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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#821

Post by vmladenov »

kortex wrote: post #785
dredmorbius wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect smartphones affect this in two ways. One is that they put the Internet in everybody's hands, literally. The other, though, is that by virtue of the interface, both display (tiny) and input (shitty, to put it mildly), the effective IQ of those participating, regardless of whatever it was initially , is severely penalised. When I'm typing at a keyboard, I can look at the words I'm typing, or the source I'm ty…

Have you ever heard about the MessagEase keyboard? It's a pretty radical departure from the usual touch qwerty. Once you get the muscle memory down, you can even disable the letters completely. Right now I'm typing on a featureless black 3x3 grid (save for a purple dot in the center). It's a great conversation starter too, cause folks see me typing and are universally like "wtf how are you typing". I never thought of…

This sort of looks like the Japanese Kana keyboard on iOS

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#822

Post by broscillator »

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…

What does it even mean what a user "wants"? I want to eat 3 cinnamon rolls. I also want to be fitter. Everyone has contradictory wants, it is not a binary choice.

The point is whether the tools feed our best or worst intentions, and which are easier to exploit. To put the onus on the individual is skewed.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#823

Post by seoulmetro »

roel_v wrote: post #674
seoulmetro wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It's not specific to their height and obviously not specific to their race. The same way men on average prefer big boobs, women on average will prefer taller men. Both can't really be changed by the person but exist as attractiveness scores against a person. It matters to people who it matters to. Not many in the grand scheme and definitely not related to race.

I have literally not once in my entire life heard a woman in real life say 'oh he's so tall, that's so attractive'. That's only an internet thing. Or an outside-Western Europe thing, maybe.

Have you never heard "he has nice teeth and his arm pit doesn't stink" too? Because that's also another reason women find men attractive, they smell nice and have good teeth. Obviously we don't announce all our instincts.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#824

Post by seoulmetro »

astrange wrote: post #507
seoulmetro wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It's not specific to their height and obviously not specific to their race. The same way men on average prefer big boobs, women on average will prefer taller men. Both can't really be changed by the person but exist as attractiveness scores against a person. It matters to people who it matters to. Not many in the grand scheme and definitely not related to race.

> It's not specific to their height Of course it is because it's relative to how tall they are. But taller women already don't expect you to tower over them, because that's hard to find, so it's ok if you don't. > and obviously not specific to their race. It is within a specific ethnicity and generation. If you're in a country where the men in a specific age are short because food was scarce 2-3 decades ago, they're…

No it's not. There is always a taller person and shorter people.

Thinking someone thinks a certain way based on their height is weird and wrong.

You are reading way too far into this and your take is incredibly wrong, not to mention racist.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#825

Post by astrange »

seoulmetro wrote: post #824
astrange wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not specific to their height Of course it is because it's relative to how tall they are. But taller women already don't expect you to tower over them, because that's hard to find, so it's ok if you don't. > and obviously not specific to their race. It is within a specific ethnicity and generation. If you're in a country where the men in a specific age are short because food was scarce 2-3 decades ago, they're…

No it's not. There is always a taller person and shorter people. Thinking someone thinks a certain way based on their height is weird and wrong. You are reading way too far into this and your take is incredibly wrong, not to mention racist.

"No woman will ever like you unless you're 6'" is the take that's reading way too far into dating.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#826

Post by tacitusarc »

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…

Seems like the law of small numbers to me.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#827

Post by seoulmetro »

astrange wrote: post #825
seoulmetro wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. There is always a taller person and shorter people. Thinking someone thinks a certain way based on their height is weird and wrong. You are reading way too far into this and your take is incredibly wrong, not to mention racist.

"No woman will ever like you unless you're 6'" is the take that's reading way too far into dating.

Yes, it's also bad like yours.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#828

Post by zorrolovsky »

boxed wrote: post #691
kromem wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel a twinge of guilt whenever I see things about how OKC got crappy. Not that long before the acquisition a certain jackass brought in as a consultant ( ahem ) happened to point to OkC as the leading competitor against the acquiring company's properties specifically for mobile. Sorry everyone... If it makes it any better, I've had to use the product since then too, and suffered alongside all the rest of you.

If match didn't understand this already they were pretty stupid. I think the blame lies 100% on the people at OKC who sold out.

I wouldn't blame the people who sold out. That team created a strong and delightful product. To me, blame goes to the people who took over and started to make bad decisions.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#829

Post by dakial1 »

I think it is more the question of sites/apps being more layered to tackle different segments.

Broadly one segment is the superficial, reptilian brain, one, which are the vast majority of the population. They will crave quick, non-complex, interactions, in order to get quick and easy rewards (dopamine).

The other would be neocortex segment, much smaller base, that would actually seek seek more rational, or deeply emotional, long term results that they see as more fulfilling in the long run.

They are obviously not all different people, as we all have both brains, but we always start our experiences with the reptilian brain and only some of us move towards the neocortex phase when experiencing things.

I think if more services and products took that into consideration, they would have a strategy to move those people along this journey and would have both the reptilian base so needed for growth, but also the neocortex folks needed for long-lasting client relationship.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#830

Post by wiremine »

pc86 wrote: post #79
wiremine wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Online dating sites have gotten worse because the Match Group monopolizes them. There's hardly any competition. I recently helped a group look at launching a dating app over a six month period. Here are a few take aways: 1. Nobody really likes the dating app experience. Most users have a few dating apps installed at any given time. 2. Therefore, it's relatively easy to break into the market. You start with a single…

Facebook Dating has been around for years, and I've only heard it spoken of in the wild once, with derision.

100% agree. That was my point saying "_if_ they really wanted to own it."
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