitely say that the majority of Reddit participants—the people actually posting the content Reddit is trying to sell—have left. Reddit activity has dropped off a cliff: https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit

Wow. Seeing all the top posts / commenters etc all being deleted really drives it home.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#780

Post by cutemonster »

pbj1968 wrote: post #458
ryandrake wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remember Fark, they did the exact same thing. At some point in these sites' growth/success they always seem to have this irresistible compulsion to do The Grand Redesign which always, always shittifies itself. I wonder if there were any dissenters inside of Reddit who have actually been on the Internet in 2007, desperately warning the designers that they were "Farking" themselves with that redesign.

What killed Fark was the founder ran for office and we all found out what a terrible person he is. It’s still fun to visit that ghost town and look at the tombstones occasionally.

I think he looks like an interesting person: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Curtis

at least compared to most other local governor candidates?

The book summary was interesting too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Not_News,_It%27s_FARK

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