[HN Gopher] The Tyranny of the Marginal User
___________________________________________________________________
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
Author : ivee
Score : 749 points
Date : 2023-09-14 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nothinghuman.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nothinghuman.substack.com)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I think it's unnecessarily unkind to Marl.
|
| The reality is, your core user base is always your easy-to-get
| captive market that intrinsically want what you do. A corollary
| of that is that gradient towards more users is always going to be
| eating into people more at the fringe or even totally outside the
| core intent of your product or service. So intrinsically,
| optimising for them is _very_ unlikely to be optimising for your
| core users.
|
| We can believe a fairy tale where we tell ourselves that we can
| optimise for new users while still maintaining equal service for
| existing users, but it's really just a fairy tale - invariably
| these things end up in competition with each other.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Is this related to the phenomenon where, as the smart phone
| market got _larger_ the diversity of options decreased? Naively,
| I would have assumed the opposite. Seems to be similar in lots of
| large hardware markets where I would expect there to be a large
| enough total customer base to justify serving at least a few
| groups with niche interests, but it often seems like that doesn
| 't happen and you get a very small number of very similar
| monolithic offerings.
| ivee wrote:
| yeah this is strange and I don't fully understand it. perhaps
| the options exist and we just haven't heard of them (like
| there's a chrome extension or an OSS library that solves every
| conceivable problem)? Or that the nature of the modern
| smartphone software stack encourages too much bundling of
| functionality?
| ghaff wrote:
| My theory would be that as the market grows and matures and the
| mainstream offerings are refined, niche offerings are
| marginalized. Most people probably adapt to the mainstream even
| if they'd really prefer a somewhat smaller laptop for traveling
| given the 13" one is pretty light and refined. Some people will
| buy whatever phone is smallest but most won't.
| unoti wrote:
| The article says:
|
| > Google Search itself, has decayed to the point of being
| unusable for complicated queries. Reddit and Craigslist remain
| incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software
| remains frozen in time
|
| I was contemplating the truth of this, and thinking about how
| much of the internet's wealth of useful content gets overshadowed
| by nonsense and UI antipatterns. It was right at this moment that
| I continued reading and scrolled down and the stuff I was trying
| to read got greyed out and replaced by one of those annoying
| popups about something or other before I could finish reading the
| article. Oh the irony...
| iamwil wrote:
| This reminds me of the post on Product Market Fit the other day.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490300
|
| That PMF is never done, and you are just chipping away at more
| and more market segments. There's no negative feedback for people
| to think that they're done with a market and they're starting to
| squeeze blood from rocks.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd arrived at a similar conceptualisation which I call "The
| Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User":
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://old.redd...>
|
| In terms of impacts on software / application complexity,
| capability, and suitability to the needs and interests of
| advanced users, I feel somewhat similarly. I do take exception
| however with the notion that serving the needs of the much larger
| set people with less-advanced skills or interests is
| _necessarily_ bad. In general I _do_ support the effort of
| expanding access to computers and digital technologies.
|
| A large part of the degredation Vendrov describes is less an
| element of the people _using_ these tools as it is the financial
| and economic incentives of the entities _providing_ them,
| encapsulated in Cory Doctorow 's ever-more-widely-known term
| _enshittification_. That 's driven by the dynamics of winner-
| take-all monopolies, advertising, surveillance capitalism, and
| the inherent challenges of monetising information goods.
|
| What I _would_ very much like to see, though, is a world in which
| _both_ general and advanced-skills access are available and
| supported. A general characteristic and problem of media and
| information goods, going back to the advent of printing, is that
| _popular_ tends to equate to _degraded quality_. This shows up in
| other products and services as well, though I 'd argue it's most
| pernicious with information and media.
| ivee wrote:
| great essay! saving people a click:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230606224134/https://old.reddi...
| michaelteter wrote:
| I have my share of OKC stories, and indeed the app of today is
| vastly inferior than the app of years past.
|
| What exists of OKC now is a "free" system which is utterly
| useless. You simply must pay to do anything that might result in
| a date.
|
| This problem isn't the marginal user. The problem is the ever-
| growing marketing push to dangle "FREE" in front of people to
| lure them in, when of course there is cost later. In the case of
| OKC, the cost is your time at first. Then eventually you may pay
| (what is frankly an exhorbitant rate per month) just to be able
| to communicate with anyone.
|
| Back to the point though. Think of all the garbage free apps for
| phones. Think of all the absurd games they play to trick or goad
| you into paying. That whole process IS the experience moreso than
| whatever the theoretical purpose of the app was. Instead of the
| old concept of "here's what we offer, and here's what it costs to
| get", we have this current state of the world.
|
| There is a solution to all this: sell your product from day one.
| Do the traditional show and tell marketing to illustrate your
| product's value so you might gain customers. This is far better
| than the (VC?) approach of gathering users at a big loss and then
| figuring out how to monetize them. As we know, some of the
| monetization methods are evil...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over
| time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in
| tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation
| and Progress, is at work here?"
|
| I once asked someone this question and he replied with a single
| word. "Greed", he said.
|
| I wanted the opinion of someone who was not biased, i.e., who did
| not believe, AKAIK, that software was getting worse (from the
| user perspective).
|
| This person was longtime shareholder in one of the companies that
| engages in what's being described here and their success has been
| his success.
|
| If anything, he should be biased in favour of "modern" software
| not against it.
| nine_k wrote:
| The software in question only gets worse for you, the audience,
| not the people running it. For them, it gets better as it
| brings in more profits.
|
| (Another reason why free software is essential.)
| epivosism wrote:
| Could it be something simple, like how as companies grow, the
| average company knowledge about the product decreases?
|
| Both at IC and exec level; the new people coming in are more
| likely to just be good general operators. Plus the CEO and
| leadership gets tired or retire.
| tikkun wrote:
| Related concept: Enshittification (I've seen this mentioned on
| HN)
|
| A company starts out focused on building a great product.
|
| Then, they reach product-market fit.
|
| Then, they raise money.
|
| Now, the best way for them to grow is to go upmarket. Sell to
| enterprises.
|
| Unfortunately, then the resources of the company are directed to
| features that enterprises buyers care about, because that's the
| best way for the company to make more money.
|
| The actual product stagnates.
|
| (This does leave an opportunity for bootstrapped founders to come
| in and swim in the "wake" of B2B startups that built a great
| product, then let their product stagnate while they went
| upmarket. Eventually some of those bootstrappers might choose to
| get bigger and move upmarket themselves, and then the opportunity
| opens up again for new bootstrappers. Or the bootstrapper can
| remain niche, focused on winning users who choose the best
| product and who don't require enterprise features, which is a
| smaller market but still can be quite profitable and would be a
| much smaller and simpler to run business.)
|
| Examples: Airtable (it's a great product, I still love it, but it
| hasn't really improved for me as an end user since about 2016),
| Notion, Docusign (maybe it wasn't ever a great product, I'm not
| sure, but it sure hasn't improved for me as a user).
|
| Instead of going from "good to great" it unfortunately seems like
| many startups go from "great to good"
| [deleted]
| golergka wrote:
| If you're making a product for the billions, your average user
| will inevitably have IQ of less than 100. And moreover, you can
| get much stickier users if you optimise for 80 IQ.
| koch wrote:
| > Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable
| precisely because their software remains frozen in time
|
| Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of
| content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More
| confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the
| marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.
| cole-k wrote:
| 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 that the majority of them
| don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as
| invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't
| personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I
| see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have
| great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they _have
| to exist_ for ads to generate any revenue.
|
| I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use
| Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care
| about different things.
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Geeze, I didn't realise there was such a precipitous drop -
| I wonder how bad it is for smaller subs.
| cole-k wrote:
| Wow, I figured from hearsay that it was unchanged. Thanks
| for letting me know. I admit to being wrong about most
| people not caring, at least judging from the numbers you
| gave.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I think Reddit is a bit different. They're not a company that
| is finding that optimizing metrics leads to targeting Marl (as
| per article). They're a company that decided that the optimal
| way forward is to intentionally push out their former users and
| replace them with as much Marl as possible.
|
| And I think that makes sense. The original Reddit is full of
| technical people with ad blockers, weird hobbies, weird
| communities, and various undesirables. Keeping this herd of
| cats happy is extremely tricky, selling anything to them is
| extremely difficult, and there's all sorts of complex drama
| that needs managing.
|
| So it seems that Reddit decided that to make the site more
| profitable, manageable and attractive to advertisers, all this
| weirdness needs to be pushed out over time. Drive out the
| technical users and weird unprofitable communities, and replace
| with as much mindless scrolling as possible.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Reddit seems to have easy sales. Specific subreddits can be
| targeted with specific ads really easily. So it should be
| easy to sell things there and easy to keep the users happy.
| jacobn wrote:
| I've tried buying reddit ads. Maybe I was selling the wrong
| thing, or my ads sucked or whatever, but boy those ads
| didn't just not perform, they were just completely useless.
| intended wrote:
| 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.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| 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.
| wmichelin wrote:
| Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the
| weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have
| both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Yeah, but what's the point of hosting them? Like what do
| you sell on r/dragonsfuckingcars? (no, I'm not joking)
|
| And what does the existence of such a place at all mean to
| a prospective advertiser? Imagine a viral picture of your
| ad next to one of those posts.
|
| But okay, let's ignore porn. How about subreddits that deal
| with subjects like depression, gender issues, politics,
| etc? What do you sell to those? Maybe a book or two but
| probably not very much. And they're also ripe for
| "hilarious" ad/content mismatches.
|
| It seems to me that from the advertising point of view,
| Reddit would be a lot more desirable to advertise on if it
| was nothing but endless cute cat pictures.
| username332211 wrote:
| How did advertisers become such puritans? Playboy
| magazine carried ads for normal products just fine. Every
| newspaper deals with "depression, gender issues,
| politics" and they somehow survived trough most of their
| history on advertising revenue.
|
| Surely there should be marketers that see "Imagine a
| viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts." and
| realize that everything apart from "Imagine a viral
| picture of your ad" is often irrelevant.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| They don't need to monetize every sub. Most subscribers
| to dragonsfuckingcars probably sub to several other subs
| that can be monetized. Keeping all the weird niche stuff
| around keeps users scrolling longer. Just keep them off
| /r/all.
| hiidrew wrote:
| Other Reddit enshittification is their pushiness to use the
| mobile app. Great UX case study here, this guy makes them very
| entertaining - https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit
|
| Also related, Cory Doctorow's essay on this where he labeled it
| 'enshittification' -
| https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| Also the UI redesign they pushed through and bad search that
| precipitated the flourishing of third-party clients.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the
| API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other
| individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem -
| Reddit is social media that _succeeded_.
|
| This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that
| succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit.
|
| It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses
| to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses,
| advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising
| revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have
| stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as
| personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad
| publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want
| more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you
| need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead
| appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original
| intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every
| feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader
| appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content.
| The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots
| and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal
| (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to
| post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute,
| funny, infuriating, etc.
|
| So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just
| inevitable. It will _always_ happen to social media if it
| grows.
|
| You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will
| _never_ grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social
| media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-
| between inevitably slides towards one or the other.
| dimal wrote:
| It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified.
| It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then
| they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the
| driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs
| need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook --
| the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding,
| maybe they could have found a different path.
| intended wrote:
| They were a YC team. They were always on VC funding - and
| they were not exactly a tale of profit and success.
|
| Essentially, Reddit always had to IPO.
| Iulioh wrote:
| The problem was the pandemic expansion.
|
| See how many people worked at reddit in 2021 and in 2022.
|
| It went from something like 500 to 2000
|
| And even if, the CEO said that reddit was never
| profitable and that's or bullshit or a clear sign of how
| badly can a company be managed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| bdcs wrote:
| The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics'
| The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of
| utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10
| happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10 _N people
| with 1.1 happiness, or 100_ N people with 0.111 happiness, until
| you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute
| profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the marginal
| user.
|
| Perhaps the resolutions to the Repugnant Conclusion (Section 2,
| "Eight Ways of Dealing with the Repugnant Conclusion") can also
| be applied to the tyranny of the marginal user. Though to be
| honest, I find none of the resolutions wholly compelling.
|
| [0]
| https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/repugnan...
| didibus wrote:
| I really don't see the issue with your happiness split. You
| have 10 people, and they're are equally unhappy.
|
| This is perfect, because now they are all equally incentivized
| to do something about it. They're motivated to work together
| and collaborate for change.
|
| If you do any other split where some people will be very happy
| and others very unhappy, you've now created certain category of
| people who are incentivized to maintain the current system and
| repress any desire for change from the unhappy people.
| feoren wrote:
| That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its
| phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a
| poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a
| situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism.
|
| First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more
| people, but imagining them all with the same amount of
| suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work
| all day and have barely any source of happiness. But if you can
| magically divide up some total amount of happiness, why not the
| same with suffering? This is the entire source of the word
| "repugnant", because it sounds like you get infinite suffering
| with finite happiness. That _does not follow_ from _anything_
| utilitarianism stipulates; you 've simply created an awful
| world and falsely called it utilitarianism. Try to imagine all
| these people living a nearly _completely neutral_ life, erring
| a bit on the happier side, and it suddenly doesn 't sound so
| bad.
|
| Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that people can create
| happiness for others. What fixed finite "happiness" resource
| are we divvying up here? Surely a world with 10 billion people
| has more great works of art for _all_ to enjoy than a world
| with 10 people, not to mention far less loneliness. It 's crazy
| to think the total amount of happiness to distribute is
| independent of the world population.
|
| There are many more reasonable objections to even the
| _existence_ of that so-called "conclusion" without even
| starting on the many ways of dealing with it.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Your post reminds me of xenophobes who lament the arrival of
| immigrants. The immigrants are taking their jobs they are
| saying. Such a viewpoint can be countered with the imaginary
| scenario where you live in a country with only 2 people. How
| well are they doing? There are no stores to buy goodies from
| because who would create such a store for just 2 people?
| Perhaps an immigrant, could open a deli!
|
| When there are more immigrants who are allowed to work, the
| immigrants will make some money for themselves. What do they
| do with that money? They spend it, which grows the economy.
| Our economy, not some other country's economy.
|
| If you were the only living person on this planet you would
| be in trouble. Thank God for other people being there too.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > What do they do with that money? They spend it, which
| grows the economy. Our economy, not some other country's
| economy.
|
| I'm going to guess you've never spoken to anyone who is
| sending money back to their family in their original
| country with every paycheck.
|
| Not really the point of this conversation I guess but...
| yeah. It does happen more than you probably think. To the
| point where malls in my area have kiosks for wiring money
| to other countries for cheap.
| Sai_ wrote:
| Wouldn't they be sending left-over money ie, money after
| spending locally, back to their home country?
|
| I can't imagine a lot of people out there who send all
| their money back home without spending some of it locally
| for self sustenance.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| 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 delis will solve
| the issue.
|
| Yes, it is absurd. But no more so than a world of 2.
|
| History though does prove your theory right. When proud and
| brave Europeans immigrated to what would become the United
| States.
|
| "When they arrive there are no stores to buy goodies from
| because who would create such a store for just 2 people?
| Perhaps an immigrant, could open a deli!""
|
| Thankfully for the native people's immigrants came in to
| create a consumer capitalist culture.
|
| Can you imagine the utter horror if they native peoples
| were allowed to keep their versions of society going and
| develop it the way they wanted. They sure were blessed by
| the immigrants. A lot the natives' peoples also became
| xenophobes and we sure now what bastards' xenophobes are.
| julianeon wrote:
| Here's a simpler way to phrase the problem.
|
| The current world population is about 8 billion.
|
| By this argument, and also by your argument, it should
| actually be 999 billion. Or a number even higher than that.
|
| The conclusion boils down to:
|
| 1. Find maximum population number earth can support.
|
| 2. Hit that number.
|
| I do think that, when put this way, it seems simplistic.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Here's an even simpler way to phrase the problem.
|
| The current world population is about 8 billion.
|
| By my argument it should be 2 billion.
|
| Your argument is therefore rather foolish.
| curiousllama wrote:
| To be fair, boiling something down to a simple statement
| does indeed tend to produce simplistic statements
| [deleted]
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, more generally, I'm reminded of David Chapman's essay,
| "No Cosmic Meaning" [1]. Thought experiments are a good way
| to depress yourself if you take them seriously.
|
| But I think that utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat
| related problem in treating "utility" as a one-dimensional
| quantity that you can add up? There are times when adding
| things together and doing comparisons makes a kind of sense,
| but it's an abstraction. Nothing says you _ought_ to quantify
| and add things up in a particular way, and utilitarianism
| doesn't provide a way of resolving disputes about quantifying
| and adding. Not that it really tries, because it's
| furthermore a _metaphor_ about doing math, which isn't the
| same thing as doing math.
|
| [1] https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning
| greiskul wrote:
| The big problem with utilitarinism, is that people think
| that a preference function for the utilitariam that is
| creating a given world is something simple. Then some
| people are like, no, it's more complex, we need to take
| into account X, Y and Z. But the truth is, no human being
| is capable of defining a good utility function, even for
| ourselves. We don't know all the parameters, and we don't
| know how to combine those parameters to add them up. So I
| would say that formal, proper utilitarinism, is not a
| metaphor for math: it is math. But is right now in the area
| of non constructive math.
|
| Maybe our descedants will elevate it outside of that with
| computers someday. Cause the human brain with just pieces
| of papers and text, probably cannot do it.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Also utilitarinism was created by people who were utterly
| unaware that the world is fundamentally chaotic. Instead
| they thought it could be represented by a system of
| linear equations.
|
| It's fundamentally broken in practice.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem
| in treating "utility" as a one-dimensional quantity that
| you can add up?_
|
| Yes, it does. This is one of the most common (and in my
| view, most compelling) criticisms of utilitarianism.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| One of the very muddled thoughts I have in my head, along
| with Goodhart's Law and AIs which blissfully attempt to
| convert the universe into paperclips, is that having a
| single function maximized as a goal seems to give rise to
| these bizarre scenarios if you begin to scan for their
| existence.
|
| I have started to think that you need at least two
| functions, in tension, to help forestall this kind of
| runaway behavior.
| pdonis wrote:
| Even "two functions, in tension" still assumes that you
| can capture values as functions at all. But the reason
| ethics and morality are hard in the first place is that
| there are _no_ such functions. We humans have multiple
| incommensurable, and sometimes incompatible, values that
| we can 't capture with numbers. That means it's not even
| a matter of not being able to compute the "right" answer;
| it's that the very concept of there being a single
| "right" answer doesn't seem to work.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| All of this having been said, replacing happiness with
| revenue makes chasing marginal users make _a lot_ of sense.
|
| If you have a sure-fire way to get half the people on the
| planet to give you $1, you can afford a yacht. Even if it
| means the tool you make for them only induces them to ever
| give you that $1 and not more... Why do you care? You have a
| yacht now. You can contemplate whether you should have made
| them something more useful from the relative safety and
| comfort of your yacht.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> a situation that doesn 't follow at all from
| utilitarianism_
|
| Except that it _does_ according to many utilitarians. That 's
| why it has been a topic of discussion for so long.
|
| _> you 're imagining dividing happiness among more people,
| but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering_
|
| No. "Utility" includes both positive (happiness) and negative
| (suffering) contributions. The "utility" numbers that are
| quoted in the argument are the _net_ utility numbers after
| all happiness and all suffering have been included.
|
| _> You 're picturing a drudging life where people work all
| day and have barely any source of happiness._
|
| Or a life with a lot of happiness but also a lot of
| suffering, so the _net_ utility is close to zero, because the
| suffering almost cancels out the happiness. (This is one of
| the key areas where many if not most people 's moral
| intuitions. including mine, do not match up with
| utilitarianism: happiness and suffering aren't mere numbers
| and you can't just blithely have them cancel each other that
| way.)
|
| _> if you can magically divide up some total amount of
| happiness, why not the same with suffering?_
|
| Nothing in the argument contradicts this. The argument is not
| assuming a specific scenario; it is considering all
| _possible_ scenarios and finding comparisons between them
| that follow from utilitiarianism, but do not match up with
| most people 's moral intuitions. It is no answer to the
| argument to point out that there are other comparisons that
| don't suffer from this problem; utilitarianism claims to be a
| universal theory of morality and ethics, so if _any_ possible
| scenario is a problem for it, then it has a problem.
|
| _> you 're ignoring the fact that people can create
| happiness for others_
|
| But "can" isn't the same as "will". The repugnant conclusion
| takes into account the possibility that adding more people
| might _not_ have this consequence. The whole point is that
| utilitarianism (or more precisely the Total Utility version
| of utilitarianism, which is the most common version) says
| that a world with more people is better even if the happiness
| per person goes down, possibly _way_ down (depending on how
| many more people you add), which is not what most people 's
| moral intuitions say.
|
| _> It 's crazy to think the total amount of happiness to
| distribute is independent of the world population._
|
| The argument never makes this assumption. You are attacking a
| straw man. Indeed, in the comparisons cited in the argument,
| the worlds with more people have _more_ total happiness--just
| less happiness _per person_.
| Murfalo wrote:
| Thank you for this! I have very similar thoughts. Felt like I
| was going crazy each time I saw these types of conversations
| sparked by mention of the "repugnant" conclusion...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Many versions of utilitarianism never specified the function to
| compute the sum for the many. Your example assumes that the
| function is simple addition, but others have been proposed that
| reflect some of the complexities of the human condition a
| little more explicitly (e.g. sad neighbors make neighbors sad).
| tshaddox wrote:
| Which conceivable method of summing is the least problematic?
| Depending on the summing method you might find yourself
| advocating creating as many people as possible with positive
| utility, or eliminate everyone with below-average utility,
| etc.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Utility is very complicated and summing might not even be
| possible. Folks have argued for completely different
| utility systems, such as cardinal utility where utility is
| modeled purely as relations instead of something that is
| isomorphic to a real. Even going by the mainstream view of
| ordinal utility, utility tends to be a convex function
| (simplistically, having 1 food is much better than having
| no food, but having 1000 food isn't that much better than
| having 500 food.) Modeling utility as something purely
| isomorphic to reals gives it all the fun paradoxes that we
| know the reals have and can be used to create some really
| wacky results. The "repugnant conclusion" is a direct
| consequence of that.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Yeah, utilitarianism means you want to act in a way that's
| beneficial to most people.
|
| There's many ways you can interpret that, though.
|
| But I think if you say, before we had 1 apple per person, and
| now we have 2x as many apples, but they're all owned by one
| person - that's hard to argue it's utilitarian.
|
| If before you had 100 apples, and everyone who wanted one had
| one, and now you have 10,000 apples distributed to people at
| random, but only 1 in 100 people who wants one has one - that
| also seems hard to argue as utilitarian.
|
| Businesses are value maximization functions. They'll only be
| utilitarian if that happens to maximize value.
|
| In the case of software - if you go from 1m users to 10m
| users - that doesn't imply utilitarianism. It implies that
| was good for gaming some metric - which more often than not
| these days is growth, not profit.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Reinforcing your point, Peter Singer, philosopher and noted
| utilitarian, has explicitly said that he weights misery far
| more than happiness in his own framework. From a personal
| level, he said he'd give up the 10 best days of his life to
| remove the one worst day of his life (or something like
| that).
|
| All of his work with effective altruism is aimed at reducing
| suffering of those worst off in the world and spends no time
| with how to make the well off even happier.
| pg_1234 wrote:
| As an aside, this is why buying insurance, despite being a
| financially bad bet (or the insurers would go out of
| business), actually is a sensible thing to do from a
| quality of life perspective.
| selectodude wrote:
| Insurance isn't a financially bad bet. They're providing
| a service (not needing to maintain the liquidity of
| replacement costs) in exchange for a fixed monthly fee.
| It's cheaper for me to grow my own food but it's not a
| "bad bet" to not be a subsistence farmer and buy my food
| at the grocery store even though many people are making
| money off my purchase up the chain. I get to use my money
| and time for something more productive.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Assuming linearity of utility either in individuals or in
| aggregation is a very common straw man of utilitarianism.
| jancsika wrote:
| > (e.g. sad neighbors make neighbors sad)
|
| I much prefer, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than
| a frontal lobotomy." At least in that case nobody will
| confuse a trucker hat slogan for a viable system of ethics.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > infinite people with barely any happiness
|
| That reminds me of the SMBC "Existifier" comic, which satirizes
| the idea that merely helping something exist is morally
| positive.
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/existence
| hammock wrote:
| Tyranny of the marginal user is a riff on the Nassim Taleb
| classic "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the
| Small Minority":
|
| https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| There is a minimum happiness threshold mH. We can increase
| population P until happiness H reaches mH, give or take some
| depending on how close you want to get to mH.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Why would anyone think that a large overall pool of happiness
| is somehow better than a high per capita happiness? This seems
| like the kind of thing that's incredibly obvious to everyone
| but the academic philosopher.
| patmcc wrote:
| Maximizing for per-capita happiness just leads to the other
| end of the same problem - fewer and fewer people with the
| same "happiness units" spread among them. Thus we should
| strictly limit breeding and kill people at age X+5 (X always
| being my age, of course).
|
| It's actually a hard problem to design a perfect moral
| system, that's why people have been trying for literally
| thousands of years.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| First, the phrasing is confusing, because it's not clear
| whether people with very low happiness measured in terms of N
| are what we consider unhappy/sad, which is actually negative
| utility. I believe with this measure, positive N means
| someone is more happy than they are unhappy.
|
| Second, what's "obvious to everyone" is just based on how
| you're phrasing the question. If you suggested to people it
| would be better if the population were just one deliriously
| happy person with N=50, vs 5 happy people with N=10.1, people
| would say obviously it would be better to spread the wealth
| and increase overall happiness.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| In this particular case, it's because the success of an ad-
| funded service depends on the amount of users it has.
|
| If you don't like the repugnant conclusion you have to change
| something in the conditions of the environment so that you
| make it not be true. Arguing against it and calling your
| refutation obvious doesn't do anything.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| That is an incredibly long bow to draw. Corporations are
| optimising for their own profits, not anyone's happiness.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| I agree. The math that applies to corporate profits is
| not the same that should apply for human happiness.
|
| But we have to acknowledge that the weird philosophical
| thought experiment that can't possibly convince anyone
| except weird philosophers turned out to be convincing to
| other entities after all.
|
| Compare the trolley problem, a famous thought experiment
| that people used to laugh at, up until a couple of years
| when suddenly important people began to ask important
| questions like "should we relax the safety standards for
| potentially life-saving vaccines" and "how much larger
| than Y does X need to be so that preventing X
| functionally illiterate children are worth the price of Y
| dead children"
| wilg wrote:
| It's just a question of if you value other people existing or
| not. If you don't, focus on per-capita happiness, if you do
| then you focus on meeting a minimum threshold of happiness
| for everyone.
|
| I don't see how you couldn't value other people existing - I
| think they have just as much of a right to experience the
| universe as I do.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| There's a vast chasm between "other people deserve to
| exist" and "we should 100x our population in order to
| increase the marginal happiness pool".
| wilg wrote:
| Alternately, there isn't.
| mhb wrote:
| Has that belief led you to a lifestyle in which you are
| just barely happier than miserable so that you can lift as
| many others as you can out of misery?
| wilg wrote:
| No, but doing so would be consistent with my beliefs and
| I think it would be considered admirable to most people.
| [deleted]
| burnished wrote:
| They do not, thats the point. If you start with a simple and
| reasonable sounding premise ('it is ethically correct to
| choose the option that maximizes happiness') but it leads to
| obviously absurd or inhuman outcomes then you might not want
| to adopt those principles.
|
| Your second sentence rankles the hell out of me, you're only
| able to make that snap judgement to this because of your
| exposure to academic philosophy (where do you think that
| example that demonstrates the problem so clearly comes
| from?), but are completely unaware of that.
|
| The bullshitters aren't puzzling at seemingly simple things,
| they're writing content free fluff.
| coldtea wrote:
| AKA the Repugnantly Ignorant in the Human-Ways Nerd's Idea of
| Ethics conclusion!
| scythe wrote:
| The problem is that the "repugnant conclusion" is a matter of
| definitions. A moral theory is (basically) freely chosen: you
| can change the definitions whenever you like.
|
| Not so for B2C SaaS. The utilities are always measured in
| dollars and they always aggregate by simple addition. You _can
| 't_ simply redefine the problem away by changing the economic
| assumptions, because they exist in physical space and not in
| theory space.
| tyre wrote:
| The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in
| philosophy that don't make much sense outside of academics.
|
| Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness
| (total and distribution) of an existing population. Merging it
| with natalism isn't realistic or meaningful, so we end up with
| these population morality debates. The happiness of a
| unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!)
|
| Compare to Rawls's Original Position, which uses an unborn
| person to make the hypothetical work but is ultimately about
| optimizing for happiness in an existing population.
|
| We really shouldn't get ourselves tied into knots about the
| possibility of pumping out trillions of humans because an
| algorithm says they'll be marginally net content. That's not
| the end goal of any reasonable, practical, or sane system of
| ethics.
| salawat wrote:
| >We really shouldn't get ourselves tied into knots about the
| possibility of pumping out trillions of humans because an
| algorithm says they'll be marginally net content. That's not
| the end goal of any reasonable, practical, or sane system of
| ethics.
|
| Are you sure you aren't sharing the world with people who do
| not adhere to reasonable, practical, or sane system of
| ethics?
|
| Because, ngl, lately, I'm not so sure I can offer an
| affirmative on that one, making "Getting tied into knots
| about the possibility of pumping out trillions of humans
| because an algorithm says they'll be marginally net content"
| a reasonable thing to be trying to cut a la the Gordian knot.
|
| After all, that very thing, "pump out trillions of humans
| because some algorithm (genetics, instincts, & culture taken
| collectively) says they'll be marginally more content" is
| modus operandi for humanity, with shockingly little
| appreciation for the externalities therein involved.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in
| philosophy that don't make much sense outside of academics._
|
| Not even for academics. It's something for "rational"-bros.
| caturopath wrote:
| (Real, academic philosophers actually care about the case,
| too.)
| caturopath wrote:
| I think you might be missing a big part of what this sort of
| philosophy is really about.
|
| > Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness
| (total and distribution) of an existing population
|
| For those who accept your claim above, lots of stuff follows,
| but your claim is a bold assertion that isn't accepted by
| everyone involved, or even many people involved.
|
| The repugnant conclusion is a thought experiment where one
| starts with certain stripped-down claims not including yours
| here and follow it to its logical conclusion. This is worth
| doing because many people find it plausible that those axioms
| define a good ethical system, but the fact they require the
| repugnant conclusion causes people to say "Something in here
| seems to be wrong or incomplete." People have proposed many
| alternate axioms, and your take is just one which isn't
| popular.
|
| I suspect part of the reason yours isn't popular is
|
| - People seek axiological answers from their ethical systems,
| so they wish to be able to answer "Are these two unlike
| worlds better?" -- even if they aren't asking "What action
| should I take?" Many people want to know "What is better?" so
| they explore questions of what are better, period, and
| something they want is to always to have such questions be
| answerable. Some folks have explored a concept along the
| lines of yours, where sometimes there just isn't a comparison
| available, but giving up on being able to compare every pair
| isn't popular.
|
| - We actually make decisions or imagine the ability to make
| future real decisions that result in there being more or
| fewer persons. Is it right to have kids? Is it right to
| subsidize childbearing? Is it right to attempt to make a ton
| of virtual persons?
|
| > The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not
| the same as zero!)
|
| Okay, if you say "Total utilitarianism (and all similar
| things) are wrong", then of course you don't reach the
| repugnant conclusion via Parfit's argument. "A, B, C implies
| D", "Well, not B" is not a very interesting argument here.
|
| Your null posing also doesn't really answer how we _should_
| handle questions of what to do that result in persons being
| created or destroyed.
|
| > We really shouldn't get ourselves tied into knots about the
| possibility of pumping out trillions of humans because an
| algorithm says they'll be marginally net content. That's not
| the end goal of any reasonable, practical, or sane system of
| ethics.
|
| Okay, what is the end goal? If you'll enlighten us, then we
| can all know.
|
| Until then, folks are going to keep trying to figure it out.
| Parfit explored a system that many people might have thought
| sounded good on its premises, but proved it led to the
| repugnant conclusion. The normal reaction is, "Okay, that
| wasn't the right recipe. Let's keep looking. I want to find a
| better recipe so I know what to do in hard, real cases."
| Since such folks rejected the ethical system because it led
| to the repugnant conclusion, they could be less confident in
| its prescriptions in more practical situations -- they know
| that the premises of the system don't reflect what they want
| to adopt as their ethical system.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness
| (total and distribution) of an existing population.
|
| That's a somewhat-similar alternative to utilitarianism.
| Which has its own kind of repugnant conclusions, in part as a
| result of the same flawed premises: that utililty experienced
| by different people is a quantity with common objective units
| that can meaningfully summed, and given that, morality is
| defined by maximizing that sum across some universe of
| analysis. It differs from by-the-book utilitarianism in
| changing the universe of analysis, which changes the precise
| problems the flawed premises produce, but doesn't really
| solve anything fundamentally.
|
| > Compare to Rawls's Original Position, which uses an unborn
| person to make the hypothetical work but is ultimately about
| optimizing for happiness in an existing population.
|
| No, its not; the Original Position _neither_ deals with a
| fixed existing population _nor_ is about optimizing for
| happiness in the summed-utility sense. Its more about
| optimizing the risk adjusted distribution of the opportunity
| for happiness.
| chongli wrote:
| Rawls's original position and the veil-of-ignorance he uses
| to support it has a major weakness: it's a time-slice theory.
| Your whole argument rests on it. You're talking about the
| "existing population" at some particular moment in time.
|
| Here I am replying to you 3 hours later. In the mean time,
| close to 20,000 people have died around the world [1].
| Thousands more have been born. So if we're to move outside
| the realm of academics, as you put it, we force ourselves to
| contend with the fact that there is no "existing population"
| to maximize happiness for. The population is perhaps better
| thought of as a river of people, always flowing out to sea.
|
| The Repugnant Conclusion is relevant, perhaps now more than
| at any time in the past, because we've begun to grasp --
| scientifically, if not politically -- the finitude of earth's
| resources. By continuing the way we are, toward ever-
| increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing
| inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the
| likes of which have never been seen before.
|
| [1] https://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/world-
| death-cl...
| crabbone wrote:
| One way to deal with this problem is to ask _why do we use the
| arithmetic sum to calculate the total happiness?_. There are
| plenty of ways this can go. Say, if you believe that two very
| happy people are better than four half as happy people, then
| you can define this sum function as sum(happiness_per_person)
| / number_of_people. Of course, this isn't the only way.
|
| Utilitarianism opens a lot of questions about comparability of
| utility (or happiness) of different people as well as
| summation. Is it a totally ordered set? Is it a partially
| ordered set? Perhaps utility is incomparable (that'd be sad and
| kind of defeat the whole doctrine, but still).
|
| Also, can unhappiness be compensated by happiness? We
| unthinkingly rush to treat unhappiness as we would negative
| numbers and try to sum that with happiness, but what if it
| doesn't work? What if the person who has no happiness or
| unhappiness isn't in the same place as the person who is
| equally happy and unhappy (their dog died, but they found a
| million $ on the same day)?
|
| A more typical classroom question would be about chopping up a
| healthy person for organs to fix X unhealthy people -- is there
| a number of unhealthy people which would justify killing a
| healthy person for spare parts?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Every time I've engaged in debate over this, it always comes
| down to believing that the world is zero sum and there is a
| limited amount of "happiness" that can be distributed.
|
| That may be true for some things, but for many decisions it is
| not true.
|
| There is enough food to feed everyone if we choose to
| distribute it properly. There is enough housing to house
| everyone. etc. etc.
|
| There may not be enough cardiologists or Dali originals ...
| wilg wrote:
| I've never understood this problem. To me, it seems that since
| you've defined a minimum "worth living" amount of happiness and
| unbounded population, it makes complete sense that the answer
| would be that it is better to have lots of people whose life is
| worth living rather than fewer. Is it not tautological?
|
| Like it seems like you have to take "worth living" seriously,
| since that is the element that is doing all the work. If it's
| worth living, you've factored in everything that matters
| already.
| mhb wrote:
| If you pack the whole problem into a definition of "worth
| living", then you're right. But the premise is that there is
| a range from extreme misery through neutral through extremely
| happy. The repugnant conclusion is that it is better to have
| many people in a state that is barely above neutral.
| wilg wrote:
| I'm not the one packing it, the setup of the problem does
| it. "Barely above neutral" means you've picked an
| acceptable state. And then we are supposed to consider that
| acceptable state "repugnant"?
| mhb wrote:
| There's a comparison. If the scale goes from -100 to
| +100, the conclusion is that if we have 8 billion people
| in the world with average happiness of +10, it is better
| to immiserate them in order to have 80 billion with
| average happiness +1.01.
|
| It's not that the acceptable state of 1.01 is repugnant,
| it's that the conclusion seems counterintuitive and
| ethically problematic to many people, as it suggests that
| we should prefer creating a massive population of people
| who are barely happy over a smaller population of people
| who are very happy.
| wilg wrote:
| I guess I just don't understand how if your axioms are 1)
| X is an acceptable level of happiness and 2) more people
| are better than fewer it is in any way surprising or
| problematic to end up with infinite people at happiness
| X.
|
| Perhaps people don't see that (2) is a part of the
| premise?
| zaphar wrote:
| It's more that after seeing that result of starting with
| those premises they don't like the 2 premises anymore. It
| would be like me really liking the experience of eating
| potator chips all day right up until the point that I
| discovered it had a lot of adverse health effects. I
| might no long like eating them as much.
| mhb wrote:
| Because 1 is not one of the axioms. The axioms are 1)
| There is a range of experience between worst possible
| misery and best possible happiness and 2) more people who
| are just barely happy is better than fewer people who are
| much happier.
|
| I don't understand why you're insisting on a binary
| distinction of acceptable vs. not acceptable. With that
| assumption there is no repugnant conclusion.
| wilg wrote:
| 1 is one of the axioms because a binary cutoff is built
| into the premise.
| mhb wrote:
| I may have taken you a little too literally when you
| wrote that you didn't understand the problem. Perhaps
| what you're saying is that the conclusion is not
| repugnant to you and that the conclusion is neither
| counterintuitive nor ethically problematic.
|
| Consequently you believe that it is better for a large
| number of people to exist in a state barely better than
| misery than for a smaller number of people to experience
| a greater degree of happiness.
|
| Fair enough.
| renanoliveira0 wrote:
| Worse for whom? The purpose of the absolute majority of software
| is to make money. The means of achieving this are varied, that's
| all.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Totally wrong about OKCupid.
|
| The whole point is that you're not supposed to find anybody but
| keep looking because if you find somebody you're no longer a
| customer. Match buys every dating site that gets even 2% of
| traction because they can't stand the possibility that somebody
| makes a dating site that works and destroys their customer pool.
|
| If the government was serious about antitrust they'd break up
| match.com
| weare138 wrote:
| Tech companies stopped making products for their users and
| started making products for their investors instead. It's
| devolved to the point tech companies don't even care about
| profitability anymore, only marketability to the investor class
| and Wall St. It's just a shell game of metrics and markets now.
| menacingly wrote:
| This is a subset of a related problem: the word "scale", in
| nearly every context, is a euphemism for "make stuff shitty by
| making the problems of 10% of users problems for 100% of users"
|
| It applies to everything. God-awful frontend build pipelines.
| Everyone feeling the pressure for their regular old database to
| not make the cut. Sprawling, labyrinthine legal rules no one can
| follow because one weasel in one meeting was able to say "but
| what about..."
| pc_edwin wrote:
| "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself
| become the villain"
|
| You either die as a cool edgy app/platform or you live long
| enough to face the innovators dilemma.
|
| Surprisingly, I think its a good thing on balance. It creates
| room for disruption from newcomers.
| shrimpx wrote:
| The problem is that short-term profitability isn't compatible
| with the long-term health of society, because often the easiest
| way to make a lot of money quickly comes as a form of societal
| exploitation. The most direct examples being chemically addictive
| products like painkillers and cigarettes, and now ad-based
| attention sinks like TikTok and Instagram.
| ssss11 wrote:
| The question is how would we (and can we) change corporations
| to value things other than short term profit?
|
| I've seen B-corps - those seem good, social/environmental
| focussed. No idea how widespread they are.
|
| Are there other corporate structure models that could become
| mainstream and solve some of these issues? At least for the
| companies adopting them and therefore customers signed up to
| them.
| shrimpx wrote:
| I think it's hard because we have GDP growth as the #1 KPI,
| and VCs seeking large-multiple exits in single-digit years,
| with no major concern for negative effects on society.
|
| Veering too deeply into pure capital acquisition will destroy
| capital though. A zombied out, addicted and unhealthy
| population isn't a source of capital. Ad revenue and demand
| plummets as nobody has the money or will to buy shit. But
| there's a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone
| passes the buck to some abstract "other" who will work on
| keeping society healthy.
|
| Traditionally, government is the balancing force that puts
| limits on capitalism and makes sure some profits are re-
| invested into society. But when top capital holders become
| political power brokers, government power recedes.
|
| I think the best hope is a new vision where young generations
| are intrinsically motivated to build a healthy society, and
| not just to push private capital acquisition as far as it can
| go.
| epivosism wrote:
| I would like more info on the factors hinted at in the article:
|
| The effect of buying and closing innovative potential
| competitors?
|
| Product design distortion due to companies being valued by unreal
| factors, so most of the market is acting on partly false data
| (raw MAU rather than sophisticated analysis of likely actually
| meaningful paying DAU)
|
| Actual errors due to not measuring user sentiment: failing to
| build long term value since the life cycle of users from new->
| user-> advocate -> generational aligned customer is not
| understood at all. In this thesis, most companies profit model is
| just wrong on long term time scales. They're actually burning the
| goodwill of potential dedicated customers in return for flat
| growth and revenue. This is Google to me; they have no way to
| detect that I've gone from loving to hating their products over
| the last ten years, since I spend as much as ever. But I'm
| looking for any way to jump to another product.
|
| In the end I still don't know. Am I just wrong that Google isn't
| suffering from me hating them? It feels so true that if they
| respected power users more it would be so beneficial to them, but
| in a hard to measure way. Recruiting, advocacy, lobbying, let
| alone bug fixes, wanting to work there. It could be that the hate
| they receive doesn't hurt them. But I think a certain type of
| person will always exist, who wants to love and respect the
| groups they're associated with, beyond just realized profit. I
| would jump at the chance to associate with a company which makes
| 50% as much money as google, but which I can still admire and
| feel aligned with. And long term it seems people will try to form
| societies and economies where companies can be viewed as actually
| aligned. So day to day google does fine, but maybe they're not
| pricing in the rare negative effects of existing in a less loved
| state?
| ivee wrote:
| > Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating
| them?
|
| No, I think you're right that Google is suffering in the long
| term. It's a combination of measurement difficulty and agency
| problems - there's no way for the VP of the product to get a
| credible signal about whether a change was good or not other
| than by looking at something incontrovertible like DAUs. You
| might try to introduce a metric like "user happiness" but the
| design space of such metrics is so large that a misaligned
| product manager could always use it to shove a bad change
| through.
|
| Kind of like we all know GDP is a bad metric for human
| flourishing, but everything else feels even worse.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Marl isn't born that way, Marl is made by the same tech you're
| talking about. You're not a victim of Marl, you actively produce
| new Marls.
|
| Whenever you introduce convenience into the world, you reprogram
| people. You create the short attention span and passiveness.
| nicbou wrote:
| That was a pleasant read. I love the writing style amd the type
| of humour.
| rendall wrote:
| I was one of the early users of ok cupid, even before it was
| dating and more just a kind of social media for questions and
| tests. I met some amazing people on that site. At some point
| something changed though and the quality plummeted.
| wrs wrote:
| This is sad to see as a user, but I can tell you it's _really_
| sad when you have to do it to your own product.
| iamnotsure wrote:
| Non-free software gets worse, not better, over time. "when a
| measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" applied
| to money. software is not a commodity
| sublimefire wrote:
| Article implies the subscription based model which in turn
| contradicts the thesis that somehow people can/will use the thing
| indefinitely. This might apply to something like Word or an email
| provider or search, e.g., a tool that is used often to do a
| transaction. I doubt if it applies to human relationships as they
| are not that transactional except when thinking about porn,
| onlyfans, etc.
|
| IMO it was just a bad example because users will always stop
| using such an app hence it is natural to focus on new users more
| from the business side. You could equally say that the demise of
| okcupid happened purely because the newer generation of users had
| other expectations compared to the prior users, the model could
| not sustain itself without significant changes and the changes
| were not significant enough. Correlation is not a causation in
| other words.
| diegof79 wrote:
| The article puts a lot of emphasis on Marl, the marginal user.
| However, it's a two-way relationship: the society (culture,
| media, and products) created Marl. If you watch YouTube since you
| were a kid and see video recommendations all the time, it's hard
| to develop a good attention span as there is always something
| attractive and new in the corner of your eye. Then you read
| online articles that are incredibly shallow and almost generated
| by a bot, with the sole purpose of gathering clicks. Over time,
| you get used to skimming the text contents.
|
| The article is a good example; nobody wants to spend too much
| time creating a long blog post. So, a short text and a catchy
| title work better to attract your audience. For me, software is
| about products like an operating system or an editor; for the
| author, "software" is about websites like Google or Reddit. It's
| not the same. The incentives are different, but making a
| distinction requires more analysis, an analysis that Marl will
| not read. Marl will complain that macOS quality seems lower on
| each release without realizing the article is about something
| different.
|
| Most people reading HN work in the software industry. In one way
| or another, we are also responsible for creating Marl. That's why
| having a better education in social topics should be an essential
| part of any engineering curriculum.
| [deleted]
| mrcartmeneses wrote:
| So it goes
| [deleted]
| darkerside wrote:
| The problem is not metrics driven design or marginal users. It's
| that OKCupid wasn't successful, and that it probably can't be.
| _So far_ , there isn't a tool that has successfully matched up
| looking term romantic partners with a high degree of success.
| That work has to come from people, and they don't get as much
| leverage from tools as they hoped. That's why the successful apps
| make it a numbers game and leave it to people to solve the actual
| problem of matchmaking.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| All true. But it isn't the Marginal User (Marl) that's the issue.
|
| It's the dev managers that pursue him. In the quest for quarterly
| metrics.
|
| Building a use base of interested committed users is not done
| that way. It's done by providing value, having short training
| videos, getting word-of-mouth referrals, continuing to provide
| value month after month.
|
| Ok that isn't maybe as profitable. In a big company the pressure
| for profitable is perhaps even more grinding and inhumane than in
| a smaller company. At some point your entire product gets reduced
| to a number at some executive level, and your fate is inevitably
| sealed by metrics.
|
| In a small company, a startup even, management is 1 level deep or
| shallower and you can have goal, ambitions, a vision of your
| product and your user that exceeds "show them another ad". And
| you can communicate that to whomever is budgeting your group.
| throwmeout123 wrote:
| More like the tiranny of people whose job title matches
| .*[Pp]roduct.*
|
| They are the real scourge of our industry; I never met one who
| wasnt hellbent on raising some kind of meaningless number that
| people who don't talk to the customer decided was important for
| the next 90 days.
|
| Get them out of the industry as fast as possible, keep only the
| good ones
| freedomben wrote:
| > _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 feels too accurate. Damnit
| Marl, please for the sake of us power user minority, please
| change.
|
| Alternatively and more seriously, I do hope to see markets emerge
| that target power users. I'm not optimistic though. Open source
| seems like the only real hope there.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > This is hilarious and sad because it feels too accurate.
|
| To me it's a disappointing effigy that the author is conjuring
| up and then burning because they're unwilling to address the
| fact that the corporation they work for and the ceaseless chase
| of "social media platforms" drives this behavior more than the
| imagined "Marl's" of the world ever did.
| masukomi wrote:
| > because they're unwilling to address the fact that the
| corporation they work for and the ceaseless chase of "social
| media platforms" drives this behavior more than the imagined
| "Marl's" of the world ever did.
|
| the fact that the corporations are doing that, and chasing
| the Marls is the foundational premise of the article. He's
| not blaming it on the Marls. He's blaming it on the companies
| chasing them.
| npsimons wrote:
| > Open source seems like the only real hope there.
|
| Pretty much, yeah.
| WD40forRust wrote:
| >Open source seems like the only real hope there.
|
| You know how the saying goes: The best things in life are Free
| Software!
| titzer wrote:
| > 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
| poorly thought-out frameworks that are often stupendously
| complicated. (Web, I am looking at you.)
|
| Why can't I rip apart the UI of an app I use every day and
| rearrange it the way I want? And I mean, far more than toolbars
| and rearranging drop down menus. (BTW, remember those? Those
| were great).
|
| Seriously though, I have written many hundreds of thousands of
| lines of code in my day; I fancy myself not super bad at
| programming, yet I cannot take apart a random GUI app and make
| it do what I want. _Even when_ it 's open source. I feel like
| this is an unaddressed problem; the UI cafeteria people keep
| serving us an ever-changing menu of crap, and I feel powerless
| to even lock in the few UIs that I do end up getting good at.
| They'll take that away soon enough.
| autoexec wrote:
| Even if the programs you used all supported it, there'd still
| be no getting around the fact that you'd need to learn some
| kind of framework or system to modify the UI to your liking.
| I guess we'd need someone to create one that was intuitive to
| use and very easy for programs to support, then it'd have to
| be popular enough with programmers that they'd actually use
| it. The closest thing I've seen would be websites, since we
| can remove elements or use customer CSS to change them. Maybe
| GTK, and those interfaces aren't exactly pretty.
|
| It'd probably have to be free, fast, secure, simple,
| attractive, flexible, powerful, able to work with all kinds
| of platforms/screens/inputs, and make creating GUIs easier
| for programmers to create in general (seems like there's a
| need there), but even then it'd have to contend with
| companies who want control over what users see, artists who
| think they know better than everyone else, and support teams
| that want documentation full of meaningful screenshots.
| WD40forRust wrote:
| >Why can't I rip apart the UI of an app I use every day and
| rearrange it the way I want? And I mean, far more than
| toolbars and rearranging drop down menus. (BTW, remember
| those? Those were great).
|
| IMO there's no reason you can't. Just yesterday I was playing
| with pavucontrol and thought "There needs to be a GNU Radio
| like view, where I can drop boxes which represent sound
| generating/taking programs/devices and draw connecting lines
| arbitrarily," then I thought why not the same thing for video
| treating even the contents of windows themselves as video
| sources too!
|
| Table formats are easier to implement I guess...
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Why can't I rip apart the UI of an app I use every day and
| rearrange it the way I want?"
|
| Because it is very hard to do something like this, so common
| people can do it. (you _can_ change every html UI in theory)
|
| I tried to make something like this and basically failed
| (though in the very long run I might get there eventually).
| GUI editors are hard to get right and the ones I liked, like
| Adobe Flex Builder (with Flash UI as a bonus) are gone. But
| those were also no newb tools. But flash itself was and that
| was the main reason for its success.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The typical Old School Unix way to do this is to provide
| all of your application's functionality and business logic
| through a command line app or at least an API, with the UI
| being a thin layer on top of the command line. Then anyone
| can build whatever UI they want on top of it. We've fallen
| from the light and now the prevailing design is to deeply
| integrate the business logic with the UI to the point where
| they are codependent and inseparable.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| In some ways web apps act like this: all (most) of the
| buisness logic and data is on the server.
|
| And you get the data through API calls - so in theory one
| can build your own UI on top of a known service. There
| are rare examples of this done succesfully (for HN for
| example), but usually you won't get very far in a
| reasonable amount of time, because often it is a mess
| behind the shiny UI. (And because this is not encouraged
| behavior by the service provider)
| sanderjd wrote:
| This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really
| exists for things that are given away for free.
| ncruces wrote:
| People need to realize that the sales business model does not
| necessarily lead to better outcomes.
|
| I (pretty much single handedly) made a reasonably profitable
| mobile app. It was my bread and butter for a decade. It has
| millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monthly
| active users. It's a "power" tool, not a game.
|
| Unfortunately, it depends on servers for a lot of it's core
| features. There are no accounts, data passes through my
| servers and, aside from caching, gets deleted as soon as
| feasible. I really wish I could avoid it, tried to reduce
| this as much as possible, and made servers as cheap as
| possible in the process. But it's still in the $100s/month,
| which I can't justify without compensation.
|
| I tried donations, and have ad free paid versions: they don't
| cover costs. Ads are 95% of revenue.
|
| People who paid $1 half a year ago will complain that I
| killed their pet if the server is down for an hour on a
| weekend. They've paid their hard won $1 after trialing the
| product for a month, and feel entitled to forever support of
| something that has running costs, in both hardware and brain
| power. Whereas I've made my buck, and have every incentive to
| tell them to f-off.
|
| People on ads will give me a tenth of a cent everytime they
| use the app, so I have the incentive to keep then coming
| back. Of course I can be sleazy and trick them into clicking
| ads, or drown them in popup hell, or whatever.
|
| But the point is, if $0.001 is enough to make a nice profit
| from each use of my app, there's no better model than ads. A
| $1 sale means I'm loosing money on a power user after a few
| years. A $1 yearly subscription is something users just won't
| do, especially without fancy upgrades. And, in all models
| I've tried, 95% of revenue is always ads. Sales don't even
| cover the costs of the sales channels.
|
| That's why ads took over the internet, and you won't be
| turning that back.
| ativzzz wrote:
| This is why everything now is either free with ads or is a
| SaaS
| freedomben wrote:
| You would know your market way better than me, but just
| anecdotally I'm usually willing to pay $5 for a useful app.
| Based on your numbers it sounds like that would still make
| you money after 10 or so years. If the app is source
| available, I'll go up much higher. I'm definitely not a
| typical user, but for a "power" tool I'd think I'm in your
| market.
| mato wrote:
| Err, nope.
|
| As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:
|
| Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to
| domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it
| every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet
| managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works,
| better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the
| interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a
| waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot
| book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI,
| nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on
| something or other to add it as a waypoint.
|
| This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's
| UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl's
| tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only
| really exists for things that are given away for free.
|
| There's cable TV.
|
| To be fair though, cable TV was the original Poo-To-Marl
| Service and has been getting supplanted by free versions of
| itself. So I guess it proves your point anyway.
| autoexec wrote:
| I think paying for something does encourage users to be more
| invested in it, but paid software can neglect their power
| users too if they're comfortable being "good enough for most
| people"
| mdaniel wrote:
| 1Password has entered the chat
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah I guess it's more of a continuum than a binary. But I
| do feel like there may be a discontinuity between free and
| cheap, where the business model totally changes in a way
| that (in my view) better aligns the incentives between the
| business and its customers.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Ironically, I think the power user can be another marginal
| user: the user who pays *top dollar* (in their mind) for your
| product so they expect it to support marginal, niche features
| for eternity. Somewhere in between the user who doesn't want to
| think while using your application and the user who wants a
| basically programmable application is, I think, the ideal.
| ivee wrote:
| "market targeting power users" is basically SaaS, right? I
| don't understand that market as well, but it seems to have
| similar dynamics where you only charge X$ / user / month and so
| are incentivized to grab more users instead of giving more
| value to existing users.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Almost. The problem with SaaS is that it doesn't actually
| target the power users; it targets their managers and/or
| purchasing departments. Basic mismatch of incentives already.
| autoexec wrote:
| In my experience power users don't want SaaS. They tend to
| want control over their data, they want control over how/when
| the software runs, they want things to work offline, and they
| care about their privacy. It's the people who don't know/care
| about tech and just want a magical black box that love SaaS.
| They want all the complicated tech stuff to be someone else's
| problem, and they'll pay over and over and over again just so
| that they don't have to think about or manage anything.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes, exactly. SaaS tends to repel power users because it's
| so depriving of control. Just my experience, but the main
| people who pay for SaaS are usually those who don't want to
| invest time/effort into learning/customizing something,
| they just want to pay and be done. An exception to this is
| platform SaaS that targets tech companies. Those can be hit
| or miss.
| bakugo wrote:
| > 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. Marl's tolerance for
| user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he
| only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can
| do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling
| motion.
|
| Whenever I express a negative sentiment about some aspect of
| modern software that takes away power and choice from the user
| in favor of baby-tier handholding and get the usual reply that
| goes something like "well the average user doesn't need or care
| about that so it shouldn't exist!", this is who I imagine
| typing out the comment on the other side of the screen.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Damnit Marl, please for the sake of us power user minority,
| please change."
|
| But are you really that different? There are just too many
| websites amd apps and new ones are getting generated every
| moment and time and attention is limited. So I also open and
| quickly close many of them.
|
| I don't think that is the problem here.
|
| But to your conclusion I agree.
| freedomben wrote:
| It's definitely harder to get my attention than to get
| Marl's, but unless I see something really off-putting I'll
| invest a couple of minutes into learning more about it.
| Getting that attention is quite difficult though.
| ftxbro wrote:
| > _We've all been Marl at one time or another - half
| consciously scrolling in bed, in line at the airport with the
| announcements blaring, reflexively opening our phones to
| distract ourselves from a painful memory._
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And I want to do different things when I'm this way than what
| I want when I'm in a conscious state.
|
| Why is it that every single company only wants to serve the
| same one of those personas?
| carlossouza wrote:
| Totally agree: it's hilarious because it's true.
|
| Good startups target power users. By "good" I mean companies
| that find true PMF and grow exponentially at near-zero CAC
| (i.e. the ones that earn - not buy - their growth).
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Good startups target power users.
|
| Growth-oriented startups then run out of power users and
| start targeting the wider population; when the latter
| outnumber the former, power users fall by the wayside at best
| and are explicitly told to fuck off as uneconomical at worst.
|
| Acquisition-oriented startups sell their power user base to a
| large company that's unlikely to care about them and proceeds
| to tell them to fuck off (usually after some large-company-
| scale fleeting instant, like a couple of quarters).
|
| That is why, most of the time, I now preemptively fuck off
| when I see a (VC-funded) startup targeting me as a power user
| of whatever they're making. I've been burned too many times,
| and with all due respect to the cuddly techies running things
| at the moment, they don't own the company.
| ahstilde wrote:
| this would mean for many companies Marl is the power user
| notpachet wrote:
| I think for many companies, Marl is the CEO
| doctor_radium wrote:
| I worked with a Marl once and couldn't do more than look
| on in disbelief. This was on the job (tech company), not
| after hours or standing in a customer service queue. He
| wasn't the CEO, but maybe had more potential than I
| thought?
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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.
|
| If this were true, the app probably wasn't worth having in the
| first place. An app that actually does something Marl needs, or
| enables him to do something he wants to do doesn't need to
| catch his attention with shiny things. The thing that will hook
| Marl is accomplishing what he set out to do, and generally that
| should be possible without spending a bunch of time customizing
| settings, but having sensible defaults doesn't mean those
| options/settings aren't valuable.
|
| Marl doesn't need to change, and it'd be a shame if he (most
| users) were forced to tinker with a bunch of settings and
| change a bunch of defaults to do the things they want.
| Flexibility and customization is still important for the folks
| who need that though and useful software that does a good job
| offering that while also having sane defaults have an
| opportunity to be popular with everybody.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If the app actually does something Marl needs or enables him
| to do something he wants to do, then that's great, but all
| that means Marl simply isn't the marginal user for that app
| that the article is talking about, he's a core user of it -
| and there exists some _other_ user, let 's call him Narl, who
| has slightly different needs than Marl, doesn't _really_ need
| that app, but would use it if you catch his attention in
| those 1.3 seconds, so he actually is the marginal user for
| that app.
|
| And if the app does the things you want for Marl, then, as
| the article states, it makes all economic sense to make the
| app worse for Marl to catch Narl. Marl will use it anyway
| (since for him the app was worth having in the first place),
| but your effort will make a difference in getting Narl.
|
| And if you can make the app really good for Narl as well,
| that doesn't change anything, because there _always_ will be
| another marginal user, and there is a financial motivation to
| add all the shiny bullshit (at the expense of everyone else)
| to catch _that_ marginal user.
| autoexec wrote:
| > it makes all economic sense to make the app worse for
| Marl to catch Narl. Marl will use it anyway (since for him
| the app was worth having in the first place), but your
| effort will make a difference in getting Narl.
|
| I guess you're right. Marl wouldn't be a marginal user. The
| economic sense of attracting the marginal user Narl still
| only holds true to a point. Make the app bad enough by
| appealing to Narl and you'll lose Marl to a competing app
| that doesn't suck as bad. Narl is fickle, doesn't really
| need the app, and will be easily tempted to move on to
| other apps. Not a great long term investment. Marl needs
| the app and as long as it does what he needs without
| pissing him off the app has got a user they can profit
| from. It seems very shortsighted to drive away your core
| users to temporarily attract the less interested marginal
| ones.
|
| Thankfully, I can't think of many apps that have gotten
| worse by aggressively targeting the Narls of the world.
| When apps get worse, it's usually greed that gets in the
| way. Anti-features that even narl hates, but which stuffs
| the developer's pockets with cash.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| That's not the tyranny of the Marginal User, that's a primitive
| mindset of growth at all costs, which doesn't realize growth is a
| phase of the existence of an entity, and just like teenagers stop
| growing eventually, so should companies, once they find their
| niche. Instead they keep overaddressing their audience, until
| entropy takes over and destroys the company altogether, to be
| replaced by another startup that has the same infinite growth one
| bit mentality.
|
| Our understanding of how to create systems is primitive. Our
| understanding how to effectively maintain and refine them over
| time is broadly speaking non-existent. Collapse and destruction
| is not inevitable, it's plan B when the entity in question cannot
| maintain its own constitution. Our companies, products, cultures,
| nations, civilizations don't know how to do that. So they keep
| collapsing and get replaced.
|
| It's massively wasteful, it causes endless pain and suffering,
| immense waste, it's the tragedy of our existence. And the hope is
| we'll learn eventually, before our entire species collapses. But
| so far I don't see it. We keep making the same mistakes over and
| over, but faster and faster, at higher and higher scale. That
| light at the end of the tunnel is not what you think it is.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Blaming any particular user is victim blaming and shifts
| responsibility away from those responsible: creators. (Let's
| assume commercial apps with paying users rather than volunteer
| freeware.)
|
| Whoever acts as the product manager or manager for UX needs to
| concurrently field input from users as signals rather than
| directly actionable feedback AND not be so self-absorbed with
| coding, grand feature plans, or what they "want" that they cannot
| prioritize use-cases of users in the real world (e.g., user-
| centric agile-ish development).
|
| Another issue is that popular apps backed by major corporations
| tend to drift away from their roots because their developers and
| product managers tend to be rewarded for features and appearances
| of work than steady consistency and usability rather than fixing
| bugs, maintaining what already exists, or improving bad UX.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| "A substantial fraction of the world's most brilliant, competent,
| and empathetic people ... spend their lives serving Marl" that is
| a logical fallacy because smart people don't waste their time on
| something as useless as that.
| gipp wrote:
| That's not what a logical fallacy is
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| "A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that occurs when
| invalid arguments or irrelevant points are introduced without
| any evidence to support them."
|
| invalid argument => x people doing y where x is "brilliant"
| and y is "serving Marl". Serving Marl is not brilliant. It
| doesn't count to work for a FAANG company to be considered
| brilliant, at least by my standards and view on how time is
| well spend.
| gipp wrote:
| Yeah, that's cool and all, but
|
| a) a logical fallacy is a particular _pattern_ of invalid
| argument, not just an argument that is invalid. So just on
| like a semantic level, an individual argument can 't _be_ a
| fallacy, though it can _commit_ one.
|
| b) fallacies are invalid inferences by construction. You
| just don't agree with the premise in this case (and are
| also implicitly proposing a second premise that doing
| something not-brilliant means a person is not themselves
| brilliant)
|
| And most importantly c) whether or not working for a FAANG
| company is "brilliant" is entirely a question of your
| opinion.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| a) I googled my description. Does it really matter if you
| use a verb or an adjective to convey the message?
|
| b) One is brilliant when doing brilliant things, and
| stupid when doing stupid things. A chainsmoker stops
| being a smoker until he reaches for the next cigarette.
|
| c) yea I explicitly wrote "at least by my standards and
| view on how time is well spend"
| skyyler wrote:
| Surely you understand the underlying message about perverse or
| mis-aligned incentive?
|
| Are you familiar with the fallacy fallacy?
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Do you mean that the author meant it in a sarcastic way? My
| impression was that the author meant it in a literal way.
|
| You are saying I shouldn't describe the whole sentence as
| fallacy because in any case, part of it is true? I don't know
| that doesn't go well with writing sneering comments.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Tyranny of the Corporate Conglomerate is a more compelling
| explanation for the downward spiral in product quality. Take
| Reddit's decision to cut off API access, which destroyed
| independent apps like Apollo as well as all the very useful
| search tools (pushshift) - I haven't visited Reddit once since
| that happened.
|
| It's all about controlling the users as a controlled user base is
| more easily exploited for profit. First corral the sheep so that
| they can be more efficiently fleeced, that's the mentality of the
| executive suite.
| dkarl wrote:
| I think the author took the wrong conclusions away from his
| experience. All the questions, all the personalization, all the
| stuff that apps tried to add to make things _better_ actually
| made things _worse._ All they could measure was similarity. They
| encouraged him to double down on choosing people based on their
| tastes in entertainment and how they answered cheesy questions,
| ignoring three factors that perhaps should have been obvious from
| the beginning:
|
| 1. People are already effectively segregated by similarity in
| their real and online lives, and a dating app does them a
| disservice by doubling down on this.
|
| 2. Difference is an essential part of relationships. How many
| successful relationships do you know of where one person is
| spontaneous but liable to do foolish things, and the other person
| is steady and reliable but maybe a bit boring if left to
| themselves? Or where one person is an introvert but loves to cook
| for people and the other person is an extrovert who loves to
| throw parties?
|
| 3. People who try to get to know each other online are often
| surprised (and disappointed) when they meet in person. Online,
| you can only get very, very rough indicators of in-person
| romantic capability, no matter how much time and detail you have
| to work with. A month of getting to "know" someone online is
| worth less than five minutes of in-person conversation.
|
| If you agree with these things, why in the world would you use
| any dating app whose basic premise runs contrary to them?
|
| Tinder was _accidental genius._ A simplistic swipe left / swipe
| right app does exactly what you want. You show up knowing you
| don't know anything about the person, but vaguely excited. It's
| like glimpsing somebody from across the room and walking over to
| talk to them, except it's not just for people who enjoy spending
| time in crowded rooms striking up conversations with strangers
| who might not be interested in them.
|
| People bag on Tinder because it's superficial. Tinder is genius
| _because_ it 's superficial. It sticks to the only thing that any
| dating app has ever been good at, and it leaves everything else
| in human hands. That's why dating apps are converging on the
| Tinder model. When apps stop doing what apps are terrible at, and
| stick to what apps can actually help with, there's very little
| left, but it's extremely useful.
| gz5 wrote:
| And the tyranny extends because most of the money goes to those
| who can (theoretically) get geometric growth - get lots of us
| during our Marl moments.
|
| If the pendulum swings the other way - meaning we each have less
| Marl moments - more of us willing to pay for an experience with
| dollars than time, then expect more OKCupids to start and to
| persist. Theoretically without venture money.
|
| I think LLMs may help swing the pendulum in the OkCupid direction
| but in two very different ways - curious how others see it.
|
| 1. Lots more Marl courting apps developed, faster. Causing more
| fatigue. Less time to go to any single Marl app; reluctance to
| try new ones. Push pendulum away from Marl apps - each of us cuts
| our Marl moments.
|
| 2. Ability to develop OkCupid apps with less investment and
| target smaller circles (which often means i can deliver a better
| experience to that small circle, and not need VC
| funding/geometric growth to keep the lights on). Pull pendulum
| towards OKCupid apps.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| andrewmg wrote:
| As Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."[0]
|
| [0]https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-
| me...
| waffletower wrote:
| To Pogo: 'What do you mean "us"? Do you have a mouse in your
| pocket?'
| npsimons wrote:
| > It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of
| us and encouraging us to become those people.
|
| That _is_ incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes
| me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate
| goal, _especially_ of people.
| lifty wrote:
| It's not deliberate. It's the tragedy of the commons. They
| are tapping into a shared resource (our well being) and
| everyone else is doing it.
| Finnucane wrote:
| There's no commons on a commercial website. This is
| deliberate.
| somedude895 wrote:
| It's a very good point that I think some commenters here should
| take to heart. No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're
| all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or
| another.
| npsimons wrote:
| > No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part
| of the masses and behave this way at one point or another.
|
| While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems
| to _encourage_ this? Shouldn 't we be trying to do better?
|
| If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?
| intended wrote:
| Spitballing -
|
| Perhaps due long tail effects.
|
| Tech (platforms) will always be advertising focused,
| because information systems scale with compute. marginal
| costs are so minor, that the limit becomes human attention.
|
| Which is also why apple may be able to focus on user
| centric design better. They are product + tech.
|
| Then again I can see other physical product firms delving
| into advertising - so its most likely corporate
| behavior/values.
| tqi wrote:
| I think the problem is there isn't a clear delineation
| between "traps" and "meaningful improvement."
|
| Take Signal for example - early days they had a ton of
| success with a core group of users, in spite of a number of
| product warts. Ever since then, they've been making
| usability improvements to lower friction and appeal to more
| and more marginal users. Is that good or bad? Based on the
| hn threads I've seen, it seems like the jury is pretty
| mixed?
| spott wrote:
| Because there is an endless amount of human time spent like
| this, but we all have limited attention for other things.
|
| If you try to appeal to someone's better parts, then there
| is a limit to the amount of attention that they can apply
| to your product.
|
| If you try to appeal to someone's base need for dopamine,
| then the limit of attention is much higher.
| telios wrote:
| The reason it works is because they've done the research to
| make it work. It isn't a coincidence DAUs increase. I think
| it is important to recognize that it can impact you, and take
| steps to account for that, even if - or especially if - you
| don't want it to. You are not immune to propaganda, and all
| that.
| srik wrote:
| That is the insight I'm surprised the author didn't zero in on.
| beefman wrote:
| Good point, but there are also 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.
|
| A large percentage never used e-mail because e-mail addresses
| are too abstract. They only began using "social media" when
| they could address correspondence by photograph.
|
| 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.
|
| Though smart people are sometimes Marl, they are Marl less
| often, or in more sophisticated ways (like wasting time on
| Hacker News instead of TikTok).
| spott wrote:
| 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 more Marls to add to your
| user pool because Marl is the basest human need for a steady
| effortless dopamine drip. Just about everyone has some amount
| of time that they spend as Marl, so there is an almost
| limitless pool of Marl time to pull new users from.
|
| I'm trying to find some way to say that this isn't what you
| actually want, but I'm struggling. If you are making a product
| for everyone, Marl is the only persona that is in everyone, so
| you should probably target Marl.
|
| However, if you are trying to build a product for a more
| constrained persona, you should probably be careful of using
| metrics that measure Marls. Because there are so many of them
| (even your users with other personas are sometimes Marls!) if
| you aren't really careful, you will enshitify your product as
| you continue your A/B testing gradient descent into a user base
| of Marls, without anyone you were trying to get -- even if you
| don't loose your content creators and conscientious consumers,
| you have converted them into Marls, and lost what you were
| trying to achieve.
|
| Enshitification is the conversion of your target user from any
| other kind of persona, to Marls.
|
| [0] there are other personas, these were that the ones that
| immediately came to mind.
| lapcat wrote:
| > OKCupid, like the other acquisitions of Match.com
|
| The article seems to just glance over this crucial fact.
|
| Online dating sites have gotten worse because the Match Group
| monopolizes them. There's hardly any competition. Same with
| Google Search. Monopolies suck. They start out good, in order to
| attract all of the users, and then once they've acquired all of
| the users, they turn to unchecked profit maximization and stop
| caring about the users.
|
| It should be called the tyranny of the monopoly, not the the
| tyranny of the marginal user.
| jmuguy wrote:
| This kind of makes me want to just remake OKCupid. I met my
| wife on there. It worked, really well, as the author describes.
| Surely there's money to be made there without just being
| another Tinder clone.
| YouSuck2 wrote:
| There is, you will just have zero users because everybody
| uses the Match.com and Bumble duopoly
| nostrademons wrote:
| The two issues are related. Focus on the marginal user is much
| heavier with monopolies, because a) these are usually built off
| of strong network effects which often leads to monopoly and b)
| _monopolies don't need to worry about losing their existing
| customers to competitors_. Competitive industries often focus
| much more heavily on churn, and minimizing churn means keeping
| your existing customers happy.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| Google does not have a monopoly on search engines. There is
| abundant competition in the search engine market: DuckDuckGo,
| Bing, Yandex, Brave, Yahoo.
|
| Nobody uses Google because they have to, they use it because it
| is the best.
| shmde wrote:
| > Nobody uses Google because they have to, they use it
| because it is the best.
|
| Oh yeah, you sure its not because its the default browser on
| Android ?
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| Internet Explorer's market share was 65% in 2009. In 2015,
| just before its slated deprecation to Edge, it was 19%.
| That isn't because it wasn't the default, it's because it
| wasn't good enough.
|
| If Google Search, as the default search engine of Android,
| wasn't good enough, nobody would use it.
| lapcat wrote:
| > There is abundant competition in the search engine market:
| DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Brave, Yahoo.
|
| DuckDuckGo and Yahoo both use Bing's search index. (Which
| sucks whenever Bing randomly removes your website for no
| reason.)
|
| Brave Search is a very recent addition, just within the past
| year or two.
| xnx wrote:
| Many consider OpenAI, Amazon, and TikTok to all be
| competitors to Google Search.
| RunSet wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/LokiList/comments/s0a0w6/why_i_made...
|
| Also:
|
| > we took pairs of bad matches (actual 30% match) and told them
| they were exceptionally good for each other (displaying a 90%
| match.)
|
| https://archive.ph/O2AF1#selection-421.14-421.145
| YouSuck2 wrote:
| [flagged]
| wiremine wrote:
| > 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 geography and a single niche, and use
| marketing to gain a pre-launch group of a few thousand
| individuals.
|
| 3. The MRR is not great, and churn is around 2 months.
| Therefore, it's a hard market to scale into effectively without
| a lot of money.
|
| 4. Beyond the financials, the ethics are interesting. You're
| either selling your users to advertisers, or you're you're
| nickel-and-diming your users for low-value features.
|
| Ultimately the group we were involved with decided to invest
| their money and time into other projects.
|
| That all said: Match.com has a monopoly because most startups
| want a quick exit, and not actually solve the core problems. If
| someone like Facebook really wanted to enter the market and
| win, they could crush Match.com, IMHO. (Not saying that would
| be a good thing, just pointing out it's possible.)
| pc86 wrote:
| Facebook Dating has been around for years, and I've only
| heard it spoken of in the wild once, with derision.
| [deleted]
| guestbest wrote:
| But the monopolies are prestigious places to work, and marginal
| users are ungrateful and poor. Won't somebody please defend the
| poor rich tech robber barons?
| ivee wrote:
| (author here) I agree monopoly & market power is a big part of
| the story here, but I feel like that is already well-
| understood; I was trying to describe what the incentives feel
| like from the inside.
|
| I guess more anti-trust in tech would probably be good, but the
| reality of network effects & the advertising economy mean it's
| actually nontrivial for government to intervene in a way that's
| clearly net good for users. Google has gifted the world amazing
| free-to-use software that gives me probably thousands of
| dollars of consumer surplus yearly. Had OKCupid stayed separate
| they might have had to tinderify anyways just to survive. Same
| with YouTube and Instagram had they not been acquired.
|
| If I had to point my way to a solution it would be something at
| the protocol or operating system level. Apple, for example,
| mostly doesn't make money from ads and could set up their OS in
| a way that makes apps compete to satisfy user intentions rather
| than hijack their attention.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Had OKCupid stayed separate they might have had to tinderify
| anyways just to survive.
|
| I never used them but I did read their blog and my sense is
| that they leaned a bit towards that demographic anyway.
|
| As I wrote elsewhere, a lot of people jump to the conclusion
| that a company was ruined by a buyer or that a company let
| themselves stagnate. But I'd argue (agree?) it's often the
| case that the "marginal user" (or mainstream audience) have
| no real interest in what appealed to the early adopters.
|
| And the early adopters may have moved on as well. I was
| pretty into eBay as an auction site at one point and I mostly
| lost interest.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| relevant link for dating startup economics for investors:
|
| https://andrewchen.com/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/
|
| and the HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606572
| postmodest wrote:
| It should also be noted that match.com knows that it's business
| isn't "connecting people in stable relationships" but "luring
| people to pay for match.com by promising them connections that
| never work out."
|
| OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching
| with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.
|
| Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to
| survive, they HAVE to be bad at the service they purport to
| provide. They don't want people to have long term
| relationships, they want people to _use a dating site_.
|
| There are "societal good" functions that companies might
| provide, for which a profit motive is wholly un-applicable
| without destroying the function itself.
|
| There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free
| market" because the measure of their success cannot be
| expressed in market terms.
| afarrell wrote:
| A dating site could work sustainably if it was a site for
| planning date nights. Make profiles based on activities and
| swipe right or left on the _activities_ you want to do.
|
| Revenue sources would include:
|
| - Ads for local businesses, classes, and events.
|
| - Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year
| and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants.
|
| Once you get the site to work for date nights, let people be
| open to getting matched based on similar activity interests.
| Then you can solve the problem of two users finding a
| specific joint activity.
|
| Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex
| with? No, but computers are bad at sex.
|
| Would this solve the problem married couples have of picking
| a place to eat? Hopefully.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| > Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left
| on the activities you want to do.
|
| Back in the early 2010s there was a dating site that was
| based around this premise. You would post a specific
| activity and see if someone wanted to join you for it. I
| didn't personally use it (as intended) but it was a great
| place to get fun date night activities with my partner. I
| think they realized that use case (date night planning) and
| eventually added this as a feature. I don't remember the
| name of the site unfortunately, someone else might. I would
| be surprised if it's still around.
|
| edit: Found it! it was called HowAboutWe.com.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/tag/howaboutwe/
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/
| 1...
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| That's also similar to a service OkCupid had separate
| from the main site called Crazy Blind Date.
|
| With this one, however, you defined the qualities you
| were seeking and the times and part of the city you were
| available for a date. They would match people up based on
| the time, location and OkCupid match rating (mostly, I
| think) and would ask if you wanted to meet the person. It
| gave you just their basic info and a distorted photo.
|
| I used it for a while and don't remember why I stopped
| but it was one of the best dating apps I've used. None of
| the dates went anywhere, but it was a really simple and
| easy way to meet new people.
| com2kid wrote:
| I ran a startup making something similar to this pre-covid,
| it wasn't just date night, it was "find something to do in
| under 5 minutes". Groups of 4 to 6, partnering with local
| businesses who hosted the events. You opened the app, said
| what you wanted to do and when, and you were automatically
| put into a group. You could select how many people you
| already had going with you (date, or just a group of 2
| friends who needed a few more people for a cooking class or
| whatnot).
|
| No photos until just before the event started, because
| photos turn things into a beauty contest and people start
| judging on looks, which is where, IMHO, all my competition
| in the same space went wrong.
|
| Events were scheduled for as little as 4 hours out, and
| only up to 72hrs in the future. The entire app flow was
| designed to be as close as possible to a "I am bored,
| entertain me now" button.
|
| Investors hated it, two sided marketplaces are apparently
| something they like to avoid due to difficulties around
| execution.
|
| People were _desperate_ for this type of service though,
| for one marketing campaign my user acquisition cost dropped
| as low as 15 cents per user.
|
| (If any investor reading wants to throw me a million I'll
| start it back up again. ;) Solving the loneliness epidemic
| in America's cities is a huge chance to do some social
| good!)
| mighmi wrote:
| You weren't able to scale enough initially to be
| profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what
| scale would you be able to support your burn rate?
|
| This is a fantastic project. I also briefly worked on
| something similar, but left when I learned more about my
| coworkers.
| com2kid wrote:
| > You weren't able to scale enough initially to be
| profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what
| scale would you be able to support your burn rate?
|
| Bootstrapped, COVID hit right before the launch date.
|
| Infra costs were ~$200 a month to support 10k DAU. I'd
| just come off of working on embedded, so I was used to
| writing really efficient code. :)
|
| > At what scale would you be able to support your burn
| rate?
|
| Just needed to cover my living expenses mortgage and
| salaries!
|
| Obviously to scale money was needed for ad campaigns, but
| people are lonely and offering to solve loneliness has a
| high conversion rate!
| Numeral4072 wrote:
| I agree the idea seems solid enough, but accommodating
| the increased complexity of scaling it up sounds quiet
| difficult. Out of curiosity what did you learn about your
| coworkers? Something about their motivations for creating
| such an app or what?
| Plasmoid wrote:
| Why did you shut it down?
| com2kid wrote:
| $ and COVID.
|
| I burned through my savings and was ready to launch in
| earl 2020.
|
| Oops.
| intended wrote:
| Theres a YC video that goes over tar pit problems. If i
| am not mistaken, this exact scenario is covered as a tar
| pit.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Theres a YC video that goes over tar pit problems. If i
| am not mistaken, this exact scenario is covered as a tar
| pit.
|
| Yeah the final end goal was either to make lots of deals
| with local businesses (hard to scale) or to license an ML
| personality matching model to companies.
|
| The app had a handful of personality questions that I
| copied over from research done at one of the Nordic
| universities (I forget which one) on what makes people
| get along together in a casual setting. The American
| universities have mostly done research on group cohesion
| in corporate settings, which maybe hints at what is wrong
| with American society at large!
|
| Cruise liners and casinos would pay a fortune to know
| what guests would vibe together.
|
| I had a partner website that allowed for self onboarding,
| but of course b2b2c is never that simple. :)
|
| The operating costs were so absurdly low (~$200 a month
| per city it was running in) that letting people create
| their own events for free was in the near term road map,
| no reason not to.
| janeerie wrote:
| There did used to be one like this and I can't for the life
| of me remember the name of it.
|
| My friend didn't meet her husband on it, but she did meet
| her future husband's roommate.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex
| with? No, but computers are bad at sex._
|
| Are they? I thought hookup sites like Tinder and Grindr
| were very popular.
| autoexec wrote:
| Generally, the things that are valuable to society, but can't
| be delivered by corporations who are only interested in
| maximizing their own wealth and power are good candidates for
| something that would be better run by government.
|
| Maybe a dating site actually would make for a good social
| service... Assuming that what we'd gain in terms of the
| stability and happiness of the population is worth more than
| what it would cost to run the service it might not be a bad
| idea. Especially in areas where dating is uniquely difficult
| like Iceland where apps exist to make sure you're not dating
| someone closely related.
| rurp wrote:
| While there are some perverse incentives, I think this is
| overstating it. Millions of people enter the dating market
| every year by aging into it or ending a previous
| relationship. That seems like plenty of space to make a
| profitable business. Of course there is the temptation to
| increase the churn rate, but it doesn't _have_ to be
| exploitative.
| koromak wrote:
| It literally does, if you're a publicly traded company.
| Karunamon wrote:
| _No it bloody well does not._ The "maximize shareholder
| value" thing has never been read that strictly by a court
| of law (otherwise, Apple would have been ripe for a suit
| when they told off an activist investor rep who was upset
| they were pursuing environmental goals at the expense of
| better ROI [1]).
|
| Companies hollow out (or enshittify) their products
| because it is easy and because it guarantees results at
| least in the short term. There are other ways to grow,
| and they tend to require imagination and long-term
| planning. Don't blame the stock market for entirely
| voluntary choices of taking the easy way out.
|
| [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-
| shareholder...
| grotorea wrote:
| Yes but it doesn't have to be upheld in a court of law.
| It just has to be what corporate officers are ordered,
| selected and incentivized around. It doesn't need to be
| legally required for people to do something.
| unmole wrote:
| This stupid meme needs to die.
| wpietri wrote:
| It really doesn't, at least in the legal sense. Managers
| have wide legal latitude to run the business as they
| think best. However, in practice corporate boards tend to
| vote the short-term numbers, which combined with
| decreasing CEO tenure is a strong incentive for CEOs to
| do short-term, exploitative things. That's not always the
| case, though. Bezos, for example, built Amazon to its
| juggernaut status by ignoring the short terms numbers and
| doing a lot of long-term investment with a focus on
| increasing customer value. It's only lately that it's
| turned to exploiting its customers as well.
| Jensson wrote:
| Regulations will catch up to it, maybe in 50 years. Look
| at cars, they started out as cobbled together death
| traps, but today they are very user friendly and safe
| (not the software, but the machinery). Those things
| didn't happen thanks to car companies being nice, but
| thanks to regulations.
| c0balt wrote:
| It does when one of, if not the only, important metric is
| growth. And for many publicly traded companies that act in
| the social/dating space growth tends to be a key metric.
| After some point the "natural" growth and contraction of
| the market will be a limiter. It's also arguably easier to
| handle a recurring user than having to spend time on
| acquiring new users to a platform.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable
| business.
|
| Sure, but VCs and big companies want to maximize profit,
| not just be profitable. When a profitable startup sells
| out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't
| enough for me".
| rbultje wrote:
| > When a profitable startup sells out, that's the
| founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".
|
| Or just "I'm done with this shit". It's remarkably
| difficult to run a small (software) business in the US.
| Section 174, multi-state income tax filings. It's a
| bloody pain if your goal is not just to operate the
| business and be overhead, but to actually do stuff.
| Regulatory/tax complexity thresholds depending on
| business size would be a welcome improvement.
| pjerem wrote:
| The point is, even if it works, if you need 4 months for it
| to work instead of 1 month, that is 4 times the revenue for
| them.
|
| So yes, it have to work, at least for their reputation, but
| it also have to not work that much.
| JustinVx wrote:
| Unless it's some utopian value-based family company, the
| goal of any company will ultimately become to maximize
| profit and/or growth because that is what shareholders
| want.
| szundi wrote:
| Sorry to point out that whatever you could make helping
| your clients happily leave you forever, you can make 5x
| that making them suffer. It is simple math.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Unless you have competition.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Also you'll be acquired by Match.com
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| This is not a convincing argument. If a dating site can't
| get people to match, they're likely to stop using it,
| just like any other product/service you pay for that
| doesn't work.
| Miraste wrote:
| The user won't leave simply because the product doesn't
| work; they'll leave if they _believe_ it won 't work. For
| dating apps, tricking users is more profitable than
| trying to match them. Hence all the psychological
| warfare: fake profiles, new account boosts, fake likes,
| blurred out likes, paid boosts, swipe stack interface,
| etc. etc.
| grotorea wrote:
| Yeah I think this is the missing part. Even if
| enshittification is more profitable, people should still
| be able to just change services to a better one.
| skeaker wrote:
| Change to what? Another match.com-owned service?
| grotorea wrote:
| Yeah that's the part I haven't figured out. Why isn't
| there a offering for the market demand for something like
| old OKCupid? A dating site doesn't seem like an
| enterprise that needs a lot of startup capital or
| anything.
| intended wrote:
| Casinos are very profitable.
|
| A casino with no physical upkeep ?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > If a dating site can't get people to match, they're
| likely to stop using it
|
| And if it succeeds in getting people to match, they
| _definitely_ stop using it.
|
| "Likely to stop using it" is the better outcome for them
| in terms of customer retention
| bwanab wrote:
| I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they
| really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services
| anymore.
|
| The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like
| auto-repair post-warranty period.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Which is, of course, an argument for single-payer
| healthcare. (Or even semi-centralized, insurance based
| healthcare, for that matter). A $BIGORG has both the
| firepower and the incentives to ensure that your bodyparts
| stay healthy at minimum expense.
|
| An anecdote: Ads like "your dentist hates this simple
| trick" don't work at all in a single-payer system. People
| are just baffled as to why a doctor wouldn't want you to be
| healthy!
| mhb wrote:
| It's an argument for having dentists compete, as they do,
| and picking the one who does a good job.
| Sharlin wrote:
| It's not like a layman can have a good idea of whether a
| dentist has done a good job, except in cases where the
| job was clearly botched. People can't realistically make
| an informed choice based on dentist competence, so soft
| metrics like patient comfort and general bellyfeel
| dominate. Moreover, people hopefully don't need dental
| services very frequently, so gathering enough data takes
| a long time.
| mhb wrote:
| OK. But a single payer addresses none of those issues.
| vhcr wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37022911
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This type of logic doesn't really hold for healthcare
| providers, at least not in the US. The licensing
| restrictions is how they make their money. The demand for
| service so far outstrips the supply of providers that they
| don't really need individual repeat business. They'll do
| just fine with positive word-of-mouth. In the specific case
| of dental care, there is also the problem that "fixing" the
| immediate problem generally can't fix the root cause, which
| is some combination of bad genetics and people constantly
| drinking loads of nearly pure sugar. As long as those
| things don't change, you'll keep coming back with new
| problems even if they fix the old ones.
| saltminer wrote:
| > They'll do just fine with positive word-of-mouth.
|
| Sometimes you don't even need that.
|
| If you ever want to feel depressed, go to your city's
| subreddit and search for "what business will you never go
| to again?" I remember one popped up on my city's sub
| recently, and it made me incredibly thankful for my
| dentist. The sheer amount of shit some get away with
| (while having ritzy offices in expensive neighborhoods)
| is incredible. And sure, such a thread is bound to
| attract people who have had negative experiences, but the
| sheer quantity of complaints some places had (with nobody
| chiming in to defend them or say something to the effect
| of "I've never had any problems like that") spoke for
| itself.
| mhb wrote:
| That's silly. Do you also have the same feeling about
| carpenters, electricians and plumbers? If they fix
| something poorly you hire a different one next time.
| com2kid wrote:
| > I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they
| really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services
| anymore.
|
| Dental problems are two fold, genetic and habitual.
|
| There are people who brush and floss 2x a day and have
| miserable teeth, their personal biome and genetics have
| screwed them.
|
| Then there are people like me, I skipped the dentist for 2
| years and when I went the dentist said my teeth looked
| perfect. (Though being on a keto diet for that time might
| have helped, one dentist I had said keto is the perfect
| diet for dental health! :) )
| pc86 wrote:
| This makes sense as things like bread, if left in your
| teeth, eventually turn to basically sugar, and start
| working to dissolve your teeth.
| com2kid wrote:
| > This makes sense as things like bread, if left in your
| teeth, eventually turn to basically sugar, and start
| working to dissolve your teeth.
|
| This was in the early days of keto, back when you
| couldn't find any keto products at the store and it was
| just a small subreddit that spread by word of mouth.
|
| I described my diet to my dentist (no carbs at all, no
| sugar, lots of green veggies, healthy meats and fats, all
| home cooked), and she instantly approved of it.
|
| IMHO Keto has gone off the rails, no true scotsman and
| all of that. In the early days keto shared a lot of
| dietary stuff with paleo in regards to no processed
| ingredients, everything from scratch, and I think that
| made a real difference in how effective it was.
|
| Before if I wanted keto ice cream I had to _make_ keto
| ice cream. Now I can just buy it at every local grocery
| store. Well excess calories are still excess calories...
|
| Also the prepackaged keto stuff isn't as satiating as
| from scratch keto food, and half of the benefit of keto
| is the food is supposed to be more satiating.
|
| /rant
| fastasucan wrote:
| >If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their
| services anymore.
|
| Not really. A dentist fixing your dental cavity doesn't
| stop you from gettinga new one in 10 years.
| pohl wrote:
| It sounds like a build-to-flip startup idea is to create a
| dating service geared towards creating LTRs and growing it to
| the point where you get on Match's radar.
| hooverd wrote:
| Nationalize it. 'partner.gov' here we come.
| grotorea wrote:
| I think this is going to start in East Asia if anywhere
| RugnirViking wrote:
| given trajectory of birth rates, plumetting sex amongst
| youth, and various governments ratcheting up incentives
| to have children, this may be more likely than you
| think...
| failuser wrote:
| Singapore has a government dating service, SDU, right?
| They try to do eugenics on top of that though, so the
| long term relations might not have the highest priority
| as well.
| amelius wrote:
| See also doctors and medicine.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| Would be great if you could bid: the user signs a contract
| where they commit to pay $X if they get married.
|
| The more you commit to, the more priority the algorithm gives
| you as it wants you to get married asap.
|
| This could be easily gamed as the users could just commit to
| absurdly high amounts and never get married - while getting
| prioritized by the site.
| xapata wrote:
| Contracts can help. Knowing that marriage is at least
| somewhat likely for happy couples, site users could sign an
| agreement that they'll pay the site $1k in the event that
| they become married to someone they meet through the site. Of
| course this could lead to freeloaders who try to avoid
| triggering the agreement, but that just means the contract
| may need optimization. Freemium models can work.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Alternatively hear me out you could have people who
| actually care about other people make a website that treats
| people like they want to be treated charges a modest per
| month fee to users looking to do a good job and turn a
| profit. Unless you've already signed a deal with the devil
| with people who don't give a fuck about other people it
| doesn't have to be a maximal profit per user it just needs
| to be more than the cost to run the site.
|
| If you don't constantly redesign your site or feel
| compelled to use the most expensive hosting possible, or
| cosplay as google it doesn't even have to be that
| expensive. A single actual physical computer could serve a
| hell of a lot of people for a modest amount of money. The
| $20 OK cupid charges per user could trivially pay for the
| oh so complicated task of allowing people to find and
| message like minded users.
|
| A doctor doesn't need to work around the market economics
| of not making people sick so you can cure them they have
| agency they can choose just to be a good doctor and most of
| them do.
| ignite wrote:
| I think many of the dating sites started that way. That's
| why they were better in the beginning. But eventually,
| they go public, or get acquired, and end up getting run
| by people who are bottom line focused.
| jstarfish wrote:
| People are avoiding marriage these days and experimenting
| with noncontractual arrangements like polyamory. Even
| before the fraud materializes, the proposed system would be
| a total failure based on societal changes.
|
| Always get paid upfront. Net-anything just gives others
| time to find a way to cheat you.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I think 40-60% of people are still seeking escalator-
| style relationships that would result in marriage (even
| if they're not seeking such relationships immediately),
| which is an enormous number of people
| oooyay wrote:
| > OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of
| matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.
|
| That was OKCupids claim, but was this claim ever proven
| through data that directly affirmed that as an outcome?
|
| Often these websites have tiered profit schemes that can milk
| a user for $100+/m. Sometimes they gamify it, like loot
| boxing, to make it more lucrative. I don't remember OKCupid
| being any different.
| phonon wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcup
| i...
| jstarfish wrote:
| Slow release may not be a bad thing. Modern dating seems so
| dehumanizing...if the NPC you're matched with doesn't check
| all of your preference boxes, reroll them.
|
| But if OKCupid drags this process out so you only get n
| matches per month, they maximize revenue while maybe
| encouraging people to appreciate each other's differences.
|
| Like getting a "crappy" CD from Columbia House...might as
| well listen to it. Maybe it'll grow on you!
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| > There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a
| "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be
| expressed in market terms.
|
| Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your
| matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users
| for your matchmaking service and then return their money if
| they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth
| is by betting on the success of the couples you suggest.
|
| I think companies don't try this strategy because it would be
| too expensive for the end user. You would need to charge
| thousands of dollars to make up for the hard work of
| matchmaking and the risk of bad matches. Not something an
| internet startup can do at scale.
| YouSuck2 wrote:
| And do they return the money in the case of divorce?
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Probably not. If they got to the point of needing a
| divorce that means the relationship looked like it was
| going to work, so much so that the people involved agreed
| to marry.
|
| No online service can possibly promise to be more
| thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans
| who chose to marry each other.
| petsfed wrote:
| There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to
| pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO
| roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts.
|
| Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse
| is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon
| divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed
| to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and
| society at large.
|
| There's not really a way to do rent-seeking on matchmaking
| without breaking matchmaking, so maybe don't seek rent on
| the matching itself? Just let your revenue stream be
| advertising. It's fine.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| > Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-
| over
|
| That's a good idea. In this hypothetical app, if a couple
| stays together for a couple of years they should forfeit
| the right to get their money back even if they later
| break up. This reduces the amount of cash the company has
| to keep, at the cost of merely promising years-long
| relationships instead of marriages.
|
| > Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good
| matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society
| at large.
|
| How is that unambiguous? It seems to me like an empirical
| question. Are people taking too many risks with their
| relationships, or too little? The answer is different for
| each person, or even for the same person at different
| stages of their life. Very ambiguous stuff.
| petsfed wrote:
| Time spent dating, or in a long-term relationship, prior
| to marriage is positively correlated with enduring
| marriage. That is, people who date each other for 3 years
| or more prior to marriage are 50% less likely to get a
| divorce than those who don't[0]. Thus, it pays societal
| dividends to encourage people to take their time and
| really get to know each other before getting married.
| Saying "the sooner you get married, the sooner you get
| your money back" or worse still "stay together without
| getting married for too long, and you risk not getting
| your money back" specifically discourages the behaviors
| that prevent domestic violence (including child abuse).
| What I believe we want is marriages that uplift their
| members, and minimize spousal abuse. Making people feel
| like they can't afford to _not_ get married is the exact
| same phenomenon that drove up domestic violence during
| the COVID lockdowns[1].
|
| If you're telling me that more abusive marriages is
| _better_ for society, I don 't think we have enough
| common ground to discuss this.
|
| 0. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meet-catch-
| and-keep/...
|
| 1. https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/covid-19-isolat
| ion-li...
| no_wizard wrote:
| Unlimited PTO is poorly worded and always felt like a
| scam to me
|
| It's not really unlimited and people tend to take less
| overall
| amelius wrote:
| Nope because this can easily be gamed, since getting
| married doesn't need to cost much.
|
| Also the free market still needs a central authority for
| any proofs.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| > this can easily be gamed
|
| There are other online services like Uber and AirBnB in
| which it is much easier to cheat by communicating with
| your counterpart outside of the app, that way you don't
| have to pay commissions and so on. It's a serious problem
| for them.
|
| But this hypothetical online service marries people.
| Fraud is much riskier there, because divorce can be
| extremely expensive if your partner-in-fraud doesn't
| cooperate.
|
| > the free market still needs a central authority for any
| proofs
|
| Isn't marriage a relatively centralized institution? The
| central authority that marries people can easily provide
| proof that they indeed married some people.
| intended wrote:
| In a free market an inefficient model loses market share
| and gets bought out. Then it's converted to the efficient
| model.
|
| That said, firms exist with that model.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Ding ding ding, I met my current partner on OKCupid 9 years
| ago, don't think I will ever need to return. (fingers-
| crossed, knock-on-wood, [insert-platitude-here)
|
| Seeing as I have a "face for radio", I doubt I would ever
| manage to date seriously on "swipe right/left" platforms.
| fidotron wrote:
| You absolutely could do market based dating where people can
| bid how much a date with the other would be worth and you
| match everyone every few days based on the highest sum of
| bids, collecting the difference.
|
| So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date
| A the match will cost A 20 plus fees.
|
| This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn't what
| people want.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into
| a finacialized instrument?
|
| Sorry but I have quite a viscerally bad reaction to such a
| proposal. Sure it could work in some sense of finding value
| price pairs or whatever where people's preferences aren't
| clear.
|
| But it also seems extremely dystopian and horrifying,
| particularly applied to the dating market. It would be
| similar with finding friends. People do this naturally and
| normally on their own for free no problem if you put them
| in a big room together. It neeeds no incentive
| HPsquared wrote:
| A lot of people don't seem to do it in today's society.
| Hence the need for these sites.
| jerf wrote:
| "or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating
| into a finacialized instrument?"
|
| I dunno. I kinda look forward to the news stories about
| the Economic Collapse of 2035 being due to the market
| finally realizing that too many supposedly AAA Date-
| Backed Securities were actually Non-Investment Grade Junk
| Dates, and the subsequent revaluation of the Date Market
| caused the entire banking system to become insolvent
| because all the dates they were holding on their books as
| marked to maturity are in fact never going to be anything
| but immature, and consequently must be marked down to
| their actual market value of Zero.
|
| I mean, it's a pretty realistic economic threat. Who
| doesn't have a story of something they anticipated being
| a AAA Rated Date turning out to have junk date status?
| Definitely a lot of mismatched incentives all the way
| around.
| bawolff wrote:
| So prostitution with extra steps?
| krisoft wrote:
| > This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn't
| what people want.
|
| I think you just reinvented sex work, but somehow made it
| more icky?
|
| The main and big problem with this if anyone would consider
| it for dating for real, which probably they wouldn't so no
| big worry, is what is in the price? So A just paid 20
| dollars for the pleasure of having a date with B. What did
| A buy? Does B have to stay at the date for a set time? Is B
| obligued to listen enthusiastically to A? Does B have to
| laugh at A's jokes? Even if they are lame? And then of
| course what happens when A thinks they paid for sex and B
| thinks not?
| ben_w wrote:
| > I think you just reinvented sex work, but somehow made
| it more icky?
|
| Or possibly expensive engagement/wedding rings in non-
| jewellery form.
|
| On a separate point, some of my socialist (and in a few
| cases literally communist) friends assert that the issues
| at the intersection of sex work with consent also apply
| to all other work under capitalism; I don't have a strong
| counter-argument to this.
|
| Money is fundamentally unnatural, so it's not surprising
| that it feels wrong and icky in a lot of situations.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| > OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of
| matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.
|
| This wasn't necessarily true. I actually met my wife on
| OkCupid, all the way back in 2007 originally, and she wasn't
| even the first long-term relationship I ended up off of the
| site, which was back in 2004. OkCupid used to have social
| features, allowing you to maintain a personal blog and follow
| other user's blogs. A whole lot of us had a pretty nice
| community, couchsurfing, visiting each other when we traveled
| for work. That was even how I met my wife, through the blogs,
| not by direct solicitation of a date. We didn't even live on
| the same coast when we met, but eventually moved to the same
| city by chance and ended up together.
|
| When Match Group bought the site, they killed these features
| and there was no longer any reason to stick around, but a lot
| of us had stuck around long after pairing off and marrying.
| For a long time, we even stayed in touch via other means and
| continued meeting up in person when we had the chance.
| Unfortunately, Facebook was the main place they all settled,
| and I did not want to stick around on Facebook, so mostly
| I've lost touch with these people now. But we had a nice
| community for a long time, even a nearly global community,
| with people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
|
| Heck, even the reason I originally joined OkCupid wasn't with
| the intention of finding dates. It was because of an old
| vBulletin forum I was on for Armenians in Los Angeles where a
| bunch of people took the personality tests and compared
| results, so I joined to do that. But things were different
| enough in 2004 that I didn't need to seek out dates. Women
| just messaged me and asked me out because they weren't yet
| overloaded with spam and jaded from the Internet turning to
| shit.
|
| The Internet was different in a lot of ways back then.
| OkCupid was founded by nerd grad students that mostly wanted
| to prove they could apply math to romance. But then they
| discovered math could actually make them rich, and Match
| Group never gave a shit and only cared about money from the
| start. I suspect much of what eventually became shit started
| that way. Larry and Sergey were probably legitimate math
| nerds, too. Mark Zuckerberg probably just wanted to hot-or-
| not his classmates. But then they all discovered they could
| get rich and investors killed the fun.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The dynamic you describe and the dynamic the article describes
| are completely independent. Your comment is completely beside
| the point.
|
| Its an article about the negative impact of catering to every
| use case. Not about why OKcupid sucks. Which makes your comment
| rather off topic.
| epivosism wrote:
| I wonder whether the flattening of product depth is a unique
| founder effect, or is destined to happen due to the eventual
| formation of monopolies?
|
| Take photo sharing as an example.
|
| Early Flickr was amazing. It had tons of features - great varied
| groups of all types, a huge licensed image search system, great
| tags, etc. I joined regional groups, and also criticism groups
| for street photos, etc. Their comment system wasn't just text, it
| had annotations and they were doing interesting things with
| geolocation, too.
|
| Then yahoo killed it and now Instagram rules, with fewer
| features, more addiction and less depth. Flickr had addiction
| loops too but that wasn't the main focus.
|
| What causes this shrinking of product space?
|
| Is it that the first companies to get mindshare have more
| product-exploration power than later entries? So if the early
| companies are creative, they can expand the product space a lot,
| and uniquely have time to do so. If so, we can just blame yahoo
| for ruining Flickr, and they actually had a chance.
|
| Alternatively, maybe at late stages competition is so high you'll
| always get the extreme focus on the best DAU maximizing loops?
| And eventual monopoly with a small product.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are
| getting dumber/lazier, or are users getting dumber/lazier
| because products are becoming less sophisticated?
| vsskanth wrote:
| I think its because you need feature parity with smartphones
| where you can't have too much UI complexity, otherwise it
| becomes too hard to use with just your fingers, compared to a
| desktop website where you have a keyboard and mouse to use
| outside the screen.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _smartphones where you can 't have too much UI
| complexity_
|
| this is a good hypothesis, except smartphone apps have much
| less UI feature complexity than is possible on a
| smartphone, i.e. it still seems to be a conscious choice to
| dumb down smart phone apps beyond what the UI and users can
| handle. A familiar example is banking apps, I have accounts
| at a number of large US banks, and in every case the phone
| apps leave out swaths of capabilities that their websites
| have, things like letting me see what Zelles I've sent to a
| particular person, "contact the bank" messaging, etc.
|
| image editing apps are another example, 100's of them in
| the app stores, but they're less feature rich than Windows
| Paint from 30 years ago. when they do something fancy, it's
| frequently because they are an app for doing that one
| thing.
| epivosism wrote:
| This is an often used argument by PMs, definitely. Kind of
| a headshot on anything sophisticated
|
| The fact that it also kills known useful things like VS,
| Photoshop isn't recognized and we continue to allow this
| invalid argument
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| The average user used to be an 18-40 year old person with
| post-secondary education, in a mid to high income country,
| using a laptop.
|
| Now, The average user is a 10-65 year old person using a
| smartphone.
| freedomben wrote:
| IMHO it's both. There will always be the possiblity of
| gaining more users by dumbing down the app, but the more
| things dumb down in general the dumber people get. It's a
| positive feedback loop.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are
| getting dumber /lazier,_
|
| > _or are users getting dumber /lazier because products are
| becoming less sophisticated?_
|
| or, in search of increased customer growth, is deeper product
| penetration into the bottom half of the sophistication bell-
| curve continually sieving ideas through fewer synaptic
| connections/simpler semantic nets
| Groxx wrote:
| It's probably safe to claim that _part_ of it (and what likely
| killed Flickr) is that the original owners are usually more
| able to make _coherent_ product features and explorations. They
| built something in the field because they knew something about
| the field.
|
| Once they're bought up by some other company, in particular any
| conglomerate, it gets worked on by a bunch of people who are
| experts _at building products in general_ , not experts _in
| that product 's field_. So they naturally try stuff that is
| less of a fit for the field it was originally targeted at...
| and potentially a better fit for "can make any money at all",
| I'm not trying to claim the new owners are all idiots. Just
| that the driving interests and expertise have shifted from what
| originally made it compelling, and that'll nearly always become
| less coherent as a product. At least until they have fully
| rebuilt it in their image.
|
| And then purchasers in the same field can sometimes escape this
| "now built by generalists" trap. Sometimes.
| esafak wrote:
| You raise a good point but you are too generous. The buyer
| tends to be mercenary. I think generic "professional"
| management only ends well in mature products and companies,
| where the main task is to increase efficiency. I don't expect
| the buyer to innovate the product.
| Groxx wrote:
| Conglomerates are IMO almost always mercenary and damaging,
| yeah.
|
| They're far from the only company purchases happening
| though, e.g. many small companies that grow too quickly
| sell to something larger to simply have the manpower and
| money to handle the new scale, and sometimes that ends up
| better for everyone. You just don't usually hear about
| these because they quietly work, and they don't involve
| globally-recognized names.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Then yahoo killed it and now Instagram rules, with fewer
| features, more addiction and less depth. Flickr had addiction
| loops too but that wasn't the main focus.
|
| Though Flickr does exist (owned by SmugMug). No idea how their
| finances are. I expect so so.
|
| You're right that community has gone away to a large degree.
| But I'm not sure how much power Flickr had to influence that
| other than _becoming_ Instagram--which the prosumer crowd would
| mostly have hated.
|
| Sometimes the mainstream crowd moves on from you and your
| choices are to more or less either let them or adapt in ways
| that aren't true to your vision.
| epivosism wrote:
| Yes, in this case I don't know. Flickr originally was
| developed by Stuart Butterfeld (among others) and he for one
| went on to do another amazing job at Slack. So clearly
| product was awesome there. Personally for me flickr got super
| slow and crappy for me, and also deleted my dad's 40k photo
| archive w/no warning and ignored appeal messages from
| multiple people on BS charges (He'd scanned an old newspaper
| article mentioning his father which tripped an auto-copyright
| system). Prior to that it was the clear market leader. But it
| basically stopped ever being linked to or showing up later
| on. So I think Yahoo effectively sped up the decline. It's
| not clear whether something like insta would always have won.
| Or even whether instagram is actually even economically ideal
| right now.
| efitz wrote:
| The article doesn't mention a number of contributing problems
| such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a
| problem.
|
| Perhaps Ycombinator is the wrong place to bring up such a point,
| but the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of
| value in a company almost certainly contributes significantly to
| the problems discussed in the article.
|
| What happened to community? The businesses I like to deal with
| are rooted in my area, owned and operated by local people with
| faces, and I willingly go interact with them.
|
| I have no such loyalty to large faceless internet companies, and
| negative loyalty to companies that enshittify everything as a way
| to eke out profit when bound to forever growth fantasies.
| npsimons wrote:
| > I have no such loyalty to large faceless internet companies,
| and negative loyalty to companies that enshittify everything as
| a way to eke out profit when bound to forever growth fantasies.
|
| You do, sure. But you're not a marginal user.
|
| A lot of the fine article reads to me as a sort of elitism,
| albeit one I find myself falling prey to: the tyranny of the
| masses, the normies, the filthy casuals, that ruin everything.
|
| I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought
| (possibly derailed, or just no steam), but I'd like to throw in
| that elitism is not _always_ a bad thing.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| > the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of
| value in a company
|
| This is a straw man. The primary source of value is the future
| cash flow. Since a long future is considered, growth is highly
| prized. I consider this a major achievement of mankind, to be
| able to value the future, today. Without this reasoning,
| financing for new businesses would cease to exist.
| bsenftner wrote:
| That's a good point. I think you're referencing a Present
| Value calculation? My big issue with a lot of valuation
| techniques is they are based on exponential growth. That
| strikes me as overly optimistic, leading to decisions that
| overlook profitable businesses that do not grow
| exponentially.
| selectodude wrote:
| They're based on constant growth. I guess over a long
| enough time frame, constant growth is exponential, but not
| in the windows that an investor expects to be paid back.
|
| Exponential growth is only expected in software because the
| development costs are so high and the marginal costs are so
| low. There's zero cost to growth, which makes it a winner-
| take-all market.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| As I said, my anti-growth example is the local family
| restaurant, that's hugely successful and profitable, popular,
| provides steady employment to new family members, and is not
| trying to take over the world.
|
| If it throws off profits, those can be invested in _other_
| businesses, not in growing the restaurant.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| If you read the writing of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of
| Patagonia, he calls out growth as the underlying cause of these
| issues. Our current economic system is oriented around growth
| and the assumption that it can continue indefinitely.
| bad_user wrote:
| Growth means prosperity.
|
| Also, the idea that the economy requires growth is BS, it's
| just that economic stagnation or recession currently means
| some people are going to be starving. And if you actually
| look at the world, with its still growing population in some
| countries, or an aging population in others, it's pretty
| clear why people starve when growth stops, and it has nothing
| to do with capitalism, or The Man.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Granting that for the sake of argument:
|
| That applies to the economy _as a whole._ It doesn 't mean
| that every single corporation in the economy has to grow,
| beyond the general rate of GDP growth.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Sustainable growth means prosperity. Unsustainable growth
| is taking out a loan against the future without any certain
| plan that it can be paid.
| nequo wrote:
| Japan hasn't had much GDP growth since 1990. You could say
| that its economy is stagnating. Yet starvation is hardly a
| defining phenomenon for its population. They have one of
| the highest life expectancies. Healthcare is widely
| available. Technological progress did not stop. And wealth
| inequality in this economy is among the lowest in the
| world.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I'm a N. American developer who worked in Tokyo for 6
| months back in '94. The most striking aspect of Japanese
| culture that is not present in N. America is a shared
| identity that everyone collaborates to make Japan and
| Japanese culture better. The common everyone, it seemed,
| held that value. Which is 100% absent from N. American
| culture; here our cultural value is "get mine, from you
| if possible, f everyone else" it seems.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > Yet starvation is hardly a defining phenomenon for its
| population.
|
| Isn't malnutrition a huge issue in Japan? That and
| massive increases in poverty especially for the elderly?
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| There is a reason Patagonia is consistently rated as the most
| favorable brand in America.
| pxc wrote:
| > Our current economic system is oriented around growth and
| the assumption that it can continue indefinitely.
|
| It's worse than that. For the present system to function
| correctly, growth _must_ continue indefinitely. Even just a
| _slower pace_ of growth constitutes a crisis under our
| current economic system.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Embedded debt obligations
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yeah, this certainly isn't on the users. The change is
| monopolies but perhaps even more, the end to the growth of the
| Internet. Both of these imply that each company needs to
| leverage each user it has. And that basically means pushing the
| users to make choices in every single situation where the user
| can be pushed.
|
| Here, you have various ideologies of user interface. One is
| approach that users are idiots/"easily confused" and need to be
| treated-as-such/"given clear direction. Another seems to this
| reference to the marginal user - that our product is craptasm
| of dark pattern 'cause we have to satisfy the least common
| denominator (it's Google, so maybe we're just on dark gray
| patterns currently).
| scythe wrote:
| > such as monopoly power.
|
| The article does mention monopoly power, but it uses instead
| the term 'network effects'. These are not exactly the same, but
| in the realm of social media and similar platforms, they're
| very close.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The article doesn't mention a number of contributing problems
| such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a
| problem.
|
| Indeed, and it shows when you look at how and where money is
| invested. Transoceanic fiber cables [1]... on paper it's a Good
| Thing that Africa and other historically piss poor regions get
| access to fast Internet, no doubt there. Or that Facebook pays
| many millions of dollars to regional ISPs for zero-rating,
| which helps them build out infrastructure.
|
| But IMO, this is not genuine. The priorities for the mega tech
| companies _clearly_ are to get more users hooked to their
| walled gardens, as the Western markets are already saturated
| and no further growth of the MLM pyramid /snowball scam is
| possible. Receiver nations are grasping at straws, it's obvious
| why - they need the infrastructure and have no way to pay for
| it - but it's going to bite them in the ass in the mid future.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-facebook-giant-
| unders...
| layer8 wrote:
| > I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know
| how to fight it.
|
| This can only be solved by company owners caring more about the
| usefulness of their product than about profit maximization. Being
| merely profitable should be fine. Being profitable should be a
| vehicle for creating and maintaining a good product, and not the
| other way around.
|
| This also means that metrics like DAU and automated methods like
| A/B testing are no substitute for having good judgement,
| listening to users, and doing in-person usability studies.
| theresistor wrote:
| Building off of the idea in here, the margin user also underlies
| the explosion of software scale: the software itself (how can
| these apps be so big?) and the teams (why do they need so many
| people?).
|
| When all that counts is gaining that N+1'th user, there's a
| strong incentive to pile on one-off features and special cases to
| ensure that every potential new user has a tailor-made first
| experience to hook them in. Facebook and Uber both lean heavily
| into this, for example.
| ultra-jeremyx wrote:
| Are there any examples of _consumer_ software that has an
| interface for the Marginal User, and a different interface for
| others? The only example that comes to mind is something like
| TweetDeck, but I believe that was killed off in the new Elmo/X
| era.
| BWStearns wrote:
| gmail had a kind of hidden option for adding keyboard shortcuts
| and their labs options. Not really a fully different interface
| but for a long time they kept that pretty lively.
|
| Unfortunately gmail has fallen off pretty hard lately. I can't
| even reliably expect my attachments to actually send the past
| few weeks.
| ultra-jeremyx wrote:
| Oh yeah, and they had Inbox, which I LOVED, and sadly, they
| killed off
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I found this article pretty insightful. The big successful
| companies all focus on the marginal user, and everyone wants to
| ape FAANG. Wonder if that's the disconnect I see in some smaller
| SAAS based companies, aping companies who design for the marginal
| user which is *not* their bread and butter.
| can3p wrote:
| This is not a tyranny if's marginal user, this is corporate
| mechanics and metrics at play. Every big company has a number of
| North Star metrics. If you move them in right direction you get
| promotions and recognition, since the metrics are used as a proxy
| for customer benefit
|
| The problem though is that it's relatively easy to game the
| metrics, especially in short term hence the popular sport is to
| pump the metric, get promotion and move on to a different project
| before the negative consequences are evident.
|
| Eg if your metric is conversion you can exploit it in lots of
| really dark ways
|
| In even bigger companies like google it's possible to repeat this
| action many times and the result is obvious. You can see how this
| could work with acquired products - of course the first changes
| will be to bring them to Xcorp scale, stack or standards which
| can mean years without new features
|
| It works completely differently with hobby projects because of
| different incentives. I'm 100% sure that the best things in the
| world are created when their authors do them just for the sake it
| using their vision.
|
| Unfortunately you cannot really grind in this way. So if you have
| to implement a login using 100 different auth systems, the
| approach should be different
| nullifidian wrote:
| Why not segment user interfaces for different demographics by
| creating several apps (or switchable app modes) -- one for the
| "marginal" users, another for the less "marginal" "normal" users,
| and another for "sophisticated" ones who want more options and
| control and are prepared to pay for it by tolerating increased
| complexity?
| gunshai wrote:
| > the attention span of a goldfish on acid
|
| I happen to have quite a long attention span on acid I'll have
| you know!
| densh wrote:
| I feel like the same idea applies to programming languages and
| frameworks equally well: marginal users whom you want to attract
| dictate evolution and prioritization of new developments.
| Ultimately, those changes hurt existing users due to evergrowing
| complexity and feature bloat. Eventually, the need arises to find
| the next best lightweight language or framework and the wheel
| spins one more time.
| adolph wrote:
| I like how this article doesn't mention dopamine. On the other
| hand, I think that the key challenge is that brain activity that
| was well suited for contexts that prevailed for a long time long
| ago are less well adapted for things available today.
|
| From Nir Eyal, author of "Hooked:"
|
| _Here, companies leverage two pulleys of human behavior -
| motivation and ability. To increase the odds of a user taking the
| intended action, the behavior designer makes the action as easy
| as possible, while simultaneously boosting the user's
| motivation._
|
| [...]
|
| _Bizarrely, we perceive this trance-like state as fun. This is
| because our brains are wired to search endlessly for the next
| reward, never satisfied. Recent neuroscience has revealed that
| our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our
| efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful
| response we call desire._
|
| https://www.nirandfar.com/how-to-manufacture-desire/
| ivee wrote:
| yeah designing anti-dopaminergic (maybe serotonergic?) tech is
| a class of solutions I'm especially excited about. Like browser
| extensions that cut out the little dopamine-triggering UI
| elements that designers keep adding in.
| par wrote:
| The problem with this article is that I'm trying to read it
| during a meeting and I can't stop laughing out loud. Love hearing
| about Marl the every user.
| Kapura wrote:
| Feels like this is tyranny of easily measured metrics. If your
| north star metric is something more focused (number of fun
| dates!) that incentivizes features and experiments that push that
| number up, but if the number is DAU, suddenly you've decoupled
| "success" from the actual intention of the website or app.
|
| Obviously, "number of fun dates" is a lot harder to measure,
| relying as it would on surveys with low response % and a variety
| of circumstantial factors. Whereas you can easily measure DAU,
| and put them on nice charts that point up and to the right to
| justify a bonus for some executive. Such is life.
|
| Finally, there's a level of personal responsibility. Code doesn't
| get worse without developers making it that way. If you think
| your job is bullshit, making things worse, say something, and
| leave. Do your best to not be part of the problem.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The active user metrics doesn't come from the company though,
| it's what the advertisers and investers will look at first
| glance, before going deeper and check what they really care
| about.
|
| Let's face it: in general we're not good at nuance and that has
| downstream effects in many places.
|
| The escape hatch is probably to have businesses that mostly
| stand on their own, sustained by their users and don't need to
| convince random marketers and crypto bros that they're worth
| paying attention to.
| [deleted]
| malfist wrote:
| > say something, and leave
|
| So you want me to give up my mid-six figures job so your dates
| go a little bit better?
| vimax wrote:
| Do you really want to spend your life adding dark patterns to
| a dating website?
| manicennui wrote:
| Most things you can work on are equally bad, so why not? We
| all want to survive, and survival in America is expensive.
| allarm wrote:
| Mid-six figures have absolutely nothing to do with
| survival.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Sadly, I've worked with software engineers who had
| absolutely no ethical qualm with implementing basically
| anything their boss wanted them to implement. Dark
| patterns, Benchmark cheating, Excessive user data
| collection, I'm sure they wouldn't even balk at writing
| Malware or Ransomware. This is why ethical engineers
| opting out of the project or job will never work: There's
| always someone lined up willing to write the unethical
| code.
| dsm4ck wrote:
| hey in this instance does this mean you are making ~150,000
| or ~500,000?
| Kapura wrote:
| I want you to have some amount of self respect, and
| appreciation for your craft.
| vsareto wrote:
| It's hard to take that seriously for a few reasons:
|
| - the gatekeepers of the craft are random and inconsistent
| and the competency standards are suspect
|
| - the people on the other side of your employment
| relationship won't do the same
|
| - leaving for self respect may not look good into getting
| you your next position. It may even harm your chances if
| you quit too soon
|
| - For the US, losing healthcare benefits for the love of
| the craft seems just like shooting yourself in the foot for
| no good reason
|
| We should strive to be better, but criticism about not
| living up to the craft often involves just a difference of
| opinion or preferences
| ahstilde wrote:
| His craft may be writing software that maximizes profit.
| volkk wrote:
| i work at a dating app and number of fun dates (worded slightly
| differently) is our north star metric! it's one of the major
| ones, and it has helped it stay relatively non predatory :)
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Comeon tell us what the app is!
| hbn wrote:
| But doesn't that inherently imply you try to keep users from
| making long-term connections? Users having lots of fun dates
| are not doing them with the same person and continuing to use
| your app. It's a bunch of dates that ultimately went nowhere.
|
| That's the thing with dating apps/sites. If you succeed too
| well, you've lost 2 users.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| And note that the incentives for the user and the company are
| at cross purposes with dating apps.
|
| Users use dating apps with the intent of not needing dating
| apps. A dating app that works well destroys it's user base.
| Their desired user base is people looking for hookups. Is it
| any wonder the apps have degraded into stuff pretty much only
| useful for hookups?
| s0rce wrote:
| That's true for a lot of business that still can be a good
| business model, lots in medicine, for example: lifetime
| vaccinations, and cures for diseases like HepC.
| Miraste wrote:
| There are plenty of vaccines and treatments you can't get
| because they're not profitable to manufacture.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yep, the ideal dating app in terms of profitability is one
| that makes users think they're going to meet the person of
| their dreams (so they are motivated to use it), but
| continually falls short (so they are retained). Which is
| _exactly_ what the market has optimized for.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| 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 the product continued to
| improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-
| down directives about how to develop the product during that
| time.
|
| OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but
| as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the
| focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match
| their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company
| with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40
| people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn
| a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile
| was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used
| to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant
| stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded
| hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of
| questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice
| asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no
| questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I
| had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people
| just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply
| invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.
|
| I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started,
| and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to
| its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do
| that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do
| that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like
| fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really
| interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.
| Iulioh wrote:
| Thanks for sharing
|
| Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model
| sirspacey wrote:
| A somewhat natural conclusion is that mobile killed the
| thoughtful internet. Ouch.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I find I comment and write much less on mobile than on a
| computer, because the writing experience on mobile is still
| very sub-par.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Mobile onboarded a different demographic of user. Pre-mobile,
| not many people really used computers or the internet outside
| of work or gaming. I grew up in a poor part of the US and
| lots of people did not have desktop computers at home; most
| kids begged their parents for access to computers for gaming.
| Parents in our area could never figure me out. I liked using
| computers (I would dumpster dive for parts since as a poor
| kid, I had much more time than money) but I didn't game much,
| and I'm a kid so I'm definitely not doing work. (I learned to
| code as a kid because I wanted to make games and then I found
| the coding part much more fun than the gaming part.) My
| parents were flummoxed how a kid who liked spending so much
| time reading was also so weird about wanting to use something
| as expensive as a computer.
|
| That's the root of this blog post, the rise of Tinder, and
| the big shift to mobile in general. Nerds aren't the only
| people on the internet anymore. The average person is now on
| the internet. OKCupid was very much the dating site of us
| thoughtful nerds, those who thought text and personality
| tests would help them find a better match. Most singles in
| the West at the time just went to the bar, got intoxicated,
| then made base conversation with whomever engaged their base
| interests. That demographic moved to Tinder.
|
| Unless you're specifically targeting a nerd-heavy demographic
| (e.g. academics, devs, hackers, etc) with a high margin
| product, if the goal is to create a mass appeal product then
| making nerds happy just isn't profitable. We're too small in
| number and too picky.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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.
| switchbak wrote:
| As did I! OkCupid was a shining star of a product that
| treated its users with respect and provided a really valuable
| service.
|
| I didn't realize that it's no longer. I feel old pining for
| the internet of yesteryear. As is obvious only in retrospect,
| you don't realize when the golden years are!
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Anybody else remember the data blog posts? Those were
| interesting and satisfying. It was another confirmation
| that I'd found the right dating site and probably a like-
| minded userbase.
| dspillett wrote:
| Particularly the one that was a tare-down of why paid
| dating sites like match.com where a mug's game for almost
| everyone. That somehow went AWOL fairly soon after the
| match.com take-over...
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| genewitch wrote:
| 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!
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The upside of dating app bootstrapping is that it's an
| inherently local phenomenon. People want to meet people near
| them, which means you can gain traction one locale at a time.
| Maybe some kind of promotion where you cut deals with some
| local bars or restaurants to get some kind of discount /
| freebie if you match with someone (with the implication being
| that they'll use it for the date). Still takes capital, just
| not "nation-wide aggressive advertising push" levels of
| capital.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| I remember being on SparkMatch when I was a 14-15 year old. A
| dating site meant for teens, from the makers of Spark Notes.
|
| I always had this weird vague hunch that spark match become
| OKCupid. Any info on this?
| martey wrote:
| from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid
|
| > _SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing
| registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for
| and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The
| popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its
| own site, later renamed OkCupid._
| unconed wrote:
| If you want to complain about software getting worse, maybe don't
| post it on a website that forces a pop-up on readers after they
| have already started reading and scroll down...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The margins are always where the interesting stuff happens. The
| interesting people gather there. The interesting ideas are
| shared. The new fashions. Think of Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby
| Street, Notting Hill, Bloomsbury, Mercer New York....
|
| Sure, Capitalism always devours it, but by then the party has
| moved on somewhere new.
|
| Marginals know how to find each other. By the books we read. By
| the fact that we're the only ones not staring at phones in
| public. Spotting another vaguely attractive person with a dumb
| phone or interesting book is good enough reason to strike up a
| conversation.
|
| Oh, and in case you we're feeling all "mainstream"... Hacker
| News? WaaaaaaaaaaaaY out marginal! We're practically on another
| planet here ;)
| footy wrote:
| Unlike you, the article is using "marginal" in the economic
| sense.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| different dialect
| xorcist wrote:
| Thoughtful article that doesn't even mention Youtube Shorts,
| perhaps the most glaring example of the trend.
|
| When online services maximizes the number of daily users, perhaps
| in the hundreds of millions, the vast majority of them won't be
| very interested. So of course any data driven service will
| optimize keeping uninterested users occupied. That does explain a
| lot actually.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Youtube doesn't gain extra from very interested users though,
| as long as everyone keeps watching.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The other thing I find amusing about things like Shorts (as
| well as things like Reels or Tok Tok) is that it is the
| _perfect_ example of Goodhart 's Law.
|
| Basically all these platforms use dwell time as an indication
| that you liked (or at least were interested in) a video. So
| then these sites got flooded with completely inane videos of
| the "Just wait for it!!!" variety that last for 5 minutes,
| always making it seem like something is going to happen, but
| it's just video of an intersection or people at the grocery
| store or whatever.
| davio wrote:
| I'm mixed on the shorts. I like it when they do a "you fix this
| by pushing this button here" in 15 seconds instead of it being
| 8+ minutes so they can get mid roll ads.
| robert_tweed wrote:
| I'd be fine with shorts if they didn't disable the normal
| player controls.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Yet another reason to use NewPipe or SmartTube rather than
| the YouTube app or the browser.
| bakugo wrote:
| The Youtube app (on android at least) now lets you use
| more of the normal controls (particularly seeking and
| adding to playlists) on shorts as of a few months ago. I
| thought the lack of those controls was intentionally
| permanent but I was relieved to find out it wasn't.
| davio wrote:
| Agreed. It's like a different video playing application
| popped up in the middle of YouTube. Also weird when you
| exits shorts, the previously watched long video starts
| playing.
| worble wrote:
| Every time I view one I think to myself "I really should
| make a userscript that changes the '/short/' to '/v/' in
| the url" but I never view them often enough that this
| annoyance has manifested itself in action.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/452282-youtube-shorts-
| use-...
| adasdasdas wrote:
| This is how Lyft and Uber works too, they build their incentives
| to buy the marginal driver/user. So if you are a reliable Uber-
| only or Lyft-only driver, you get screwed out of incentives.
| However, if you switch around, Uber/Lyft will bid for your next
| ride.
| WD40forRust wrote:
| At risk of an avalanche of knee-jerk downvotes, I will suggest
| this angle:
|
| 'Inclusivity' is in vogue. It's a meme (Dawkins) which is so deep
| into the psyches of normies today it integrates into everything.
| Normie is the fish and inclusivity is the water.
|
| What I think is being left on the side lines is 'exclusivity' not
| in class of product, but in intended customer. "KDE 3.5 is an
| advanced product, it was not meant for average users like you. Go
| check out $LATEST_GNOME, it also comes at a more affordable price
| too!" Sure you're going to turn off some customers, but what
| you're really saying is "you're not good enough to be within the
| set of intended users" and I think this dynamic can drive some
| users into saying "nuh uh I'm not some normie goy, gimmie gimmie
| gimmie!"
|
| Well that's my shitter thought away, time to flush this turd!
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| This article is precisely pointing that behind this
| "inclusivity" trend there is a pervasive _economic_ reason ,
| which directly contradicts what you are implying (that it's a
| "meme in the psyches of normies").
| throwaway128128 wrote:
| I hate that I love this article. It's so true.
| s0rce wrote:
| I think Youtube is a counter example. There is absolutely amazing
| content and it hasn't turned into a feed, although it does have
| that stuff (personally, I find TikTok more enjoyable for that
| type of content/experience).
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > Of course, "Marl" isn't always a person. Marl can also be a
| state of mind. We've all been Marl at one time or another
|
| This is an incredibly useful and healthy way of thinking. I think
| this is how we fight the actor-observer bias in practice.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I felt this article was so spot on. Everything feels optimized
| for those who are semi-lobotomized.
|
| I recall years ago (maybe this was late '00s or early 2010s) when
| Facebook changed their interface to be much more "Twitter like",
| i.e. a semi-random list of items in your feed. Before that, for
| me it was much easier to actually follow conversations with my
| real friends. After that it was just a sea of posts - and by the
| way if you scrolled past a post and wanted to find it again, good
| luck. After all everything must be new and fresh to keep you
| engaged!!
|
| This type of architecture has helped to lower the value of online
| relationships, and has continued to destroy our attention spans.
| I guess the only good news is that I feel like it's gotten so bad
| I can hardly use apps like FB or Instagram anymore, which is
| probably a good thing.
| tristanMatthias wrote:
| As other people have commented, seems like the West's addiction
| to never ending growth at all costs could be a strong driver of
| this. Reminds me of this TED talk, A healthy economy should be
| designed to thrive not grow:
| https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...
| hedora wrote:
| I often wonder what the average lifetime value of these marginal
| users is.
|
| When services are dumbed down in ways that chase off power users,
| they're explicitly optimizing for users that churn rapidly. After
| all, today's new user is either a customer and tomorrow's power
| user, or they've stopped using the the product.
|
| If you're trying to raise a round, and the VC blindly looks at
| user count, then I guess this makes sense, but I'd bet VC funds
| that use onboarding rates (to the exclusion of churn and
| sustainability of the offering) have lower average returns than
| ones that apply basic common sense when vetting their
| investments.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The good news is, if this becomes too much of a problem, we can
| always give software feature and purchasing decisions to a
| nonuser!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| A great article.
|
| "Growth" is the culprit. "What if we just acted like the
| successful restaurant: packed every night, very profitable, solid
| employment for my kids?"
|
| Nah. We have to keep growing.
| epx wrote:
| +1. Software companies should accept that there is a ceiling to
| their revenue, and this ceiling won't need that many engineers
| to maintain the software. But many actors are benefied by
| believing in infinite growth. It is a collective illusion.
| evouga wrote:
| It's not so easy for several reasons:
|
| 1. It's easy enough for a lone entrepreneur with no investors
| to make principled long-term decisions. It's not so trivial
| when you owe a fiduciary duty to a board of venture
| capitalists.
|
| 2. Your team of engineers (which has grown steadily as you've
| scaled up) have built The Thing and everyone loves it. Now
| what? You only need 5% of the team to maintain the software.
| You could fire 95% of the team, which will make your company
| mighty unpopular to future hires, and moreover your best
| developers won't want to stay and do maintenance for the next
| decade. Easier to have them work on gratuitous frontend
| redesigns, bloated features that increase engagement metrics,
| etc. In a restaurant the contractors who build and furnish the
| place aren't your employees.
| kazinator wrote:
| I wrote a comment about this recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457753
|
| "Marl" is an interesting angle on it.
| scoofy wrote:
| I honestly see the tyranny of Marl is part of the original sin of
| the internet, zero-sum online consolidation of existing business
| models. If that's the model, Marl is the only user who matters.
| If you're bootstrapping something for an intended and limited
| audience, Marl can fuck off.
|
| My personal project, https://golfcourse.wiki is basically founded
| on my attempt to stop Marl from making golf-on-the-internet
| shitty.
|
| My religion is basically that Wikipedia is the only website that
| I don't hate after 20 years of internet growth, so that's my
| model. I've attempted to do this by having nearly no expectations
| for the site for 5 years (we are in late-year 2, with a year of
| causal development before that). I do this by running on the
| thinnest budget I possibly can. There is no handy interface
| (yet), if you want to add your course, it isn't too hard, but it
| isn't too easy. The site is ugly simplicity.
|
| Anyone who doesn't understand or care that I'm trying to build a
| database to then give it away for free will tell me the site
| sucks, and they're not wrong. It sucks because I am not paying
| for the data, so I don't have to charge for it. Still, I'm
| slowly-but-surely growing my google imprint, and increasing my
| (consumptive) user base.
|
| Anyone who has spent the time to add to the project I'm extremely
| thankful for. I will never focus on Marl, because the consumption
| side of the site is not the target audience for me, it's the
| contribution side. It's a hobby, and at a few dozen dollars a
| month to operate, if the side doesn't snowball, it's no big loss.
| mrshoe wrote:
| The real problem is industry-wide adoption of metrics-driven
| design.
|
| When I studied cognitive science, the method we employed for HCI
| was User Centered System Design. Granted, this was a backronym
| for UCSD, but the point remains -- design should be user-
| centered, not metrics-driven.
|
| When I launch Netflix, it is abundantly clear to me that their
| design is driven by their metrics. What I want to see at the top
| is my "continue watching" shows -- 99% of the time I just want to
| watch the next episode of a show that I'm already watching.
| Instead, they show me row upon row of shows that I have never
| watched. Their metrics prove to them that getting me hooked on
| new shows will increase my engagement and increase the amount of
| time I spend in their app. Guess what? As a user, those are not
| my goals! Their UI is effectively one big advertisement for
| Netflix itself. Wonderful.
|
| Unfortunately, virtually all tech companies have accepted
| metrics-driven design as conventional wisdom at this point. Run
| an A/B test and see which button treatment performs better, based
| on the metrics the company cares about -- not what the user cares
| about.
|
| One outlier here is Apple. They do not design based on
| experiments and metrics. And the Apple TV app does in fact
| display the shows I am already watching as the top row. Go
| figure.
| [deleted]
| gnyman wrote:
| Yes, and not only design, it's metrics-driven everything.
|
| And often the metrics can be counter productive in the long
| term, but by then people have collected their bonuses,
| promotions or left the company.
|
| Here is a example I encountered from few years back where
| Google Ads was loading slower then the search and ended up
| replacing the first result just when you were about to click
| it. https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1257239940309622784
|
| If it was intentional or not I don't know, but I recall that
| this persisted for many months before being fixed.
|
| I think it's obvious (but maybe I'm wrong) that accidentally
| clicking on ads is not what google wants, long term. As that
| won't get any real results for the advertiser. Which in turn
| reduces their interest to spend. But short term I bet Google
| made a lot of buck on this.
|
| Either way, maybe it's unavoidable in a capitalistic world,
| it's not like non-software companies were driven by a consumer
| happiness score before either. The reason it feels so bad is
| just that a lot of us have been here during the growth phase
| when end-user happiness is a more important metric.
| egonschiele wrote:
| I agree with everything except the last bit. I have purchases
| on Apple TV, and I'm not a subscriber, but when I launch the
| app, all I see is subscriber-only content. Apple Music is
| similar.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Their metrics prove to them that getting me hooked on new
| shows will increase my engagement and increase the amount of
| time I spend in their app. Guess what? As a user, those are not
| my goals!
|
| But here's what I find odd about Netflix. Up until extremely
| recently--and even now for most customers--Netflix did not and
| does not display ads. Netflix makes money from subscription
| fees, which means they get the same amount of money whether you
| spend zero, 10, 50, or 100 hours per month in their app, as
| long as you keep paying for your subscription.
|
| Netflix has apparently concluded that users who spend more time
| in their app are more likely to remain subscribed. I wonder why
| that is, or if Netflix is even correct. I would think that for
| most users, the quality of their time matters more than the
| quantity.
| beisner wrote:
| I think it's probably because it's extremely hard to
| understand what * _content*_ keeps users subscribing, and
| "hours spent watching this content" is maybe the lowest-
| hanging (or only?) "clean" metric you can use to determine
| what content to keep, how much to spend on content, etc. I
| watch a smattering of shows on netflix and so keep a
| subscription, but I don't watch very much. How the heck are
| they supposed to know whether a piece of content will keep me
| subscribing? And how much should they spend to
| produce/acquire that content? It's a very difficult supply-
| side question.
| apetresc wrote:
| Indeed, given the relatively high cost of streaming high-
| quality video, you'd think Netflix makes substantially _more_
| money from the 0-hour viewer compared to the 100-hour viewer.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Maybe they prefer dominance over profit. Make less money
| but maximise revenue. They want you to spend 100 hours a
| month not 50 even if you pay the same so that you are not
| spending time at a competitor such as Disney or hanging out
| with friends at a bar.
|
| Eventually they may go like Amazon with infinite upsells
| and hunt for whales.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| How could this be good business?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Maybe the LTV is higher. Or it attracts more shows to
| Netflix than competitors. Ot it secures a moat.
| revscat wrote:
| Unless they're selling user data.
| Clamchop wrote:
| There do seem to be "churners" out there subscribing to
| services only for as long as they need to watch the show
| they want to see, and I'd guess a wide middle of customers
| who are at least prepared to cancel if they feel that
| they're not using the service enough or that they will get
| better value from an alternative.
|
| To keep these customers, you need to keep them continuously
| hooked on your programming.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If I was Netflix, and I was optimizing for this type of
| customer, I would want to have them moving through my
| content as _slowly_ as possible! My goal would be 2-4
| hours of Netflix per week, preferably spread across
| different days--just enough to ensure they haven 't lost
| interest! Autoplay Next Episode would not be a thing, and
| I certainly wouldn't release new seasons all at once.
| brap wrote:
| You assume that your goals are aligned with the company's
| goals. They're not. There is no "problem", it's all working as
| intended.
|
| From the company's point of view, they actually _are_ doing the
| right thing. They're making money (which, I'd argue, is
| ultimately a good thing for everyone involved).
|
| Netflix and Apple are no different, the goal is always $$,
| Apple just sells different things.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| No, he's saying the exact opposite - that the company's
| revenue-driven goals and the user's goals are not in
| alignment. It is definitely possible for those things to be
| in alignment, that's how products have worked for the
| majority of modern human history.
| ibbih wrote:
| It's a bit more complex than that right? If no part of the
| user wanted this, it wouldn't drive up engagement. Clearly
| it causes me to use the product more. Companies can try to
| optimize for stuff like "satisfaction after using the
| product" but it's genuinely much harder -- and not tying
| work to business outcomes is not scalable.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most drug addicts don't want to be addicted, they just
| want the high. Most video watchers want to continue their
| current shows, but if you make it easy they will get
| addicted to shows they didn't know they liked yet. People
| get on facebook for their friends, and then the infinite
| scrolling keeps them on long past when they have seen
| almost everything their friends have done.
| mastema wrote:
| I think the broader point is that the User's goals and
| Capitalism's goals are not in alignment and the company,
| who is caught in the middle, has an obvious and legally
| required option to choose if they are shareholder owned.
| The user loses this fight every time.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This brings to mind my experience as an early facebook adopter
| (when it was still college email invite-only), to some point a
| while ago when they went from a chronological timeline/feed to
| a "curated" one. Users overwhelmingly did not want or like
| this, because the main use of facebook at that time was to
| connect and chat with people you knew in real life. However,
| that does not drive ads as well as what exists currently, so
| here we go.
|
| If users were pickier about what they consume things would
| probably be better - that's also an issue (and I admit I am
| part of the problem). I can't even remember the last time I saw
| a close friend's post on my feed.
| hinkley wrote:
| Welcome to enshitification.
| revscat wrote:
| This seems to be almost synonymous with metrics-driven
| design.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >I can't even remember the last time I saw a close friend's
| post on my feed.
|
| It's probably because they aren't on Facebook any more.
| bluGill wrote:
| I have found a hack around facebook that partially works:
| remove yourself from all groups. So only friends are in your
| feed. Then every time a friend shares something from one of
| their group go hit "block all from [group]". Facebook now has
| less junk to show me as I've blocked most of it, and so I see
| my friends. I've also set a rule that when I block two groups
| I'm done for the session. Anytime I share something on
| Facebook I make sure the privacy settings is "friends of
| those tags only" - if I'd want more or less than that it is
| either too private to share at all, or it should be on a
| better public forum.
|
| I hope more of you start doing the same. There is value in a
| Facebook type private place to communicate with friends and
| family (this need not be facebook, but that is where my
| friends are), and everything else clutters it. The more
| people who follow similar rules to me the more likely
| Facebook is to notice in their metrics that people only want
| Facebook for personal friends, hopefully they adjust to
| enable that better.
| Crusoe123 wrote:
| You can filter your feed to only show friends stuff (and
| it's chronological)
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends
| nelblu wrote:
| For netflix : I only watch it on my browser (my TV is basically
| a monitor connected to a PC), and the way I work around is by
| having a bookmark : https://www.netflix.com/browse/continue-
| watching Problem solved! (well until netflix starts blocking
| that too, in that case I might as well delete their membership)
| Hizonner wrote:
| That kind of criminal behavior on your part is why Netflix
| wants you to use the app, you lowlife. How dare you?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Do these fields care about depth and worth-done efforts from a
| user ? this decade is about giving everything for free,
| consumption flow effortlessly, which is obvious a good point to
| aim, but I remember the things I liked the most are those which
| made me work a little to make complex things. And I can't find
| recent advances on this terrain.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| Apple absolutely does do this. I have first hand knowledge of
| doing it for them.
| 9dev wrote:
| Sounds like something you probably should not be talking
| about on the internet with your real name?
| iaaan wrote:
| Notably, Plex (a free media server) also displays "continue
| watching" stuff at the top.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| What you describe is the capitalist perpetual September.
|
| Long term you is less valuable than short term you.
| dgudkov wrote:
| The real problem is big-money-driven design. Big-money
| stakeholders don't care about non-measurable things like user
| experience or user well-being. Big money thinks finance, and
| finance is always metrics, so everything else becomes metrics
| too.
|
| A brilliant essay.
| hinkley wrote:
| Worse, they loop through when you scroll horizontally and
| replace the thumbnails with new icons for the same shows, so
| you lose track of whether you've wrapped around or not.
|
| I've been waiting for the day when we wake up and realize how
| cynical and impersonal the world of A/B testing is and
| consumers insist on better treatment.
| avip wrote:
| I'd like to give a shoutout to the one app in my life which
| actually gets _better_ overtime - whatsapp.
|
| The only app, to my goldfish-like limited knowledge, which always
| delivers.
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