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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#811

Post by butterNaN »

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…

IQ is a bad measure of the thing you're trying to quantificate here

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#812

Post by butterNaN »

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…

I agree with your overall thesis. Just a nit, "Enshittification" is not what you describe, at least how the original author of the term intended: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#813

Post by GuB-42 »

danielheath wrote: post #634
opsimist wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it’s called Gemini

I don't think Gemini is good for dating or anything interactive.

It is designed to serve text documents with links and not much more. That it is a poor choice for anything else is a feature, not a bug.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#814

Post by presentation »

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…

Or you choose a niche that is willing to pay for value. If engagement is a meaningful metric for a business, that’s a red flag. This is why I don’t work on general purpose consumer apps and instead work on utility B2B products, because your job becomes to provide value to a business, not marginal entertainment to Marl.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#815

Post by gmd63 »

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…

Marl behavior does not convey Marl's actual preferences, and this is where A/B testing zombies with no artistic instinct or creative bone in their body sacrifice the gift of their influence on the world.

To design for humanity, you need to look deeper into what Marl wants without relying on Marl to tell you what that is, because he is incapable of expressing it with words or actions.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#816

Post by strgcmc »

mlyle wrote: post #701
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally you'll have a quarterly holdout to measure total impacts but I agree that yearly would be better.

But even this doesn't work: if you are continually making choices that erode your users' trust in you, there will eventually be an impact. It happens outside of the experiment (e.g. communications between users, general sliding changes in sentiment, etc). And you can't just spot in the time series whether you're going too far or not.

Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement, through methodologies internally called HVA/DSI and DSE (to name just a couple).

- High Value Action / Downstream Impact == using a "twins" comparison, estimate the 12-month impact of a customer taking a particular action (e.g. sign up for Prime, watch their first Prime Video, etc.), compared to one who doesn't. HVAs are basically those "A's" which turn out to have a high numeric DSI value.

- Downstream Expectation == similar but very different - instead of quantifying the impact of a single action, DSE tries to estimate the combined downstream causal impact of a user taking an initial action... there's a sophisticated methodology there that tries to strip away confounding factors like "rich people who would've shopped more anyways, are also naturally more likely to sign up for Prime", because they truly want to measure the causal benefit of Prime itself, separate from the fact that richer customers generally spend more no matter what

These are both long-term methodologies, that were explicitly designed in response to the problems of: short term experiments that didn't capture long-term negative effects, and different parts of Amazon having vastly different methodologies for measuring business impact (e.g. page views vs search impressions vs downloads vs orders vs whatever... no, everyone should optimize for the same customer level financial metric which is a flavor of growth-adjusted composite contribution profit (GCCP) that's partly derived from DSE)

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#817

Post by spott »

butterNaN wrote: post #812
spott wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with your overall thesis. Just a nit, "Enshittification" is not what you describe, at least how the original author of the term intended: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Thanks, I misremembered.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#818

Post by mlyle »

strgcmc wrote: post #816
mlyle wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even this doesn't work: if you are continually making choices that erode your users' trust in you, there will eventually be an impact. It happens outside of the experiment (e.g. communications between users, general sliding changes in sentiment, etc). And you can't just spot in the time series whether you're going too far or not.

Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement, through methodologies internally called HVA/DSI and DSE (to name just a couple). - High Value Action / Downstream Impact == using a "twins" comparison, estimate the 12-month impact of a customer taking a particular action (e.g. sign up for Prime, watch their first Prime Video, etc.), compared to one who doesn't. HVAs are ba…

> Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement

It's funny-- Amazon is the exact case I'm thinking of. I went from spending high five figures to a few hundred, and I'm seeking to eliminate that. The exact impact of these kinds of data-driven management practices has lead me to expending a whole lot of work to figure out how to give Costco, Target, and Walmart my business instead.

My complaints:

- Cutting of customer service. I didn't use customer service often, but it was always exemplary There's something wrong with my account where if I pay with points from my Amazon Visa for a book, that the book gets yoinked away out of my account a couple of days later with a "payment failed" message. The points are still deducted. I spent a few hours with customer support twice on this issue, and each time the specific book that this happened to was fixed, but the problem remains. It's clearly a backend problem, but Amazon thinks it's a better move to keep a high value customer on hold while people not empowered to fix anything futz around.

- I (believe that I) was briefly in an experiment with an alternate "buy it now" order flow that would pretty reliably charge me for 2 of whatever item I was seeking to buy. Support wasn't helpful. I have video.

- Overall devolution of the retail marketplace into a flea market full of counterfeit, dubious goods.

- Aggressive attempts to upsell me back into the Prime ecosystem (e.g. the whole "Iliad flow" thing).

I'm sure all of these business decisions and changes looked great on initial measurements, but they're traps later. Worse, they turn people like me into people that were formerly Amazon evangelists to people who work to help friends use other marketplaces.

Even a year isn't sufficient time: none of these things pissed me off within a year of the change. And they're pretty difficult to capture, because they're hopelessly confounded with other changes in the market and consumer sentiment and Amazon doesn't roll things out slowly enough have a truly different contingent experiencing a different business.

Heck, maybe even all the interactions with me look positive on your metrics, depending on how you weigh downstream effects in your model: a previously valuable customer has "payment problems", begins consuming excessive support resources, then leaves.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#819

Post by Capricorn2481 »

beefman wrote: post #439
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.

There are stupid people. A large percentage of the population never regularly used PCs because keyboards and mice are too abstract. They only began regularly computing once they could touch things with their fingers. Today, Google search has more fuzzing and returns more Q&A results on mobile. A large percentage never used e-mail because e-mail addresses are too abstract. They only began using "social media" when the…

> 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.

Karma on hackernews seems like a pretty arbitrary metric for intelligence

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#820

Post by Capricorn2481 »

sirspacey wrote: post #497
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.

Yes and no 98% of Spotify users never take any action other than “press play” on a radio station 2% take some kind of agency (create a playlist, like a song) A vanishingly small amount create personal or public curated playlists Yes, that very small amount may also listen passively sometimes, but the difference matters. Imagine if Spotify was just a radio station.

Well this just isn't true
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