[HN Gopher] The Tyranny of the Marginal User
___________________________________________________________________
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
Author : ivee
Score : 1374 points
Date : 2023-09-14 14:28 UTC (1 days 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.
| genewitch wrote:
| well once android hit the market it became more rare to see
| RIM-compatible software, palmOS software, and all the other
| players back then that i can't remember. The installed userbase
| for android, which was designed for well-off Marls was massive,
| and iphones supplanted the need for nearly every other purpose
| built communication device. Why bother making my [chat
| client/browser/social media app] compatible with 16 OSes?
| iphone using cocoa or objectiveC or whatever and android using
| java meant only two stacks to maintain - at least until the
| platform started pushing updates whenever a new phone was
| released, and now you've fragmented the OS market - which leads
| to devices becoming obsolete before the end of their actual
| useful life.
|
| the first company that can make a phone that can run android
| apps in a virtual machine and otherwise be a glorified electron
| app server (run javascript/webasm apps only) will clean up. If
| they make it possible to upgrade the components (m.2 storage,
| sodimm memory, socketed SoC), even if you have to take it to a
| store to upgrade - they'll win the entire market.
| pier25 wrote:
| By Reddit he means old Reddit, right?
| pxoe wrote:
| am i the only one who finds the vilifying of a "dumb user", of
| internet, of anything, if not just dumb in itself, then just a
| bit unethical. sorry guys, you are all just here on this planet
| along with dumb people. that's so sad, huh. sucks to be you.
|
| making accessible things is actually good. not sure how that
| "dumbification of software for the marginal user" really aligns
| with what happens with apps. sometimes things don't get "dumber",
| or "simpler", or "easier to get even for the most basic of
| users". sometimes things just get worse. or get more complicated,
| internally (to exploit that user) or externally (dark patterns).
| simplification is really not the reason nor the 'evil thing-
| ruining machine' running behind the 'worsening of everything'. it
| might be the myriad of business processes, including a/b testing
| and orienting on whatever metrics analytics spit out, but like,
| despite almost pointing to that, this still diverts to 'things
| get simplified for the sake of the user' (boo hoo cutting
| features removing buttons). sure. but that's not the problem. the
| problem is the process that leads to, not just 'simplification'
| but whatever changes that happen.
|
| >nearly all popular consumer software
|
| is it really?
| 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...
| cbare wrote:
| Fuck that guy Marl.
| a-dub wrote:
| the internet has been gentrified lol
| edelwax wrote:
| I worked on this problem for more than a decade, as co-founder of
| what became the Center for Humane Tech, and in other roles.
|
| One way to break it down is different users, but as Ivan notes
| towards the end, we all have Marl in us. So, another way to get
| at the same thing is to exclude certain engagements from the
| metrics -- the things we click on but would not reflectively
| endorse as meaningful. You get a lower engagement number that
| represents meaningful choice, rather than just "revealed
| preference" / engagement.
|
| This is what I work to align LLMs with at the Institute for
| Meaning Alignment[1], and Ivan is helping! I also have a paper[2]
| on the difference between revealed preference and meaningful
| choice.
|
| (It's also worth noting that this process of enshittification
| doesn't just happen in software. Markets and voting also have
| this revealed preference vs meaningful choice problem. So, making
| this distinction is a chance to upgrade all of our large-scale
| systems.)
|
| [1] https://meaningalignment.org/ [2]
| https://github.com/jxe/vpm/blob/master/vpm.pdf
| 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.
| Communitivity wrote:
| Is the marginal user marginal though, in terms of marketing? Put
| another way, could you put a filter in place to bar marginal
| users and still have a commercially viable product without prices
| too high? I'd think the answer is yes, but perhaps the business
| would need to be aim toward a successful lifestyle business
| rather than a unicorn valuation.
| camgunz wrote:
| I like this article, but I have to say it spills a lot of ink
| just to say that engagement metrics fucked us. These products
| stopped trying to empower us and started commodifying us. Marl
| isn't the problem; those execs are the problem.
| brainwad wrote:
| Engagement metric focus can come from the bottom up, too. If
| you're an engineer who just build a feature you think is cool,
| but which nobody is using, it's very tempting to start applying
| growth hacks to make it more "popular". I have been through a
| few cycles of this on various projects in big tech.
| 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...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks, on both points. And I'd meant to post the direct URL.
| redbell wrote:
| > _why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time_
|
| This reminds me of Jonathan Blow's presentation about the
| collapse of our civilization:
| https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?si=0HZJzEvIYqIlmPqe
| wrineha2 wrote:
| Some shameless self promotion. I wrote about this exact idea back
| in 2021: https://www.williamrinehart.com/2021/big-tech-
| regulation-spe...
| 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...
| mikpanko wrote:
| OkCupid's problem wasn't pursuing the "marginal" user but rather
| not being able to capture the "mainstream" user and staying
| niche, while Tinder was the first dating app to bridge the
| divide. Tinder did it by making the experience less awkward and
| more casual, similar to how most people start flirting and
| evaluating each other offline: by looks and vibes. As a result
| more people were on the app and there was more choice, which
| sealed the dominance.
|
| I tried OkCupid for several months in 2013 without much success.
| Then I tried Tinder for a few months the same year and met my
| wife. Very different experience from the author of the article.
| 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, as stated by the author of this blog
| post, "software is getting worse".
|
| 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, I thought, 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.
| gytdev wrote:
| amazing essay, does anybody have a list of sites that promote
| human agency instead of decreasing it?
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| Fun fact in german the acronym DAUb means Dummster anzunehmender
| User = Dumbest Assumable User
| sharas- wrote:
| So the fault is with zombie Marl? As any zombie marketer would
| say: "we are just giving them what they want". Something
| fundamentally is amiss in this posts reasoning.
| capybara_2020 wrote:
| Is the problem more fundamental? Investor controlled/focused
| businesses are just bad for users and companies in the long run?
| Especially if investors have short term goals. Some of the
| easiest ways to make more money is to squeeze the users(more ads)
| or reduce product quality to the bare minimum as long as it lasts
| long enough to meet contractual needs. All this at the cost of
| the user/company.
| 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.
| broguinn wrote:
| Are you sure this data is accurate? By the site you
| reference, r/nottheonion has ~30 comments a day:
| https://subredditstats.com/r/nottheonion
|
| But if I actually visit the subreddit, I see many posts
| from within the last 24 hours with 300+ comments each. Is
| it possible subredditstats.com had some kind of regression
| in its counting around that time? It could be related to
| the API changes.
| cole-k wrote:
| That would make a lot of sense, I wonder if there's a
| good way to identify activity. Perhaps looking at the #
| of subscribers/active users that Reddit reports (but I'm
| not sure if historical data for this is kept).
| foogazi wrote:
| I left Reddit after the API changed and Apollo died.
|
| Last week I realized I still kept doing a bunch of reddit
| searches so I went back and tried the app.
|
| The app is not that bad, hope the users stick around
| cole-k wrote:
| This is what's been somewhat hard about quitting/boycotting
| Reddit for me. Ultimately the community comes before the
| platform and Reddit happened to house a lot of good
| communities. I admit to breaking my boycott when the only
| answers I can seem to find for my exact question lie on
| Reddit. The same goes for my boycott of Stack Overflow,
| which I have to break even more often due to its ubiquity.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Those people sometimes exist in your own family too. My wife
| asked me to get rid of pi-hole because the sponsored links at
| the top of a Google results page no longer worked.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Content quality seems to be inversely proportional to subreddit
| size.
|
| If you find a much finer-grained niche subreddit you will
| probably find the quality is still 2010 Reddit.
| 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.
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| My experience with Reddit ads (years ago now) wasn't that
| subreddit-level targeting was bad--there's a reason
| sponsored content is such a big marketing channel, after
| all--but rather that the ads platform just never worked
| very well.
|
| And by "never worked very well," I don't just mean "We
| ran ads without good results." The whole experience was
| just sort of confusing and underwhelming, especially when
| compared to other channels like FB or Google. We
| suspected that the majority of our clicks were bots,
| based on our own analytics. The targeting always felt
| unreliable. Support interactions were weird. In general,
| the platform always just felt kind of... janky.
|
| Don't know if that's still the case now, but at least as
| of a year or so ago, I knew a lot of people working in
| digital marketing who felt the same about the platform.
| ecshafer wrote:
| So the targeting wasn't just you choosing to run ads on
| /r/coffee and /r/programming? In my head the ads should
| be so easy to sell with how niche it is. But I also
| believe reddit could screw it up.
| 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.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| The people who create the content (the reason people put
| reddit at the end of google searches) also like
| dragonsfuckingcars, and if you push them out they stop
| writing about their vacuum cleaners and the content
| becomes the default subreddits which are pretty much
| entirely people yelling political talking points at each
| other.
| 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.
| strbean wrote:
| Eh, I think the reason reddit was resilient against this
| effect was because of the balkanization resulting from the
| subreddit model. If you look at an individual subreddit,
| unless it is incredibly fringe, it will follow the 'social
| enshittification' model perfectly. Reddit has the advantage
| that a portion of users can migrate to a newer, still-
| fringe subreddit as a replacement.
|
| Over time, though, the namespace starts to get cluttered.
| You have to go to r/realTrueSubreddit2 to find a decent
| community now. Also, r/realTrueSubreddit1 was taken by
| nazis/trolls who were mad at getting banned for using
| slurs.
| 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.
| pbj1968 wrote:
| What killed Fark was the founder ran for office and we
| all found out what a terrible person he is. It's still
| fun to visit that ghost town and look at the tombstones
| occasionally.
| 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| It seems you completely misunderstood the parent comment.
| They are arguing against the existence of the repugnant
| conclusion, by pointing out that happiness -- like the
| economy -- is not actually a finite pie to divvy up.
| 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.
| soorya3 wrote:
| That's not true, most of the money is spent here and very
| little to take care of the family that's been left back
| home. Otherwise how can they survive here, think about
| immigrant kids education, housing, healthcare,
| retirement.
| solatic wrote:
| Your logic: let's reduce immigration because immigrants
| send remittances to family members who are not permitted
| by our immigration laws to join their family members in
| this country, which would increase immigration numbers
| further while reducing capital offshoring.
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
|
| If that sent money ever comes back to the domestic
| economy, then you are back to the previous situation.
|
| If it doesn't come back, that's even better: because then
| your central bank can print more money to make up for the
| disappearance. Essentially, you got the foreigner to
| perform services in return for some ink and paper.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| I agree this happens a lot, but isn't this an area of
| financial life that is regulated, governed, and monitored
| by states today? I am not familiar with the policies or
| regulations in play here but this seems very addressable
| by the institutions and regulatory bodies that exist
| today in most (all?) countries. A solved problem, in
| other words.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| For example the income tax or other taxes already capture
| a portion of foreign workers' incomes that the state
| wants to capture without discouraging workers too much
| and working elsewhere, according to their economic models
| and policies.
|
| I suppose different countries have different strategies
| on this, rich countries are trying to benefit from
| foreign labor and capture some taxes from them while less
| rich countries are trying to increase their haul by
| encouraging their citizens to become foreign workers
| (example: Philippines).
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| This is silly because you don't have to imagine any
| scenarios. Good economic models are based on empirical
| data, not on imagining things, and "immigrants don't
| increase unemployment or decrease wages" is just about
| the strongest empirical result there is.
|
| The reason being that someone moving closer to you
| increases demand for labor more than supply, and
| immigrants generally have complimentary (slightly
| different) skills to natives. So the person whose labor
| the immigrant most competes with is another immigrant.
|
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-immigration-doesnt-
| reduce-...
|
| As for remittances/brain drain, there are certainly
| theoretical issues but it seems to be okay in the end
| because it boosts investment in the originating country.
|
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-skilled-immigration-
| usuall...
| Spivak wrote:
| And if you subscribe to MMT you should love immigrants
| because they're free "unemployed" people you didn't have
| to spend money raising so you have greater runway to
| print more money without inflation.
| 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think that's what it will approach in the limit, yes,
| if you are talking about humans. For AIs, I think it will
| be somewhat less so, and that it would be preferable for
| the sake of predictability.
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| Insurers are often mutually owned by their customers, so
| they don't need to profit.
| eru wrote:
| That doesn't make much of a difference.
|
| Profit is only one part of the overhead. They also have
| to pay agents, adjusters, underwriters, managers, office
| stationary, postage, fraud investigators, lawyers, taxes,
| interest on bonds etc.
|
| Similar for hospitals etc. Profit, ie cost of equity
| capital, is usually (but not always) a relatively small
| part of an organisation's overall cost structure. And the
| non-profit alternatives typically don't have meaningfully
| lower costs.
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| You are right for catastrophic insurance, ie insurance
| that covers outlays that would financially ruin you, or
| at least be majorly inconvenient.
|
| Many people buy (or are forced to buy) insurance that
| covers minor outlays, too.
|
| Using that kind of insurance has pretty big (relative)
| overheads not just in terms of money but also in terms of
| annoying paperwork and bureaucracy.
|
| Some of the worst offenders are probably health insurance
| plans that include a fixed hundred bucks allowance
| towards new glasses every year. They might just as well
| charge you hundred bucks less in premiums and strike that
| allowance. (Unless in cases where that scheme is a tax
| dodge.)
| 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.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Singer publishes his book, "The Life You Can Save" for
| free -- it was revised for the 10th anniversary. It is
| available in various formats, including an audio book. It
| is a short, easy read. It is also one of the most
| impactful books I've ever read.
|
| https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/
|
| Along the header there is an item "free book" if you want
| to get the book.
|
| In short, there are a few theses in the book that combine
| in a compelling way. This isn't his summary, this is the
| summary I got out of reading it. (1) the suffering of
| someone you don't know is just as real as the suffering
| of someone you do know. (2) there are many worthy causes,
| but we aren't allocating enough resources to address them
| all, so it is best to allocate them such that they do the
| most good for the worst off (3) if you are reading hacker
| news, you are likely in the 1% (worldwide) and your
| primary needs are already being met and you can make
| meaningful contributions to help those most in need
| without affecting your lifestyle much.
|
| Each chapter tackles a topic. For instance, part of it
| brings up many the counter arguments about why someone
| might not want to donate and then debunks them. Eg, in a
| poll, most US citizens believe that 10-20% of their taxes
| are going to foreign, and say about half that, say 5%,
| would be reasonable. In fact it is well under 1%. Or
| people will say there have always been poor people and
| there will always be poor people (counter argument: to
| the people who are helped, aid makes a huge difference to
| them personally, and there have actually been great
| strides in the past 30 years at reducing global poverty).
|
| Another chapter talks about the typical feel good news
| item about someone in the community who has gone blind
| and so the community pitches in to pay for a seeing eye
| dog for the person (it costs up to $50K to train and vet
| such dogs). Yet that same $50K could have prevented river
| blindness for thousands of children, or been enough to
| perform cataract surgery on thousands of blind adults.
|
| People often say, why give to a charity in Africa? It
| will just end up in someone's pocket before it helps
| anyway. The book talks about the effective altruism
| movement and describes how charities are vetted and
| monitored. The website above has links to many such
| vetted charities.
|
| Another chapter talks about where to draw the line? Sure,
| I can afford $700 to pay for corrective surgery for a
| woman suffering from fistula and feel good about myself.
| But in reality I could afford another $700, then another
| $700, etc. Do I need to keep donating to those worse off
| until I am one of the worse off people? (spoiler: no)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't know who to be more angry at: the idiots who
| think that Sam Bankman-Fried is effective altruism rather
| than the version of it above, or SBF.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Assuming linearity of utility either in individuals or in
| aggregation is a very common straw man of utilitarianism.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Doesn't have to be linear, ANY strictly increasing function
| for aggregating the utility leads to the same conclusion.
| 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...
| mercenario wrote:
| > This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N
| people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to
| have 10N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100N people with 0.111
| happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any
| happiness
|
| 1) Population isn't infinite, you can't continue this for too
| long
|
| 2) Your assumption completely depends on how costly it is to
| increase +1 happiness and to increase +1 user, you don't even
| mention it. And these costs are not fixed, it increases, so
| even if it is cheaper to add +1 user in the beginning, it will
| not continue to be cheaper indefinitely
|
| So, nothing is preventing you from increasing happiness at the
| same time you increase users.
| 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.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I suggest in general, when approaching a conclusion of a
| field that you find unintuitive or overcomplicated, to try to
| recognise that thought pattern and swallow your pride. Its an
| incredibly common reaction of educated people in one area to
| see another area and be like "wow why are they
| overcomplicating it so much they must all be blind to the
| obvious problems" as though literally every new student in
| that field doesn't ask the same questions they're asking.
| Heck I do it all the time, most recently when starting
| learning music theory.
|
| You may feel _so certain_ that they 're just too wrapped up
| in their nonsense that they can't see what you see. But at
| the very least you will have to learn it the way they learned
| it if you want to be effective at communicating with them to
| articulate what you think is wrong and convince people. And
| in doing so you'll likely realise that far from some
| unquestioned truth, every conclusion in the field is subject
| to vigorous debate, and hundreds and thousands of pages and
| criticisms and rebuttals exist for any conclusion you care
| about. And for it to get as big as it is such that you, a
| person hearing about it from outside, there must at least be
| something interesting and worth examining going on there.
|
| For a prime example, see all the retired engineers who decide
| that because they can't read a paper on quantum physics with
| their calculus background, the phsyicists must be
| overcomplicating it, and bombard them constantly with mail
| about their own crackpot theories. You don't want to be that
| person.
| 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.)
| coldtea wrote:
| Only because the practice (in the US mostly) has been
| watered down a lot to include all kinds of rational-bros
| in the tradition of "analytical philosophy", usually also
| involved in the same circles and arguments with the wide
| rational-bro community.
|
| Then again the opposite side has also devolved into a
| parody of 20th century contintenal philosophical concerns
| with no saving grace.
| 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...
| astrange wrote:
| > 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.
|
| We aren't doing that. Increasing human populations don't
| increase resource consumption because 1. resources aren't
| always consumed per-capita 2. we have the spare human
| capital to invent new cleaner technology.
|
| It's backwards actually - decreasing populations, making
| for a deflating economy, encourage consumption rather than
| productivity investment. That's how so many countries
| managed to deforest themselves when wood fires were still
| state of the art.
|
| Also, "resources are finite" isn't an argument against
| growth because if you don't grow /the resources are still
| finite/. So all you're saying is we're going to die
| someday. We know that.
| eru wrote:
| I mostly agree. However:
|
| > That's how so many countries managed to deforest
| themselves when wood fires were still state of the art.
|
| It was mostly ship building that deforested eg the
| countries around the Mediterranean and Britain. Firewood
| was mostly harvested reasonably sustainably from managed
| areas like coppices in many places. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
|
| What do you mean by ever growing inequality? Global
| inequality has decreased in recent decades. (Thanks largely
| to China and to a lesser extent India moving from abject
| poverty to middle income status.)
|
| By some measures we are also using less resources than we
| used to. Eg peak resource usage in the US, as measured in
| total _mass_ of stuff flowing through the economy, peaked
| sometime in the 1930s.
|
| Have a look at the amount of energy used per dollar of GDP
| produced, too. Eg at https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-
| energy/world-energy-inte...
| 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.
| wilg wrote:
| I suppose that is a fair characterization. I would say
| that I still think it's tautological. Obviously it's a
| synthetic situation that involves infinity, so real-world
| applications are difficult to evaluate.
|
| But I just don't get why people see it as an ethical
| dilemma - the conclusion is a perfectly sensible outcome
| of the setup. The conclusion is just a restatement of the
| premise - a maximization of population over a
| maximization of happiness. Thats why it seems
| tautological to me, the math of it is perfunctory and
| reveals nothing. If you cared about maximizing happiness
| more than population you would have to modify the setup.
| The trade-off is built into the premise.
| zoogeny wrote:
| While this is an exceptionally cynical article it contains a
| truth that transcends app development.
|
| Sometime during Covid I was in a massive supermarket that was
| nearly empty. I was in the deodorant aisle trying to choose from
| the approximately 100 brand and scent options. I wanted a
| deodorant without aluminum because I had read online that
| aluminum in deodorant causes yellow stains. This used to be hard,
| only one or two brands used to specialize in that. But on that
| day, my usual brand had a "new forumula!" that included aluminum.
| While looking at the packaging I realized the brand had been
| bought by one of the big boys, like a Unilever, Johnson&Johnson,
| whatever.
|
| I scanned the new ingredient list of the product and then scanned
| the wall of 100+ brands and scents in front of me. I started
| picking a few at random and taking a look at their ingredients
| lists. Every single one was the same. I mean, they have brand
| names that are distinct, color schemes that are distinct, scents
| that are distinct. But it was a total illusion of choice. Those
| 100 options were really just 1 option. The only differentiator
| between them was packaging and scent.
|
| I had a moment. The bright lights of the environment. The decor
| of the supermarket. The just audible music. When I squinted my
| eyes even the packaging of all of the brands blended into a
| single object. The entire environment was perfectly tuned to keep
| me unaware at the illusion of choice.
|
| A few weeks later, basically the next time I went to buy
| deodorant, I noticed that several of the standard brands now
| offered a new choice, boldly printed on the deodorant caps:
| "Aluminum Free!". Apparently I am as easily understood and
| marketed to as anyone.
|
| What I mean to say, the supermarket is just as tuned to make you
| Marl. 99.9% of the time I don't read the ingredient list of the
| products I buy. Whoever designs these environments knows this.
| They don't want to compete on actual differentiators. They want
| to lull your brain into a sleep and then present you with the one
| precise differentiator you care about. In my case, it was
| aluminum. When they realized that small no-name brands were
| succeeding by solving a problem the big brands created, they just
| bought them out and then re-packaged their existing products to
| highlight the differentiator.
|
| In that moment I saw it all. How we are turning ourselves into
| robots. How I was not immune. In my humble opinion, tech brands
| are behind the curve on this one. Consumer product brands have
| been mining this space for decades, probably centuries.
| 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.
| Biganon wrote:
| This reminds me of what I call the "TF1 effect". TF1 is the
| biggest TV channel in France and, IIRC, in Europe. It's (now) a
| private channel, operated with ads. I use it as an example, but
| the point stands for all similar TV channels.
|
| It doesn't need to satisfy its viewers a lot. It just needs to
| satisfy N users enough that they don't switch to another channel,
| and use their "brain availability time" (to use the words of
| TF1's former CEO) with them instead. This creates zero incentive
| to produce good content; only addictive, low cost, shitty content
| that many people will choose.
| 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..."
| emodendroket wrote:
| > OKCupid, like the other acquisitions of Match.com, is now just
| another Tinder clone - see face, swipe left, see face, swipe
| right. A digital nightclub. And I just don't expect to meet my
| wife in a nightclub.
|
| I've never used any dating app or Web site... but plenty of
| people appear to have done just that.
| 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.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is
| at work here?
|
| Capitalism.
|
| It's capitalism.
| 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.
| ssss11 wrote:
| I agree, sad state of affairs.
| sdeframond wrote:
| While the marginal (or average) _B2C_ user is Marl, the marginal
| _B2B_ user /customer may not be. Indeed enterprise software does
| not follow the same pattern of enshitification.
|
| Marl is the user, and Marl is the product. There is another side
| to this: businesses trying to reach out to people in their Marl-
| state.
| smukherjee19 wrote:
| I personally have a different name for the Marl-type of people:
| NPCs. Every time I get on the train I see them on their phones,
| mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and having the eyes of a dead
| fish. It's almost as if their brains are turned off.
|
| It's really sad that all software has become like the article
| states...
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| The question I have is why is Match Group allowed to have a
| monopoly on online dating?
|
| > _Match Group is an American internet and technology company
| headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest
| global portfolio of popular online dating services including
| Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish,
| OurTime, and other dating global brands._
|
| I can't even name another dating site.
| genewitch wrote:
| christianmingle, grindr, ashley madison, and then all the ones
| for more, uh, enthusiastic relationships. But from that list
| and the catchall at the end, Match may own all of those as
| well, seeing as how OKC was designed for people who weren't
| compatible with match.com, and around the same time, plenty of
| fish was the main competitor. Match bought both.
| generalizations wrote:
| Bumble is the notable exception.
| eep_social wrote:
| I had to go fact check this because I understood the
| opposite. And you're right! What confused me is that Whitney
| Wolfe Herd founded Bumble and was also a Tinder co-founder.
| Bumble is owned by Blackstone Group now so they presumably
| have all the same incentives as Match properties under
| different owners.
| [deleted]
| kinnessa60 wrote:
| [dead]
| Arech wrote:
| I've also met my wife on OkCupid at the beginning of 2016. It was
| by far the best dating site ever existed. Basically, of "no
| alternatives" type... I have a deep respect to everyone who have
| made it possible. Thank you. It's extremely sad it was
| destroyed...
| 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.
| ozim wrote:
| Should discussion be about what people think is good for them vs
| what is good for them.
|
| Just like smoking or sugar.
| 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.
| pickingdinner wrote:
| You need to optimize the product for the best scenarios, and
| guide everyone towards those scenarios.
|
| What happened to OKCupid is typical. Founders envision the best
| scenarios for their users, and build a business around that
| product. User satisfaction drives their success.
|
| Corporations aren't really good at that. So they need someone to
| override mindless acts of profiteering in favor of a better
| future. Someone with a vision, but also the power to enforce it.
| But they also have to be right.
| 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.
| mikpanko wrote:
| I worked on and with growth teams in established tech companies
| for a while (including Google) and am running an early stage
| startup right now and my experience is very different.
|
| Mature products often focus on user retention and resurrection
| even more than attracting new users. Even VCs of early stage
| startups constantly keep asking about retention and stickiness as
| better metrics than new users.
|
| As I am now working on a brand new product [1], I talk daily to
| potential and early users and observe the short attention spans
| all the time. These are smart people with college degrees. But
| the ever increasing amounts of information hitting every person
| on a daily basis leads to shorter and shorter attention spans of
| everybody, not just a "marginal" user. If anything, first users
| provide less attention to new products than later users for well-
| established brands.
|
| [1] https://motifanalytics.com
| 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]
| nilslindemann wrote:
| Just because people like simple tools, they are not tyrants. If
| you seek for tyrants, look at the dudes who forbid people to log
| in as root, or to open HTML files from their computers.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| This would mean that quality and complexity of apps will
| constantly decrease asymptotically to 0
| 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
| bhauer wrote:
| Great article. I personally put the blame on mobile devices and
| the "mobilification" of every computing application. Mobile-first
| mentality saw application designers ruthlessly culling anything
| that caused even the slightest friction. The result: slipstreamed
| applications that do the least necessary to appeal to the
| broadest audience.
|
| Sadly, the mobilification mindset even sometimes impacts desktop-
| first applications, what few remain. The attack vector of choice
| is Electron hosting a mobile-first web app with a middling
| desktop breakpoint.
|
| Ultimately, the author captures the same phenomenon, but I
| personally think it traces more specifically to the rise of
| mobile devices.
| 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.
| sirspacey wrote:
| Try no/low code tools like WeWeb or Glide. Still more of a
| design/dev toolkit, but a leap closer.
| 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...
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| From what I hear, PulseAudio inherently lacks the
| architecture to create arbitrary audio routing graphs.
| PipeWire can do it for audio with apps like Helvum and
| QPWGraph, but not for all windows (only webcams and perhaps
| screen sharing). The view does get confusing as the number
| of apps/nodes increases though. One point of confusion is
| that in Helvum, Pulse apps have a playback and monitor node
| (and the monitor is a copy of the input), but JACK apps
| have an input and output (where the output is the result of
| the app applying effects to the input, or an unrelated
| audio stream altogether). I'm not sure where native
| PipeWire apps lie.
| 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)
| genewitch wrote:
| as sibling commented, i look at the Automatic-1111 stable
| diffusion "webui" as being exactly like you describe,
| where the "default" service is built in, but the API
| seems relatively straightforward enough that people have
| build electron apps and android apps that can talk
| directly to the python service behind. one of these days
| i'll actually code a useful mobile UI for my servers.
| Until then, the reflowing webUI works "ok enough" on
| mobile.
|
| another one that i'd like to think has an open enough API
| is mastodon/fediverse, assuming they actually adhere to
| the activitypub spec, it should ( _should_ ) be
| relatively straightforward to write a UI on top of the
| API. And it seems ok, there's quite a number of mastodon
| "apps", but less for stuff like misskey or pleroma.
|
| I'm sure there are other contemporaneous examples, but
| suffice to say that _some_ developers still care about
| this, today!
| 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
| sanderjd wrote:
| To be clear, when I say "pay for things", I mean
| subscriptions. I don't think one time payments work at
| all.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I get why people do ad business models!
|
| But if I were a user of your app, I would personally prefer
| to pay you $5/yr for whatever "fancy upgrades" it would
| require for that to get you enough subscribers to be
| workable.
|
| But this is a personal preference! It's definitely the case
| that most people prefer to use free (apologies, I don't
| know if this applies to your app, but it usually does)
| crap.
|
| But I do think a niche of people like me totally exists,
| and is actually not that small.
| 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.
| ncruces wrote:
| I know you exist. I'm actually able to find literally
| dozens of people like you, every month.
|
| OTOH, for everyone of you (users willing to pay $1 for a
| tool that'll solve a problem they have every once in a
| while), I'm able to find 1000 that'll just install the ad
| supported app, use it that one time and forget about it
| (until the next time they need it).
|
| Trust me: the barrier to get even $1 from a user for an
| app the majority uses once a week tops for a couple of
| minutes, is immense, especially if they can run it for
| free, in exchange for the annoyance of a single banner
| ad, that you can dismiss (and go full screen) after 30s,
| if you do use it longer than that.
|
| But the free version must exist, for discoverablity if
| nothing else, and experience shows that degrading it to
| drive sales only jeopardizes total revenue. So ads it is.
| 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.".
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm struggling to see how this is responsive to my comment.
| Was it meant for someone else?
| mato wrote:
| I was responding to your comment, but should have used
| less cut and paste. You wrote:
|
| > This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only
| really exists for things that are given away for free.
|
| Navionics Boating is a paid application, and it's not
| cheap. There is no free tier, just a 14-day trial period.
|
| Despite that, it seems to have gone down the same route
| of Marl-ifying the interface as a free app would have
| done.
|
| So, my point is, that this dynamic exists even for things
| that you pay money for.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Ok yeah I get it now! Thanks for clarifying.
|
| So, I guess it would require a lot more research to make
| a real argument about this, but to me, this just sounds
| like an application that isn't very good, but I don't
| think is the same phenomenon described by the article. I
| definitely don't think charging money is any kind of
| guarantee of quality. Software is hard to make and lots
| of software sucks just because it sucks.
|
| But the difference I see is that I think Navionics
| Boating has an incentive to make that app better. That if
| they make improvements for users like you, that will
| likely impact their bottom line positively, because
| they'll attract and retain more users like you.
|
| But free mass-market consumer apps have the opposite
| incentive. They are incentivized to dumb things down to
| the lowest common denominator, because there will always
| be > 1 user that they attract with that approach for
| every 1 user like you that they alienate.
|
| Basically: I think free business models can ignore
| retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and
| that's why I prefer them.
| mato wrote:
| > Basically: I think free business models can ignore
| retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and
| that's why I prefer them.
|
| I think that only holds if you have enough competition
| that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.
|
| I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone
| I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics.
| Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business
| for many many years before smartphones even existed, and
| their electronic charts are good.
|
| Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of
| them, more or less fall into two groups:
|
| (1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent
| is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).
|
| (2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.
|
| I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper
| opinion. I originally picked it because it was way
| cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up
| since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end
| of the day just works, is fast, offline, and _does not
| crash_. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of
| the parent company designed to steer you into buying
| their expensive chart plotter brands (B &G mainly).
|
| To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN),
| but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any
| kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count
| it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator
| which is _surprisingly good_ , but a different product
| category (raster charts).
|
| TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics,
| there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| > I do hope to see markets emerge that target power users
|
| The problem is that every group of power users has their own
| idea of what they want, and they're _very_ stubborn about
| providing features that they don't personally use or like.
|
| I've run across these, though I can't find the link now, there
| was a suite of "apps for power users like us", compile 'em from
| source, if you don't like that then go fuck yourself.
|
| Which is a fine way to limit who asks for tech support, but
| it's not much of a market.
| 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.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| "Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee" Is
| wonder if that is actually true for services that aren't entirely
| ad supported. Here a non exhaustive list that defies this -
| free2play games. It's all about those whales. - games. Preorder,
| delux/collector editions, DLC, battle passes, micro transactions,
| etc. - a bunch of SaaS offerings are adding new AI tiers right
| now, e.g. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Dueling to name a few.
|
| There was definitely a time when the name of the game in tech,
| was expanding the user base. Right now it feels like everyone is
| trying their hardest to increase their per user revenue or as
| companies would put it, capture more of the value they generate.
|
| One might think, that this could actually have its upsides.
| Companies increasing the value to their existing users to entice
| them to pay more, but by and large this isn't what I'm seeing.
| Instead it feels like many are instead putting existing features
| behind higher paywalls, churning out junk content, particularly
| in games as well as adding the buzzword of the year, e.g. NFT,
| metaverse, AI.
| 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.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| The insight that we are all Marl at some point is really
| important. People who think they are never Mark are the most
| vulnerable.
| 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.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is
| at work here?
|
| Sounds familiar:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
| 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?'
| uoaei wrote:
| Is it really so hard to consider? Do you believe that
| intentions and outcomes are always aligned?
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| If you listen to Frances Haugen's testimony, you see that
| it is very much deliberate.
|
| There are probably thousands of psychology grads that went
| to school, hoping to help people, that are, instead,
| designing dark patterns.
|
| But they are probably making a lot more money than they
| would, helping people.
|
| Evil pays cash.
| lifty wrote:
| It's as deliberate as a cow eating grass. The cow
| deliberately eats the grass but because of the game
| theory involved (lack of information, lack of
| coordination, incentives etc.), the pasture disappears.
| The point of my comment (and the article's, I think) was
| that companies want the revenue, but don't deliberately
| want to harm us.
| titzer wrote:
| Companies aren't cows. They know. Big companies always
| have people studying the larger economic trends of the
| markets they are in and looking into the future--you
| know, people who are always ignored if they point out
| anything or advocate anything that would be counter to
| this quarter's profits.
| rglullis wrote:
| Now, let's find any single company/product that actually is
| successful by encouraging us to become better versions of
| ourselves.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| In apps: Ten Percent Happier and Headspace?
|
| In meatspace: Nike, Adidas?
| RugnirViking wrote:
| these are kinda depressing. I was thinkinbg duolingo as
| well but something I realise especially with the meditation
| apps is how much they almost impressively manage to subvert
| what they were origianlly. As time goes on they cater more
| to marl and less to actually achieving anything.
|
| Like the duolingo redesign.
|
| It's one of the reasons I generally seek out smaller
| companies for stuff like this. The biggest company in these
| sorts of categories gets there by being entirely unhelpful
| at its stated goals :(
|
| Even the shoes. You'll get so much better service from a
| mid sized distributor that actually cares than mass market
| conglomerates. If you ask for advice it will be sincerely
| given rather than a premade statement calibrated to tap
| into base impulse version of you to increase your
| likelihood of spending the most
| rglullis wrote:
| Sport gear companies? Just selling you a lifestyle and an
| identity. Meditation apps feel more like someone exploiting
| a fad than some with an _actual_ interest in your
| wellbeing.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I dunno, I think that might be overly cynical. You might
| as well complain that a brain surgeon only removes tumors
| because they get money for it.
|
| Does Nike want me to run and jump _less_ , to participate
| in sports _less_ , to work out less often? No, they run
| expensive ad campaigns encouraging me to make exercise a
| regular part of my life. To sell apparel, yes, but they
| aren't telling me to eat more cheeseburgers or drink more
| booze like other corporations.
| sirspacey wrote:
| Yes and no
|
| 98% of Spotify users never take any action other than "press
| play" on a radio station
|
| 2% take some kind of agency (create a playlist, like a song)
|
| A vanishingly small amount create personal or public curated
| playlists
|
| Yes, that very small amount may also listen passively
| sometimes, but the difference matters. Imagine if Spotify was
| just a radio station.
| webninja wrote:
| I hate that new Spotify radios play nearly the same songs
| from your existing playlists and listening history. Little
| variety and mostly an echo chamber.
| kmac_ wrote:
| It works for me: Discover weekly + song radio + similar
| artists + genre and user playlists. I can listen to new
| songs until I'm tired. I love Spotify.
| rconti wrote:
| Is this true, or just an invented number based on your
| intuition?
| 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?
| RugnirViking wrote:
| > While this is true, it stands to question: why build
| systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do
| better?
|
| until incentives change, people will continue to encourage
| this. The base instinct behaviors when one is stressed and
| tired and checked out are the most profitable, the most
| susceptible to adverts etc.
|
| The way to encourage conciencousness, taking pride in
| creation etc is to see a few (the right amount of) others
| (who are seen by the user as peers, not unnatainable far
| off creators) doing the same. Maybe stretched/challenged a
| little - one or two at most people above their skill level,
| who appear approachable and humble.
|
| It's the format of most true knowledge creation, be it
| classrooms, effective workplaces, sports programs, and
| others
| 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.
| airtonix wrote:
| [dead]
| rglullis wrote:
| We have them, they exist for millennia. It's just that most
| of them are considered too boring or are judged as a whole
| by looking at some of its members of questionable character
| - who ironically are there because they know they are not
| perfect but trying to be better.
| 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?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Signal is a special case because it's a generic messenger
| app - meaning it's target audience is legitimately
| _everyone_ , and with its philosophy and E2EE in general
| preventing interoperability, it _has_ to capture
| everyone. It has to be optimized towards a Marl, or else
| it 'll fail to network effects.
|
| Some software is like that. Most isn't - but the
| enshittification culture is affecting it all the same.
| 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.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| In German the DAU is the "dumbest assumed user", the worst
| case consideration when designing UI. My impression is that
| if you try to increase DAUs, you often increase both types.
| beefield wrote:
| This is something important that people do not seem to grasp.
| Intelligence is a really high dimensional thing. Even the
| ones that are highly intelligent in some dimensions are dumb
| as rock in vast majority of other dimensions. So we all are
| basically morons with some occasional flashes of intelligence
| in some individuals.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| Really dumb people don't know that they are really dumb.
| Dumb people know that they are dumb. Below average people
| think they are average. Average people think they are
| smart. Smart people know they are smart but not highly
| intelligent. Highly intelligent people think they are
| geniuses (including in all possible fields). Geniuses, real
| honest-to-goodness geniuses, know that they are smart in
| many ways but mostly dumb.
|
| I cannot prove it, but this is how I think it is. For the
| record, I think I am smart; however, because of the Iron
| Rule of Intelligence above, it is equally possible that I
| am only average.
| srik wrote:
| That is the insight I'm surprised the author didn't zero in on.
| beefman wrote:
| There are stupid people. A large percentage of the population
| never regularly used PCs because keyboards and mice are too
| abstract. They only began regularly computing once they could
| touch things with their fingers. Today, Google search has more
| fuzzing and returns more Q&A results on mobile.
|
| A large percentage never used e-mail because e-mail addresses
| are too abstract. They only began using "social media" when
| 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).
| 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.
| zbentley wrote:
| Absolutely. I think there are two business behaviors that
| underly this phenomenon: growth culture and fear of being
| outcompeted.
|
| The culture of growth-at-all-costs has been condemned plenty
| in other threads here, I won't restate how/why. It's the
| problem that brings about, for example, "your A/B testing
| gradient descent" as the gravitational pull towards
| enshittification: the idea that robotically optimizing for
| greater growth/income/engagement is the _right_ thing for a
| business to do. This ignores the huge range of ethical,
| profitable businesses that inhabit the space in the size
| /growth spectrum between "lifestyle boutique that pays the
| employees' bills and not much more" and "virally growing
| global superphenomenon". The presumption that those two
| extremes are the only inevitable outcomes for a business is
| poison. Unfortunately, sustainably inhabiting that middle
| ground requires a resistance to extreme greed on the part of
| a business's leadership/leadership culture--and again, the
| presence of _some_ greed is just fine in non-hypergrowth
| businesses! There are loyal, lucrative, and sizable markets
| for carefully targeted products whose focus doesn 't drift;
| "niche" is not a pejorative, and many niches are wide enough
| to be worth absolute shitloads of money! Unfortunately,
| continually resisting the extremity of greed is not something
| humans are good at.
|
| There's also the fear of outcompetition: the idea that a
| Marl-serving competitor will grow so large that they
| extinguish your non-Marl-focused business. That's sometimes
| true, but not inevitably so--and enduring the risk of that
| "sometimes" is one of the grit-your-teeth-and-stick-to-your-
| ethics behaviors that distinguishes beloved minority members
| of a market from self-immolating enshittification chasers.
| Remember, Apple was a beloved minority player in personal
| computing, staying (and generally performing well) within a
| luxury/loyalist niche, for more than a decade. Enduring risk
| in the face of the fear of outcompetition does require
| bravery from leaders, but can yield benefits both in the form
| of profits/loyalty and--rarely--by _converting_ Marls into
| non-Marls by showing an example of how much better things can
| be.
|
| Short version is a cold take: the intersection of
| hypergrowth-legend-induced greed and outcompetition fear,
| applied across large groups of people with communication
| impedance, leads to crappy outcomes. As usual.
| ericksoa wrote:
| 100%. When I play video games, I am Marl. Not going into
| menus or whatever to set things up, just using it to
| specifically not use my brain.
| titzer wrote:
| Well put. And everyone plays along. When the big, popular apps
| become idiocracized, then the smaller apps follow suit. It
| really seems that there's a race-to-the-bottom effect going on.
|
| Case in point: Guitar tuner apps. Back in 2005 a good friend of
| mine had a startup that made the best-in-class guitar tuner app
| in the feature phone / flip phone era, before Android. Back
| then, they had to deal with all manner of constraints from
| vendors and the hardware of the day. They figured it out and
| shipped a featureful app that had a < 1MB binary and run at
| realtime speeds and had an intuitive UI. They sold it for
| something like a $6 one-time payment and were happy keeping
| their startup chugging along at $500k-$1M annual revenue. Fast
| forward to today, there are a zillion clones, typically
| weighing in at 40+MB, are "free with ads" and will nag you
| endlessly to sign up for $7, $10, even $15 _per month_. Their
| UIs suck, too. I have no idea what their revenue aspirations
| are, but this is totally driven by capturing consumer surplus
| from the orders-of-magnitude larger Android market. We all
| lose.
|
| I do not pay for these apps; I would gladly have back that $6
| app, but can't have it. The market is absolutely saturated with
| enshittified Android apps. Instead, I _intentionally_ spend
| significantly more than that on dedicated tuners (like the
| excellent but somewhat fragile Snark clip-on ones).
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's a pretty interesting statement. I used to be fine with
| "microboredoms" and think about other things, such as a book
| I'm reading, a game I want to play, or even work.
|
| I noticed these days that I spend more time during those
| "microboredoms" on my phone. I have 10 seconds? Check out
| reddit!
|
| I've been trying to kick this habit, enjoy my surroundings
| more, or get lost in my head like I used to.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| Carrying around a fidget toy has helped me with this. Part of
| the urge to scroll on my phone is just to do something with
| my fingers. If my fingers are occupied with a bit of string
| or a finger-trap, my mind is more free to wander.
| munificent wrote:
| I started cross-stitching again for exactly this reason.
| Lately, I've been learning to knit, which is even better
| for scratching this itch.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I sympathise. This is a really hard habit to break.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > to the worse impulses
|
| In my experience, making stuff that provides no intrinsic value
| like video games, only value of meaning, my games have only
| gotten _better_ by catering to those impulses, which are really
| not that negative or stupid.
|
| Really, who needs tutorials? Why make stuff that needs a
| tutorial? You can have complex games without tutorials and
| FTUEs. You don't need so much UI. It's not about scrolling so
| much as it is that so many apps obscure, rather than transmit,
| anything meaningful, through really obnoxious UI.
|
| This argument is the Malcolm Gladwell 140 character tweet
| complaint not being enough to have a deep conversation. Easy
| for him to say, he's got his!
| TalEs wrote:
| I always wanted to make something like OkC, that caters to power
| users, but also to Marl. I will admit, I am Marl a lot of the
| time, so I know what Marls' want in a product. I already have an
| outline of my idea, but I won't give it away fully. Basically, I
| wanted something that is simple enough for Marl, but the internal
| features can be quite complex if you want to tweak them to find
| the perfect someone. It has to be an app primarily, and have a
| website as secondary. My ADHD brain is only good at ideating but
| I can't bring myself to work on them. I am no software dev, so
| it's always been just a dream.
|
| I wanted an app, that has the question and answer capabilities of
| OkC, to get to know a person, without actually having to type
| anything. It would have filters for partners or personalities. It
| can have more provocative questions to get the users desires,
| morals and values. It would be a blind date sort of deal, to
| prevent it becoming a beauty contest. Meeting in-person would be
| the main goal, with safety in mind of course. Dating would not be
| the main point of the app, meeting people would be, doing
| activities together and such.
|
| It would have a public dashboard of users, like ratio of M:F. I
| would love the return of the OkC blogs too.
|
| In terms of scaling, I don't care about infinite growth, it would
| be like a B-Corp with a sustainable growth model. The
| monetisation could be a 3-6 month full-feature subscription. If
| it didn't work out, the user could just move on. The other worse
| option would be ads. The app could be open-sourced or a freemium
| model, I am not sure about the feasibility.
|
| After going through the comments here, it seems @com2kid had
| already made something similar but I have some ideas to make it
| better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512127
|
| Would love to know what he had learnt from working on that
| project!
| 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:
| [flagged]
| 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!)
| TalEs wrote:
| Your idea is exactly what I would like to have in an app,
| with a ML twist and also more on matchmaking people based
| on their traits, personalities, morals and values. Below
| is my comment on it. It an idealistic solution, but I
| have an outline of such an app, that might need some
| refining. I would love to talk about if its it's even
| doable or feasible, and you seem to the the best person
| for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37520545
| 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.
| afarrell wrote:
| Perhaps then it is better run as a feature of a city's
| local newspaper. They already have the advertising
| department side of the marketplace. Does anyone at the
| Boston Globe want to buy your code?
| 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.
| afarrell wrote:
| So is alcohol.
| 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.
| collaborative wrote:
| For decades now bilionares have bought companies,
| improved numbers in the short term, and sold them for a
| profit
| 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
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Most relationships don't last forever; people come back
| to what they know worked before.
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Single payer has many, many more data points from which
| to draw conclusions.
| zbentley wrote:
| Well, it tries to. Whether or not it succeeds is the
| subject of lots and lots of debate, but single payer
| systems I'm aware of have accountability models driven by
| (usually public-sector) audits and quality controls that
| try to optimize for health outcomes. The rationale being
| that the payer (government) spends less overall, and is
| more likely to be supported (voted for), if the
| population has good health outcomes in areas that the
| government can influence via the healthcare system.
| mhb wrote:
| Paying and quality assessment don't need to be coupled.
| The government doesn't need to be paying for the
| healthcare in order to make recommendations aimed at
| improving health outcomes. It would probably be happy to
| swell its ranks by starting up a dental review board.
|
| Though I'm not optimistic about either its ability to
| fund healthcare or assess its quality.
| 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.
| petsfed wrote:
| Somehow I re-read your post like 4 times and still thought
| you were saying "get married _AND_ your money back ", not
| "get married _or_ your money back ".
|
| So here I am, downvoting my own posts.
|
| I will say that your idea is trivially gamed. What startup
| is going to keep the legal staff on retainer to sue every
| person who "breaks up" with their partner, gets their
| refund check, and uses it to buy an engagement ring?
| 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?
| zbentley wrote:
| Yeah. I think the problem is with an underlying
| assumption in GP's post: that because dating as a system
| _sometimes behaves game-theoretically_ it is therefore
| _equivalent to a system of economic transactions_.
|
| I think that is only sometimes true, usually in
| situations where relationships are mainly economic
| decisions. As prosperity increases and pay/power
| differences between genders shrink, it is becoming less
| frequently true, and less true on a per-relationship
| basis, over time.
| 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.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > Yes, if you neglect the existing users' experience for long
| enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by
| the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have
| long been promoted.
|
| This is why interoperability should be mandated, then you are not
| locked in and they have to care!
| mellosouls wrote:
| This article seems to misdiagnose completely what is going on,
| using an established description to boot and flipping it (without
| explaining where he has lifted the phrase from).
|
| _The Tyranny of the Majority_ [1] for instance is a well-known
| phrase that when applied to markets succinctly describes the
| tendency to blandness and conformity as once-niche products
| remove bit by bit the original and distinguishing features that
| made them _marginally_ successful.
|
| The hypothetical user described is just a representation of
| short-attention spans; the mix of concepts apparently adding to
| the author's confusion here.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| ?Por que no los dos?
|
| Companies dumb down their products to appeal to the masses,
| who then get dumber because they have nothing nudging them to
| get better. It's a vicious cycle imo.
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| > And I just don't expect to meet my wife in a nightclub.
|
| I did?
|
| I mean, you can meet a significant other or friend in any kind of
| place. I kind of get what the author is trying to say but it's
| ill phrased.
| 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.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Both of these points are wrong.
|
| A business that's shrinking but throwing off cash is with
| a lot still. Only the valuation multiple is based on
| growth.
|
| Exponential growth is expected in startups of all
| industries, software only makes the margins and
| distribution easier.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Exponential growth is also expected within new businesses
| within an established corporation. Similar to software's
| margins and distribution advantage, an existing
| corporation can often pursue new businesses with an
| existing infrastructure that approaches minimal
| additional expense beyond human salaries. The reference
| to "hurdle rate" is an often used term by corporate MBAs
| evaluating the worth of a new line of business.
| 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.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| If local familiy restaurants worked like apps and had no
| virtually no marginal costs to feed another user or serve a
| new entree, then it would stop being an anti-growth example.
| Cheesecake Factory+ would scale up and then the market would
| clone and chase them.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I don't even understand the point of this. If my
| grandmother had wheels she'd be a bus.
| astrange wrote:
| Your local family restaurant is a low-value-added frontend
| for Sysco. Or in Marxist terms, they're petit-bourgeois
| feudalists, which isn't even as good as being a capitalist
| because it doesn't increase prosperity.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Marxist insults: those should work /s
| 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...
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| This really seems to give words to a feeling that I've had, which
| is that technology has been steadily getting worse - i.e. less
| useful and more user-hostile - over the past decade or so.
|
| It's too bad, because there was some amazing product creativity
| going on in the past, and the future really did seem bright. But
| I feel not that we missed out on an imagined future, but that we
| are actually going backwards - thanks to enshittification and
| this perverse incentive structure.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| There's a hidden optimism even in this. If some technology
| (often open source and hobbyist-developed) is getting better
| despite a fraction of the funding of mainstream commercial
| technology products, think what we could do if somehow there
| was an enlightenment either of software users or developers to
| eliminate the 'Marl' state.
| 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.
| TheDong wrote:
| email still has non-marginal-interfaces available in general
| though.
|
| You can still configure some combination of mutt,
| offlineimap, sendmail, etc to work with gmail and view your
| emails locally in a proper viewer.
|
| Or use thunderbird I guess, though thunderbird feels pretty
| "marginal user" focused compared to mutt.
| ultra-jeremyx wrote:
| Oh yeah, and they had Inbox, which I LOVED, and sadly, they
| killed off
| lanza wrote:
| This is also how politics works at this point. Politicians get
| A/B tested to maximize DAUs -- e.g. Fox News viewers and thus
| their voters.
|
| Political party stances are the local maxima of AB testing
| talking points to their userbase around engagement.
| 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
| Semaphor wrote:
| > I'm now quite skeptical of quantification of romance and the
| idea that similarity makes for good relationships.
|
| That was part of what made OkCupid amazing: It wasn't even always
| similarity. You could answer a Question with A, want your match
| to answer with B or C, and assign how important that answer is.
|
| This level of "complexity" seems unthinkable in modern apps.
|
| I, too, met my wife on OkCupid around 2014, we both had over 1000
| questions answered. Luckily, you could also get matches outside
| your area, she was on another continent ;)
|
| Another thing I realized is that as an average looking, slightly
| overweight guy, you could easily get replies from "rarely
| replies" women by actually reading their profile and writing more
| than one sentence without being an asshole.
| 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.
| foxfired wrote:
| Many years ago, I felt frustrated by this marginal user we were
| catering to at work. I called him "The Busy Man" [1] and wrote
| about it because no one at work would listen to me.
|
| > The busy man only has 48 hours to spare to learn JavaScript.
| The busy only has 24 hours to get more friends on your new social
| network. Only has 12 hours to decide which shoe to buy. Only has
| 10 minutes to wait for that email. Only has 2 minutes to read
| that long article you wrote. Only has 30 seconds to know what
| your product does. Only 8 seconds to register on your website.
| The busy man has only 2 seconds to spare to like your website.
|
| [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/the-busy-man (2015)
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| I recommend that everyone read Stanley Milgram's book
| Obedience to Authority about his fake shock experiments.
|
| Some people simply suspend moral judgement entirely in
| circumstances where someone else is calling the shots.
| They no more regard themselves as culpable for the bad
| outcomes as they do an automobile operated by a drunk
| driver. At a certain point, many people just switch off
| the moralizing, automatically assigning all of the
| responsibility to the order-giver.
|
| It's an interesting phenomenon. A side effect, I find, is
| that people get very very upset when you name and shame
| individual employees doing unethical things at work that
| are legal and fall under the umbrella of "corporate
| initiatives" such as implementing antipatterns. The guilt
| for such seems to be perceived to fall with management or
| "product people", not developers, even though the
| developers are the ones who wrote the code.
|
| Same for, say, warfighters. People don't regard the
| conscripted infantrymen at fault for the deaths, even
| though it is often literally their hand on the trigger.
| csomar wrote:
| I think, the reason for that, is that
| management/leadership gets compensated fairly well for
| it. If this management doesn't have any particular talent
| or skills that can justify their compensation, then it's
| the responsibility that they are holding.
| SpookyChoice wrote:
| I recommend the the article about the infantry men who
| did not shoot https://www.americanheritage.com/secret-
| soldiers-who-didnt-s... Or better yet the book humankind
| from rutger bregman. Who wrote a whole chapter about why
| this experiment does not support this conclusion
| uoaei wrote:
| Useless, maybe. Bullshit, likely. There's definitely
| worse things, but that's not a sound argument.
| 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!
| volkk wrote:
| i would, but i don't want to dox myself
| 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.
| genewitch wrote:
| this is usually where i get frustrated with capitalism. Not
| everything has to be about retaining customers. If i hire
| someone to build a brick outbuilding, i probably won't need
| another brick outbuilding.
|
| I'd rather a "pay for 3-6 months of full access upfront, a
| 3 day trial option" than a subscription model for anything
| where there's a chance i won't be using it in 3-6 months.
| when i see a dating site ask for a year upfront i know
| they're not going to actually help me.
|
| I met my wife (and two close friends) on OKCupid over 15
| years ago, so i remember what it was, and what a site
| _could be again_ , just not OKC
| volkk wrote:
| > when i see a dating site ask for a year upfront i know
| they're not going to actually help me.
|
| the longest i've seen is 6mo (at least thats OUR longest)
| and while fewer people use this, it captures the
| demographic that is either self aware and think they'll
| need it for a long time, or folks that are happier with
| dating around. the point of these longer subs isn't
| because we're willingly creating dark patterns to avoid
| helping our users, i promise
| volkk wrote:
| i won't speak on behalf of my company, but as someone who
| was on dating apps for a while until i found my current
| fiancee, I will say that a lot of it is a numbers game.
|
| also, the company i work for is focused on more serious
| relationships. we are focusing heavily on reducing
| ghosting, lowering treating people like they're disposable,
| etc.
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| If you can't find a long-term relationship on a hookup app
| that's an attractiveness issue on your part. How's the app
| going to stop you from going on a second date?
| fragmede wrote:
| Nothing, but an app can do plenty to string you along while
| you pay for a membership hoping to get to a first one. And
| yeah, ugly people want long term relationships and need
| love too!
| memefrog wrote:
| [dead]
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| I don't understand why so many companies are against simply
| developing a new product with a new brand instead of
| lobotomizing their own product.
|
| It seems to have over and over where a product and brand that
| makes decent profit is utterly destroyed in an attempt to
| acquire a new market.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Well, the existing product already has critical mass, a new
| product - like the various Instagram clones, then the various
| Tiktok clones, then the various Twitter clones - all have to
| acquire their own customer base.
|
| That said, other point: Why not just accept you're no longer
| growing? The company would've stayed solvent for years yet,
| with a steady group of users coming in and out over time as
| the brand becomes synonymous with thoughtful dating profiles
| instead of the rapid fire hot-or-not that is Tinder.
| wvenable wrote:
| The endless pursuit of growth is incredibly destructive. A
| consistent profitable business is considered a failure.
|
| Instragram was able to pull their users into Threads pretty
| easily without making Threads a direct part of Instragram.
| It is still it's own thing with it's own brand.
| bc11hn wrote:
| Because creating a new product is harder and more expensive
| than changing an existing one, even if it does destroy it.
|
| Advertising, novel technical infrastructure, new branding,
| etc... all of this needs to be done for a new brand -- and
| then who knows if any one will come visit?
|
| Or, you can just make whatever short-term changes to your
| existing successful product, juice the metric you're looking
| to juice, and (in theory) cashout before the long term
| repercussions take affect.
| wvenable wrote:
| New branding isn't necessarily bad; it can make a new
| product seem fresh. Technical infrastructure, both hardware
| and software, can be reused. You don't have destroy one
| software product to make another.
|
| Take this OkCupid example; they had their website model.
| They could have just created "OkCupid Nights" as a separate
| Tinder-like product reusing as much of their tech as
| possible.
| Iulioh wrote:
| Thanks for sharing
|
| Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model
| pif wrote:
| You mean: another thing destroyed that a few people used to
| enjoy when the developers had no chance to have it
| economically better!
| Iulioh wrote:
| Man, you can have a profitable thing and just..have that?
|
| Like if you have the same let's say 20% profit in the world
| of business is not enough, you want the RATE of your return
| to go higher even if the product allowed you to stay
| stupidity rich.
|
| Economically better is a good pair of words that leads to
| enshittification via greed
| pif wrote:
| Enshittification is only a problem from the point of view
| of the non-paying user. But the on-paying user has no say
| in what happens to the app.
|
| As they say, if you are not paying for the product, you
| _are_ the product.
|
| Enjoying the generosity of other people is fine, but it
| gives you no right to expect it to last indefinitely.
| Iulioh wrote:
| That's not even remotely the point.
|
| Have you read the post or seen how the things go?
|
| The paying user get fucked too, just give it time.
| pif wrote:
| > enshittification via greed
|
| You are right. The greed of affectionate users who refuse
| to pay has destroyed many a service!
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| The best thing about OKCupid was the data-backed articles. It
| was our source of inspiration and data point to continue on a
| dating website we built. We started as a side project in 2006
| but got shelved after my company was acquired. I returned to it
| in 2010-2011, and OKCupid was our constant fodder for data and
| inspiration.
| Angostura wrote:
| You raise a really interesting point that I hadn't really
| thought about before - the possibility that the move to mobile
| first is directly responsible for making things worse, dumber,
| simpler with less functionality.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Okay... what was the ratio of active men to women on OkCupid
| each year? How about on Tinder? You worked there, and that's an
| unfair assessment of Tinder.
|
| The fundamental trend in these dating apps is that ratio, and
| the relative growth (or decline!) of that gender's active user
| base. And it's not something Match, or for that matter
| Dataclysm ever discussed, even though it's kind of the most
| important single metric for a dating app.
|
| I mean ask demographers, they talk about 3m:2f being a crisis
| ratio [1]. And on Tinder it's probably closer to 10:1-20:1, I'm
| sure they pay AppAnnie (or whatever they're called now) to push
| out some fake ass numbers here and there. If it wasn't a
| horrible number - anything worse than 3m:2f is pretty horrible!
| - they would write about it, and they simply won't.
|
| On the one hand I really liked Dataclysm, and I was bought into
| the ideas it put forward. There's this post from 2018 by the
| author that used to say, oh well the reply rate to black women
| was 20 percentage points lower, which is the same in 2008.
| Well, trends showed about 18 percentage points more interracial
| marriages, the data was totally counter to trend: that
| indicated a problem in OkCupid, not in the user base as the
| author claimed. The Tinder PR team kind of put the kibosh on
| that kind of transparency for the wrong reasons, but it was the
| _right_ idea.
|
| So this big essay prompt format that the app used to use, I
| don't know if it was part of the problem where OkCupid was
| fundamentally against trend. In some respects, clearly, the
| essays versus swiping didn't matter. It certainly seems
| intuitive that the essays matter, it appeals to a sense of
| superiority in a particular audience's way of believing how
| online dating should work, but those guys are operating in the
| vacuum of the single most important data point (the actual
| ratio) and are forced to essentially generate fictions for why
| the apps work the way they do and why it worked _for them._
|
| I appreciate that from your point of view, 2013-2017 was a
| focus on "mobile" and that in your opinion that was "bad." But
| c'mon, show me a category of free app that didn't have a focus
| on "mobile." I personally think the apps are doing the best
| given the circumstances - the ratio! - and that everything else
| is dancing around this because, if people knew, you know,
| they'd stop using them.
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/Date_onomics/7GDVBgAAQB...
| (page 22)
| sirspacey wrote:
| A somewhat natural conclusion is that mobile killed the
| thoughtful internet. Ouch.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| Adding to this, the thought I've heard is that mobile/pad
| devices are great for consumption but terrible for
| contribution.
| 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.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Yes. Spot-on. The only thing I input on my phone is YouTube
| Shorts because it's much easier/faster than on a computer.
| Of course, that is inherent in its design.
| wvenable wrote:
| This is very true. And now think of all the people who's
| only Internet experience is on mobile. They exist entirely
| within that sub-par writing universe.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I actually feel really bad for the younger generation,
| actually. There's a whole bunch of teenagers who have no
| idea how good and useful computers can actually be,
| because all they ever have known is the shitty watered
| down mobile version of computing. Even desktops aren't as
| good as they used to be (thanks, Electron), but they're
| still a damn sight better than mobile. But if one grew up
| thinking that a phone/tablet is the end-all of computing,
| they have no idea what they're even missing.
| vore wrote:
| This is a ridiculous out of touch take. Of course young
| people know what desktop computing is like: they use it
| at school for class and use it at home for gaming. Have
| you considered that people might prefer mobile is
| preferable because it's, well, mobile and you don't have
| to lug a big ol' machine around?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Most schools use tablets or Chromebooks, especially in
| the early years. Neither gives access to a system which
| has desktop level capabilities. Both are locked down
| consumption platforms.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I did not get my own laptop until I started at my
| university. I am now doing a Ph.D. in informatics
| (European meaning of the term). I had access to my dad's
| workstation at home, but just to play around on and I
| certainly did not have root or the ability to install my
| own software. There were computers in my computer lab at
| high school, but I rarely used them. They were locked
| down as much as any smartphone I have ever had.
|
| At what age does someone need root access to become
| interested in a career in CS/IT/web dev/whatever?
|
| Or, if not root access, like what kind of "desktop level
| capabilities" should I have had that I did not have,
| given that I did not have a desktop as a teenager or
| younger?
|
| I am Gen X. I can think of exactly 0 friends who had
| their own desktops as teenagers. (Their own, as in were
| not really their parents' work computer, did not have to
| share with the family, could do whatever they wanted
| with, etc.)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I'm at the lower end of the millennial range and have
| personally experienced people who were a couple of years
| younger than me having to have folder hierarchies
| explained to them because they haven't encountered them
| before. This was in an introductory R course at the
| beginning of a master's degree at university.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-
| direc...
|
| You do not need root access necessarily, but you do need
| to get familiarity with the platforms you will actually
| be using when working, ie. Windows and maybe macOS.
|
| For Gen X and most of millennials, that platform was the
| only platform that existed. Using computers necessitated
| becoming familiar with "real" computers. That is no
| longer the case which is why gen Z are digital natives
| that have the digital literacy on a similar level to baby
| boomers.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I'm skeptical of your claim that young people are
| actually using desktops in those situations. As far as
| I've seen, young people are primarily gaming on consoles
| and are using stripped down devices like Chromebooks at
| school. It's also been noted that computer skills have
| gotten markedly worse among young people in recent years,
| which suggests they are not in fact being exposed to
| desktops regularly.
|
| And I _definitely_ think you 're off base about mobile
| devices being popular because they're mobile. People will
| sit at home and use a phone that is an incredibly worse
| experience than using an actual computer, and think it's
| an adequate substitute. They don't need the mobility in
| that situation, but they really think there's nothing
| wrong with the user experience.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| tanepiper wrote:
| Same here (second wife) and the thing is once OKCupid did
| it's job you didn't need it anymore - and that was a good
| thing.
|
| The problem is that when you choose eternally needing
| customers you have to switch to the types of people who will
| never have a long term relationship - which Tinder style apps
| work better for.
|
| But those kind of people also drive away the ones looking for
| a long-term partner.
|
| Really sounds like poisoning the well.
| sneak wrote:
| A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online
| all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it
| wasn't just OKC's userbase, but it was the median of the
| whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated/more
| basic.
|
| When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-
| internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today.
| Now that's just a median member of the general public, thanks
| to the ubiquity of social media.
| yencabulator wrote:
| OKC even early on had lots of new users that didn't
| necessarily fit well in the site culture (/formed different
| subcultures). Those people had more visually-oriented
| profiles, focused less on funny writing, would largely not
| use the quizzes, and if they did they'd answer quizzes very
| differently from you, and you'd still get your great >90%
| match dates filtering them out, and it didn't really
| matter! The filter worked!
|
| (I found my literal 99% match before OKCupid went too
| wrong, so I don't really know how it fell. I'm assuming
| overt monetization poisoned the well.)
| johntiger1 wrote:
| The internet really took a turn for the worse once they let
| people like me on to it.
|
| /s
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| to paraphrase a director: "any club that would let me be
| in it is a club that I probably shouldn't be in"
| trelane wrote:
| It's never gauche to quote Marx.[1] Especially Groucho.
| He wasn't a _director_ , though, as far as I can tell.[2]
|
| [1] https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000050/quotes
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx
| User23 wrote:
| When I first got online the average user's IQ was no joke
| north of 120. Now of course it's around 100.
|
| Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a
| subpopulation's average value for any attribute approaches
| the population's average value for same as the
| subpopulation's size approaches that of the population.
| It's conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it's
| cumbersome to talk about.
|
| That's also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a
| particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to
| talk about many more cases would become apparent.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| [dead]
| tsss wrote:
| Law of large numbers?
| addcommitpush wrote:
| Chebyshev's inequality:
|
| > for a wide class of probability distributions, no more
| than a certain fraction of values can be more than a
| certain distance from the mean. Specifically, no more
| than 1/k^2 of the distribution's values can be k or more
| standard deviations away from the mean.
|
| IQ is (if I recall correctly) normally distributed with a
| standard deviation of 15. So for a distance of 1.3...
| standard deviation (i.e. a distance of 20), you can't
| have more than 1/1.3...^2 = 56.25% of the population so
| far from the mean (below 80 or above 120), or 28.125%
| _above_ 120.
| theresistor wrote:
| Regression to the mean
| Retric wrote:
| Undergraduate degrees are becoming a stronger signal just
| not in the same way.
|
| It's even more obvious with high school degrees. Most
| people cross that threshold, so the people who didn't now
| represent a usual group of under achievers. The threshold
| is far below what FAANG's are looking for, but requiring
| a HS/collage degree can effectively presort applicants
| for jobs with lower thresholds.
|
| Unfortunately, such methods consistently exclude many
| worthwhile applicants from a wide range of jobs the same
| way asking for a criminal background check. But that then
| sets up a stronger feedback loop as people have stronger
| incentives to cross that threshold.
| antonjs wrote:
| I'm assuming it's a typo but "collage degree" is great as
| either a baseline inapplicable bachelor's for a tech job
| or a cynical view of the value a high school diploma.
|
| Thinking about it I bet someone somewhere has a MA
| focusing on collage and produces incredible art, so no
| hard feelings here.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Paradoxically, if you have an undergraduate degree but
| don't have a high school degree, it can be even stronger
| signal than having both. "I actually dropped out of high
| school and went straight to college.", sounds impressive.
|
| Of course you have to omit the part about taking a gap
| year and being a community college transfer student.
| cdogl wrote:
| I can't even imagine being asked about this part of my
| life in a career context. I'm 35 and for the better part
| of a decade I've just been asked about my previous roles.
| Seems like most organisations simply couldn't care less
| where I've come from. Maybe it's an Australian cultural
| thing.
| shaftoe wrote:
| No, this is pretty typical (I'm American).
|
| The only time people who are more than a few years into
| their career are asked about degrees (and grades) in an
| interview is at very bureaucratic organizations or when
| being interviewed by someone themselves barely out of
| school who lacks awareness.
| lovich wrote:
| Isn't that just Eternal September? At least in the
| internet
| opsimist wrote:
| Can we reverse Eternal Eptember? Can we create IQnet just
| for nerds?
| gwd wrote:
| Sure, just make something that has a barrier to entry
| that will filter out non-nerds. From what I can tell Ham
| radio is basically just a chatroom with an entrance exam,
| for instance. Anything done in a constructed language
| like Esperanto would be another filter.
|
| There's nothing stopping anyone from making a website
| duplicating the original OKCupid method. It's just that
| it requires someone willing to say "no" to the Marginal
| User and stay niche.
|
| And from what I can tell, Mastodon _is_ duplicating the
| original, pre-value-extraction Twitter experience. But
| the main filter it has at the moment is the network
| effects from Twitter and Facebook; as it grows that
| filter effect will be reduced.
| opsimist wrote:
| Can we use separate root DNS server as technical barrier
| to entry? Or NNTP protocol. Or client side SSL
| certificate, which must be won in a complex game.
|
| There are plenty of options to separate smart people from
| regular crowd. IMHO, a separate DNS server, which unlocks
| alternative Internet, is the easiest way to move away
| from regular people, because it's a bit complicated to
| switch DNS on a mobile device.
| gwd wrote:
| The thing is, that won't duplicate the original Internet,
| because the Internet exists. This new filtered internet
| won't contain all the smart tech people; it will contain
| all the smart tech people _who wanted to join an
| alternate internet of smart tech people_. Those are
| different sets of people.
| opsimist wrote:
| Early Internet was place for people with similar
| background, which were small part of all smart people.
|
| IMHO, we need a bait. Something, that will bring in smart
| people, and only smart people. HN detracts regular
| people, because it looks boring and doesn't help to
| continue discussions. This is good for HN, but bad for
| discussions (and spamers).
|
| I'm thinking about mix of a court and wikipedia.
| Something, where we can play our game (who is right? who
| is the smarter?) on steroids, something where we can
| layout our arguments, facts, ideas, and then discuss them
| (flame all night long), until someone else, an arbiter,
| will read all that and declare a winner. IMHO, a topic
| and number of win/lost/unfinished discussions will be a
| good indication of smartiness and expertise in a domain.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Someone will quickly monetize the idiots with a simple
| ad-ridden subscription based app that "Unlocks the
| Alternet!"
| jimbokun wrote:
| I doubt the non-nerds will want to join.
| tremon wrote:
| They will want to join once it reaches a certain
| size/notoriety. Same with reddit, gmail and twitter, and
| same with open source in general.
| suslik wrote:
| What is Ham radio?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Amateur radio, public (by law - unencrypted, anyone can
| listen) long-distance communications over certain bands
| where people are allowed to transmit after a certain
| barrier of entry of licensing and equipment.
| bluGill wrote:
| A place to talk about what radio you own.
| xattt wrote:
| A hobby some people pig up when they're boar-ed and go
| hog-wild on spending for equipment.
|
| /s
| jimbokun wrote:
| Welp, you're out of the club now.
| account42 wrote:
| Something that someone who didn't get filtered would be
| able to look up on their own.
| suslik wrote:
| I did look it up, but the way the OP was formed I thought
| that is some secret underground forum I just am not able
| to find.
| danielheath wrote:
| I think it's called Gemini
| jimbokun wrote:
| Has anyone invented a captcha that filters for high IQ
| humans?
|
| Of course then it would be mostly bots as it would
| probably be trivial for modern LLMs to solve.
| fifticon wrote:
| You can. Just find an online forum for Rick&Morty show.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| [dead]
| Jensson wrote:
| Smartphones was the final nail, after that close to 100%
| of young adults are active online participants.
|
| The good thing is that things aren't getting worse at
| least, all the idiots are already online.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| Check out the Flynn Effect. It is possible that all of us
| online idiots and the cohorts coming after are getting
| stupider every generation. I wouldn't be so hasty with
| the "things aren't getting worse" part just yet. It could
| get much worse!
| sneak wrote:
| Only about half the humans are on the internet.
| ebcode wrote:
| Then there's still hope!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You're telling us it's going to get worse then?
| eastbound wrote:
| But OKCupid joining the race to the bottom was a choice.
| They _decided_ to drop the high-IQ / literary customers.
|
| They could have remained as the high-end of dating. 90%
| of men don't enjoy using Tinder, and for women it's just
| a utility service when being bachelor.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I suspect smartphones affect this in two ways.
|
| One is that they put the Internet in _everybody 's_
| hands, literally.
|
| The other, though, is that by virtue of the interface,
| both display (tiny) and input (shitty, to put it mildly),
| _the effective IQ of those participating, regardless of
| whatever it was initially_ , is severely penalised.
|
| When I'm typing at a keyboard, I can look at the words
| I'm typing, or the source I'm typing from, or just off
| into space as I'm thinking my thoughts ... and be
| reasonably assured that what I _think_ I 'm typing is
| what's actually appearing on screen. And if not, editing
| to correct and fix issues is reasonably straightforward.
| If necessary I'll switch to a Real Editor (that is, vim,
| Vale Bram Moolenaar) which is another quantum leap beyond
| in-browser textbox editing.
|
| When I'm typing at a virtual touchscreen keyboard, _I am
| staring at the keys themselves and trying to hit the the
| keys I 'm actually intending to hit_. I'm not monitoring
| the output (which invariably has errors), I'm not looking
| at source text, I'm not thinking and composing my
| thoughts.
|
| And then _editing_ what I 've written is _also_ painful.
|
| The resulting typos, losses of thought, and general
| incoherence _in my own writing_ absolutely _pains_ me to
| look at. From what I can tell, other people seem to
| suffer similarly.
|
| I've given up using mobile devices for input (unless I
| can use a hardware keyboard, and even that rarely), and
| ... frankly it's a much improved situation.
|
| Smartphones shallow the mind in many ways.
| narag wrote:
| Everything you said + progressing hypermetropia for the
| last 25 years. When mobile screens got half decent sizes,
| I already hated the medium.
|
| When people said that those text pages, around 2000, what
| was the name? WAP? were going to get everybody online, I
| was very skeptical. But of course, that was pre-iPhone.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I remember WAP, and had an early-phase smartphone with
| limited Web support (Palm Treo/Centro) which ... remains
| one of the better phones that I've had (hard keyboard
| among other features). You wouldn't want to read much on
| that, but as a quick on-the-go reference, particularly
| when travelling, it was handy.
|
| One of my daily drivers is a large (13.3") e-ink tablet.
| Reading on that is actually a pleasure, though it's led
| me to another conclusion: _scrolling sucks_.
|
| I _much_ prefer reading paginated media, and if at all
| possible, fixed-layout media (e.g., PDFs rather than
| ePub) both because the same material stays in the same
| place on the same page regardless of other settings (I
| have a strongly spatial memory), _and_ because the layout
| is _usually_ just simply much better than what fluid-
| layouts achieve.
|
| What really drives me nuts though is having to scroll on
| webpages. It's imprecise, half the time I'm clicking on
| something I'd not intended to, and it's much harder and
| less pleasing to read.
|
| But size and print clarity alone make this a huge
| improvement over smartphone displays.
|
| Sorry to hear about the eyesight issues.
| narag wrote:
| The eyesight I wouldn't complain at all. Until recently I
| didn't need glasses, except for reading. Hypermetropia is
| also called far-sightness for a reason. Worst period is
| when I only used glasses for the screen. Someone would
| come to interrupt and talk, I took the glasses off, then
| we were commenting on the screen contents, I put it on
| again, then back to talk and glasses off...
|
| At home I use a 27'' screen with the regular glasses. I
| fear that if for a next job at some office they don't
| provide a similar one, the situation will repeat, now
| with regular glasses vs reading glasses :-m
|
| _I much prefer reading paginated media, and if at all
| possible, fixed-layout media (e.g., PDFs rather than
| ePub)_
|
| ePub didn't grow on me and I couldn't put my finger on
| why, I guess that's the reason.
|
| About WAP phones, this was the one the company provided:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/comments/gef
| gsm...
|
| Not bad, but not much I could do with it and they took
| away when I resigned.
| bluGill wrote:
| I write much longer comments on my laptop and desktop
| computers than on my phone. The pains you mention make me
| write less even when I want to write more. Do not confuse
| this with "I have made this longer than usual because I
| have not time to make it shorter." (Pascal, 1657, though
| others have said something similar and folklore
| attributes the idea to many more) - I do often revise
| long comments on my computer to be shorter, but they are
| still much longer than what I'd write on my phone. If I
| spent more time on them on my computer I'd write them
| even shorter, but still much longer because what I want
| to say is normally long and complex and a phone just
| makes the complexity too hard to write.
|
| You won't be surprised I've never got the point of
| limited space places like twitter...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Dittos ;-)
| intelVISA wrote:
| All the idiots already were, unless bikeshedding category
| theory in IRC while m$ and friends pulled the rug under
| general computing was The Thinking Man's Choice.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Just imagine how high it must have been when there were
| only hundreds of users? =;-}
|
| Bitnet Relay in 1992 had some, not even all universities
| connected and I know of marriages that originated in the
| IRL(!) relay parties. We actually drove across Europe to
| meet our online friends.
| 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!
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I also met my wife on okcupid. I wonder how many of us
| their are.
| dghughes wrote:
| I'd be curious if you're all over 6' tall. I never had
| any luck on OKCupid.
| astrange wrote:
| That height fetish stuff is the domain of 5'0" white
| women. Basically message taller women and it doesn't
| matter.
| seoulmetro wrote:
| Nope. It's not specific to their height and obviously not
| specific to their race.
|
| The same way men on average prefer big boobs, women on
| average will prefer taller men. Both can't really be
| changed by the person but exist as attractiveness scores
| against a person.
|
| It matters to people who it matters to. Not many in the
| grand scheme and definitely not related to race.
| astrange wrote:
| > It's not specific to their height
|
| Of course it is because it's relative to how tall they
| are. But taller women already don't expect you to tower
| over them, because that's hard to find, so it's ok if you
| don't.
|
| > and obviously not specific to their race.
|
| It is within a specific ethnicity and generation. If
| you're in a country where the men in a specific age are
| short because food was scarce 2-3 decades ago, they're
| not all single because their women aren't attracted to
| them.
|
| And depending on culture and economic class, it matters
| more what impresses their parents, which is being a
| doctor-lawyer-astronaut who owns a house.
| roel_v wrote:
| I have literally not once in my entire life heard a woman
| in real life say 'oh he's so tall, that's so attractive'.
| That's only an internet thing. Or an outside-Western
| Europe thing, maybe.
| bluGill wrote:
| How people act is often different from how they say they
| act. Women can be attracted to taller men without knowing
| that is a factor much less admitting it.
|
| I have no idea if women really are attracted to taller
| men, but I know what you hear people say isn't the whole
| truth either.
| TimPC wrote:
| No but, I've seen plenty of women say: I want to wear
| heels and still have my man be taller than me when we are
| dancing.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I remember hearing the founder of The League dating app
| talk about her platform, back when she was first starting
| out. She said it was made so that women could be assured
| they were dating men who were verifiably (1) well-
| educated (the name is a nod to the Ivy League), (2) made
| good money, and (3) were tall. The way she talked about
| the latter sounded a bit anti-Asian, to be honest.
| whynotminot wrote:
| As a short man, I have heard height directly or
| indirectly referenced as a point of attraction more times
| than I can count. I've even had women say literally to my
| face I wasn't tall enough for them.
|
| I'm glad you haven't had that experience. Doesn't
| discount that it's a real thing.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is where we could really use some empirical data to
| better understand these topics.
|
| Comments already devolving into "Yes it matters!" "No it
| doesn't!" only citing anecdotal personal experience.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'm 5'4" and met my wife (5'1") on OKC.
|
| I will say that all the women I dated on OKC were shorter
| than me, likely because it's common for women to filter
| by height.
|
| I dated women who were not shorter than me, but met them
| IRL.
| glorioushubris wrote:
| I met my wife on OKCupid (back when it was, according to
| this article, good). I'm 5'6".
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Yup
| bbu wrote:
| me too :)
| semiquaver wrote:
| Me too!
| 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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I fondly remember the one that showed men's rating of
| women approaching almost a perfect normal distribution,
| and then the men messaging mostly the hot ones anyway,
| whereas the women rated most men as ugly and then sloping
| downward toward very few as good looking, kind of like an
| exponential distribution, but that they also messaged the
| men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most,
| with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is basically the foundation of modern, online dating
| -- aka red pill. Roughly, the top 20% of men get 80% of
| the attention from women. (I'm pretty sure that figure
| comes from Tinder data.) It makes sense from an
| evolutionary perspective, but is brutal in the real
| world. What do you do if you are average (or less) in
| looks and income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely
| existance.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Online dating isn't a real world thing.
|
| You want easy women? Go get a working class job that is
| predominantley women. Date foreigners. Go to a festival,
| hang out with hippies, ect.
|
| I have no idea why men put themselves online and then
| complain it's a stacked deck. One of the greatest facts
| about real world dating is, you don't have to be the
| hottest guy on tinder, just the hottest guy in the room
| (or her mind) that night.
|
| If Tinder sucks, get off it, women will follow when they
| realise the top 20% of guys dont service 80% of women.
|
| Walk away.
|
| Frankly the bit about dating that bothers me is that
| women are way too forward and pushy. Instant 'attention'
| is such a turn off, I cannot wait until women are more
| demoralized.
|
| I was raised to pursue women, to hunt/chase for something
| worth getting. Women are constantly ready-to-go, a
| repetitive temptation and it's a constant turn off. Give
| me something to imagine, a skirt to chase, an air of
| mystery, or try and get to know me before it's "straight
| to the bedroom".
|
| I don't like women as they commonly are in my experience,
| right now. I don't recognize them as the women I grew up
| with. They're just sex bots.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Well this is the most toxic thing I've read today.
| tspike wrote:
| Isn't the parent comment saying the opposite of this?
| That despite rating most men as ugly, it didn't affect
| their messaging behavior nearly as much?
| friendzis wrote:
| No, they are saying a bit tangential things.
|
| Tinder's data shows "chance of approach", which is brutal
| for men who are not too good looking.
|
| IIRC, OkCupid's data shows a bit different thing. The
| distribution of ratings determines chance of
| messages/likes - the larger stddev the better chances.
| IIRC, the most messaged men were ones with ratings
| characterized by _bimodal_ distribution. Therefore, the
| most messaged men were not the ones with highest visual
| rating. I do not recall the distribution of messages, so
| can 't comment much on that.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Just read the original article[0]. I apologize if I
| misstated anything in it.
|
| [0]http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.
| okcupi...
| Roark66 wrote:
| >What do you do if you are average (or less) in looks and
| income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely existance.
|
| You try to improve these things. Going to the gym etc, or
| focusing on one's career is a start.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| There's a lot about redpill culture that is inexcusably
| execrable, but it does offer a true and practical answer
| to the question you have posed: do everything in your
| power to make yourself more attractive. Work out, get a
| good haircut, improve your wardrobe, develop your career,
| improve your social/conversation skills, have interesting
| hobbies. Become the best version of yourself and you will
| get more attention from others.
| flangola7 wrote:
| That data had poor epistemology, and was only really true
| if you're only looking at cishet monogamous men and
| cishet monogamous women.
| bluGill wrote:
| Online dating is skewed because you have no way to know
| what someone is really like. All you get is a picture
| (which may have been photoshopped), and profile data
| (they might be lieing. If you do date someone you want
| them to look good because at least if the night was a
| bust you got to look at someone hot.
| slashdev wrote:
| You're being downvoted, but that's pretty well supported
| with data. In fact it's more skewed than 20/80. Closer to
| 10/90.
| deanCommie wrote:
| They're being downvoted because the very comment they're
| replying to contradicts it: "but that they also messaged
| the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the
| most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.
|
| OKCupid's own data showed that women rate men is ugly but
| message them anyway.
| astrange wrote:
| The main effect of those data posts seems to have been to
| cause people to spread a lot of misinfo like "women
| aren't attracted to 80% of men".
|
| (What they actually said was that women rate men much
| lower than men rate women, but the women still respond
| the same way despite rating them lower, so it doesn't
| mean anything.)
| isolli wrote:
| This was a good one [0]:
|
| > When men message women, women tend to respond most
| often to men around their own ages. But when women
| message men, they're actually more likely to get a
| response from younger men than they are from older ones.
| A 40-year-old woman will have better luck messaging a
| 25-year-old man than a 55-year-old one, according to the
| data. And a 30-year-old man is more likely to respond to
| a message from a 50-year-old woman than a message from
| any other age group. When women make the first move, the
| age gap dating norm is reversed.
|
| [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-
| with-th...
| 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...
| lolinder wrote:
| This one, _Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating_ :
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okc
| upi...
| dspillett wrote:
| Very much sounds like the one. Can't double-check ATM as
| network I'm on blocks archive.org.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Information has gotten harder and harder to come by as
| the Internet has matured. Think how much Tinder, Twitter,
| and Hinge know about human flirting and attraction. I
| believe it's just too black pilled to see the light of
| day.
| bboygravity wrote:
| The best dates I ever had came from a language exchange site
| that doesn't exist anymore.
|
| Seems to resonate with the "filter for brainy people" filter
| OKC seems to once have had.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Crazy idea: dating site that forces all users to
| communicate through a second language. How to ascertain
| it's legitimately a second language, and not their native
| language, would be the tricky part.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Especially now that there's this:
| https://kottke.org/23/09/ai-assisted-language-
| translation-of...
| smrq wrote:
| Well, as long as we're talking crazy, might as well make
| the language Toki Pona or similar. (Now that would be a
| _really_ self-selecting dating pool.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup. It basically started as a dating site by Brooklyn grad
| students, for Brooklyn grad students.
|
| Grad students love writing essays. But if you want to expand,
| you have to face the fact that most people aren't grad
| students and don't love writing (or reading) essays.
|
| The trajectory to "just another dating app" was inevitable.
| garciasn wrote:
| The great thing was that women saw men (and vv) who aren't
| only a handful of Gram-worthy photos and a couple of stolen
| clever pickup lines.
|
| It allowed folks a direct avenue to those they found
| attractive and could use skills other than paying, stellar
| photography, and quotes from highly upvoted r/Tinder
| comments as a way to convince others to go on dates.
|
| People have been either really successful with the way
| dating apps operate now (they're incredibly attractive
| males or just about all females) or they're incredibly
| frustrated because the algorithms have taken so much
| control away.
|
| It's a sad reality. RIP OKC.
| carabiner wrote:
| Well they started off in Boston and were MIT/Harvard grad
| students. And the backend was a DARPA project. So not
| really Brooklyn at heart, though some millennial New
| Yorkers pretended it was. They even had a personality trait
| for how much a user reminded them of Harvard girls. Like
| many "only in New York!" things it was really something
| that had mass appeal and gave a sense of quirkiness that
| was actually widespread in our generation.
|
| "New Yorkers will say 'only in New York!' and it's the most
| normal shit ever."
| a-dub wrote:
| > And the backend was a DARPA project.
|
| the similarity/CF stuff? what was the DARPA project?
| other than that it seemed a rather ordinary consumer
| webapp?
| fader wrote:
| I think they're referring to the Internet.
| carabiner wrote:
| https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/okws-usenix04.pdf
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| Look at us here on HN - we're discussing an essay we read
| about the decline of online dating. We're a self-selecting
| group too. Tonight's top story: a group of people who like
| reading essays decry that online dating no longer involves
| reading essays.
|
| I was nodding my head very hard at this essay, but this has
| given me something to chew on.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It means nerds (male and female) are now an underserved
| dating market, compared to when dating sites were in
| their infancy.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| I think there was a happy medium somewhere along the way.
| The minimum word counts on the bios were just high enough
| to filter people that had no sincerity for the approach.
| You had to pantomime something of yourself to have a
| presence. What exists now is just a gallery of faces that
| could be the result of stable diffusion algorithms.
| Roark66 wrote:
| These were different times... I met my partner of 25+ years
| on my town's IRC channel. Imagine that happening now.
| superbiome wrote:
| I would agree. I too met my wife on OkCupid and she happens
| to be the smartest woman I know. Her whole family is
| incredibly smart.
|
| I had another OKC date from that era where the woman had a
| very high IQ, her father was a prolific author and her late
| 20's brother was VP of ask.com at the time.
|
| I had just assumed it was the Silicon Valley bubble clientele
| (and still just might've been). But only 3 years later I
| recall younger male coworkers describing how much dating apps
| declined and how terrible the dating scene had become with
| "swipe culture".
| bookofjoe wrote:
| OT: My daughter (40 next month, just celebrated 10th wedding
| anniversary) met her husband on JDate in 2008. One day I
| reminded her that in the late 1990s when she was in high
| school, she asked me if I was doing online dating (in fact I
| was: Yahoo Personals, though I never met anyone of interest).
| She told me NOT to sign up for it because "It's for losers."
| Nevertheless, I persisted in stealth mode.
| scoofy wrote:
| OkCupid had the best damn blog on the internet. They were
| obviously _extremely_ thoughtful folks. I was genuinely sad
| when it was discontinued.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| Founder wrote a book. Blog is still at archive.org
| cbeach wrote:
| Met my wife of 13 years on OkCupid. Data-driven matching works
| and I just want to say thank you for helping design such a
| great product.
|
| I'm sad to read that it's gone downhill since it moved into new
| ownership.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This post reads like Eternal September[1], and I write that
| without any cynicism or snark. It makes good sense that text-
| heavy web apps would fall prey to image-heavy mobile apps. I
| still think there is potential for dating apps that target
| higher intellect users. Most of the dominant apps today are
| mobile-first, largely visual, and disappointing for both sides.
| One idea: Could speech-to-text technology help to allow users
| to create OkCupid-style essays from a mobile phone? Maybe.
| Although, a few discussions here on HN said that speech-to-text
| is still a super hard problem in 2023.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| pif wrote:
| > I still think there is potential for dating apps that
| target higher intellect users.
|
| Apps are not developed for the sake of the users. Apps are
| developed in order to make a profit.
|
| If your higher intellect users are not ready to pay good
| money for your product, it can only be one of two things:
| either they are cheap, or your product is not that great.
| Considering that there is no correlation between intellect
| and cheapness, I would exclude the first hypothesis.
|
| Then you end up with a crappy product (and it was your
| _higher intellect_ users who voted it crappy) and a bunch of
| advertisers ready to pay you bread crumbs for your users '
| attention, and you suddenly realise that you need a lot of
| crumbles to get a sandwich.
| Kretinsky wrote:
| It really depends on how you frame your app.
|
| In the case of OkCupid, I did buy the premium offer, and
| used the possibilities (mainly see the answers to the
| quizz, and filter people) to make a profile that would show
| 99% match score with the kind of women I was looking for.
|
| At some point, it got close to a game, which was very fun
| and satisfying as I could meet nice girls as a result ;-)
| lelanthran wrote:
| I think that there is a reason that dating apps, dating sites
| and dating services all converge on a model which downranks
| intellect: the few humans who care about that characteristic
| are not enough to build a sustainable business.
|
| Literally everyone says that _they_ are different and want a
| smart partner, but when they actually hook up they aren 't
| ranking high intellect.
|
| I liked okcupids blogs. The maintakeaway I had from reading
| all of them was:
|
| 1. How much appearance played a role in being attractive.
|
| 2. 90+% of women attempted to hook up with the same 10% of
| men, while men were much more open to women not in the top
| 10%.
|
| 3. What people claimed they wanted in a partner had almost no
| relation to what they actually wanted, when looking at who
| they messaged, who they viewed, and who they responded to.
|
| All apps now are very aggressively tracking everything, so
| they have a much better idea of what makes people open their
| wallets, and intellect apparently isn't one of those things.
| uoaei wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135317/http://blog.okcup
| i...
|
| I don't think you're characterizing the results accurately,
| particularly point #2. I don't think they really had a way
| to measure #3. #1 is just obviously true but doesn't add
| much.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I don't think you're characterizing the results
| accurately, particularly point #2. I don't think they
| really had a way to measure #3. #1 is just obviously true
| but doesn't add much.
|
| Maybe not, but #2 was from a blog that specifically
| looked at the data of messaging: how many men received
| messages, how many women received messages.
|
| IIRC, nearly all the women received messages and sent
| messages, while only about 10% of the men received
| messages while all of the men sent messages. I don't
| really see any other way to interpret data showing that
| both men and women sent messages at about the same rate,
| but only about 10% of men received any messages.
|
| Now I don't have the blog handy (and I rather wished I
| did), but my takeaway #3 was from reading _all_ the blogs
| available, in basically one marathon sitting, not from
| one particular blog.
| strken wrote:
| It strikes me that if women and men sent messages in
| exactly the same long-tail shape of distribution, and you
| had a knob that controlled how frequently each sent
| messages, you'd be able to turn each knob until 100% of
| women and 10% of men received messages.
|
| This is not to say you're wrong or right, but I don't
| think the numbers tell us much without seeing the full
| distribution.
| 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!
| webninja wrote:
| The matches are real. It's just that you have to get on an
| airplane and fly to a new country to meet them. I've met my
| matches in person. One of the girls paid for almost
| everything too.
| genewitch wrote:
| is that where you disappeared to for 3 years?
| pif wrote:
| > I would pay $100/month for a site like the original
| okcupid, but ...
|
| That you would _not_ pay $100 /month for a site like the
| original OkCupid.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| A voice interface might help. By default in the app of course,
| not a phone feature the user has to use to TTS into the app.
| 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.
| JCharante wrote:
| Nationwide is much easier in countries with a large primacy
| index, for example Thailand where Bangkok has 9x the
| population of Thailand's second largest city, and Moscow
| where it has 4x the population of St Petersburg.
|
| Everybody is nearby when you have subway trains connecting
| half the people in your country together in under an hour.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Almost all internet algorithms seem to converge around
| maximising time spend on the app in question. A dating website
| simply doesn't want to be too effective, as you would lose two
| customers every successful match. Similar to the approach used
| in slot machines, you want to give the illusion of winning, but
| I'm reality only provide moderately succesful matches rather
| than perfect ones.
|
| Of course there is a human element too. Dating sites give the
| illusion of choice, and a result a lot of potential matches
| aren't realised on, as the partner is good looking enough.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| I always push back on this argument, because it came up a
| lot. As someone higher up at the company once put it, if
| people are sufficiently convinced that you can find them what
| they're looking for in a dating app, there's almost no amount
| of money they wouldn't spend. People churn after not getting
| what they want out of an app. And relationships end, and
| people will return to apps they felt they had success with.
| Word of mouth successes were the ultimate marketing tool,
| OkCupid didn't have really any ad spend for the first year or
| two I was there (and apparently the hadn't in the years
| past.)
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| > people will return to apps they felt they had success
| with
|
| So then the trick is to provide the _illusion_ of
| successful relationships (but of course not ones that
| actually pan out in the long term).
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Long lasting relationships are based on common values.
| However, you can have succesful medium term relationships
| based on common interests and good looks.
|
| OkCupid, in its heydays, indeed managed to match people
| on common values by asking detailed questions. A lot of
| modern dating apps are far more focus on looks and common
| interests.
|
| Yes they look cute, and love rock climbing too, but hate
| children, and never want any. It will result in a good
| match in your mid twenties, but likely going to result in
| irreconcilable differences when you approach 30. Unless
| of course you both hate children :-)
| kromem wrote:
| I feel a twinge of guilt whenever I see things about how OKC
| got crappy.
|
| Not that long before the acquisition a certain jackass brought
| in as a consultant ( _ahem_ ) happened to point to OkC as the
| leading competitor against the acquiring company's properties
| specifically for mobile.
|
| Sorry everyone...
|
| If it makes it any better, I've had to use the product since
| then too, and suffered alongside all the rest of you.
| boxed wrote:
| If match didn't understand this already they were pretty
| stupid. I think the blame lies 100% on the people at OKC who
| sold out.
| snerbles wrote:
| Hey, at least you can say you had a direct role in how
| couples meet and their resulting progeny.
|
| Our personal misery and loneliness aside, the long-term
| societal effects as generations wear on will be
| _fascinating._
| uoaei wrote:
| I appreciate your candor. Though I am upset, I realize this
| is the kind of thing that would be hard to see coming.
| sambazi wrote:
| huh?
|
| the top point is that more users usually lead to a worse
| product, no?
| dredds wrote:
| The perfect matching service would lose 2 new users every
| login. No different to selling an everlasting lightbulb.
| The only salvation of such a perfect product would be a
| "de-networking effect" whereby newly-happy couples would
| auto-evangelize the site for bringing them together in
| the first place, but that wouldn't grow the site much.
|
| The success of the "nightclub app" is that people feel
| they are a match only as long as they "drink", and by
| morning they are thirsty for more. Growth comes from the
| heartache of loneliness, failed relationships, and
| divorce. A worse product (poor matching, and stifled
| communication) is the actual goal of a more profitable
| dating app, not simply being a consequence of having more
| users.
| uoaei wrote:
| Speaking specifically to the short-sighted nature of
| business objectives and the enshittification of good
| services via acquisition and repurposing.
| 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?
| qingcharles wrote:
| The biggest online dating site in the 90s had a minimum age
| of 13 o_O. I thought that was weird, even back then.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchmaker.com
| talldatethrow wrote:
| I remember I was 14-15 on SparkMatch because I had to
| convince my mom to drive me 30 miles to a mall so I could
| meet a girl from SparkMatch. To this day I was the most out
| of my league girl I ever 'dated' (only kissed a few times).
| I soon acted too sweet and too lame and lost her. But it
| taught me a lot to always be cooler and I cleaned up in the
| coming OkCupid/PlentyofFish revolution, and doubly so by
| the time Tinder came around. I still think about that girl
| sometimes, which makes sense, because she was somewhat
| unique to be online constantly back in 1999-2000.
| 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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Tbh half of the instructional shorts are just flat out wrong
| and even dangerous. So many electrical advice videos showing
| awful tips and techniques. Comments full of people pointing
| out the problems but most people won't read them.
|
| They are created more for entertainment and to blast out as
| many videos as possible without any concern to accuracy.
| 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-...
| soorya3 wrote:
| This is a broader issue, I feel like tech has have marginalized
| the very people. By looking at the amount of technology we have
| built in the past 25 years, most of the technology is built (in
| terms of time and cost) for wrong purpose like social apps, chat
| apps, games, video streaming, all those non essential physical
| products built because of desire to have everything. Only some of
| the technology is used for solving real problems like healthcare,
| education, food, shelter. Just think about it, did our
| parents/grand parents had problems with communication?
| entertainment? no they needed good health care, good education,
| easy to farm and get fresh food delivered to the customer.
| 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").
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| UI design didn't get more consistent since the start of the
| century, if you ask me. Once upon a time every major platform had
| its UI guidelines, you knew what to expect and where The
| 'Settings' dialog was expected to be in a program, and how it
| would look like (Now 'Settings' it is sometimes called
| 'Preferences')
|
| Now it's a major endeavor to find 'that setting' and how to
| interpret the meaning of 'that setting'. i often need to google
| for it, and then it may turn out that the info found on 'the
| internet' is already outdated (especially true with this shiny
| Mac thing)
|
| i suspect that UI design turned to postmodernism, now there is
| 'no one right way' to do things, in other words: things are
| messy.
|
| This mess was likely inevitable with the advent of the Web and
| later the mobile UI. Now you have both these native apps, and the
| web apps - and you can't have everything subject to the same
| guidelines. So the answer is: get rid of the guidelines.
|
| Also you got devices with a big screen and devices with a small
| screen, who wins? Now that's an easy one: the most common
| denominator. So I guess that user interfaces are being dumbed
| down due to a combination of both business and technical factors.
|
| Another factor is imitation: nowadays TikTok is king, so everyone
| is trying to be like them - regardless if a model like this is
| appropriate or not.
| 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...
| davidthewatson wrote:
| User agency is a good way to think about this but like any real,
| useful metric, it's difficult to measure real impact, and this
| leaves you needing a proxy.
|
| The other problem is that David Foster Wallace said over a decade
| ago:
|
| "As VR pornography becomes a reality, we will have to develop
| some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure unalloyed
| pleasure,"
|
| the implication for dating apps in particular, but I fear this
| extends more generally, is that a major part of dating, physical
| interaction, has been replaced with mediated experience for a
| significant part of the population.
|
| The question that arises is whether a better alternative exists
| in the real world absent technology?
| 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.
| whack wrote:
| This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic
| about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl
| is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about
| deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her
| under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the
| proposed change would be killed.
|
| Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is
| sticky", but I really doubt this is the main reason.
|
| No, the truth is far more scary. The average user doesn't want
| deep and meaningful content. The average user is Marl. That is
| why every product, no matter how noble it starts off, eventually
| degenerate into Marl-fodder. Because that's where the money is.
| The only way to escape this is to take on a huge pay cut and work
| at a company that doesn't care about growing profits. Go ahead,
| you first.
|
| Finally, let's be honest. Marl isn't some obnoxious bozo. You and
| I are both Marl. That's why we're here in the HN comments. You
| are Marl, I am Marl, the world is Marl, and it's getting Marlier
| every day.
| grishka wrote:
| > The only way to escape this is to take on a huge pay cut and
| work at a company that doesn't care about growing profits. Go
| ahead, you first.
|
| Gladly! Where do I sign up?
| jefftk wrote:
| What's your background, and what are your skills?
|
| I did this in 2022 [1] and have really liked my new work.
| There are a lot of nonprofits doing important things, and I
| think it's likely you could switch to one.
|
| [1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-
| nucleic-...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| OT: what's your blog based on?
|
| I looked for a colophon / about site page with no joy.
|
| Source suggests it's simply hand-coded HTML?
|
| Hrm... Apparently, plus some webscripts?
|
| <https://www.jefftk.com/p/designing-low-upkeep-software>
|
| <https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/make
| rs...>
| jefftk wrote:
| That's right: I draft each post in HTML, then have some
| scripts which add indexes, headers, footers, and css, and
| make an RSS feed.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks, pretty cool.
|
| I also like the article preview hack.
| jefftk wrote:
| Thanks! Implementation details:
| https://www.jefftk.com/p/preview-on-hover
| zachthewf wrote:
| there are lots of swe jobs with the government.
| grishka wrote:
| I would rather not involve myself with the government of my
| country.
| [deleted]
| ivee wrote:
| I completely disagree. If you walked up to Marl, built trust
| with him, and asked him whether he wanted more meaningful
| content in his life (for a definition of meaningful which made
| sense to him) I think he would say yes. So it's not really
| about Marl's preferences but about the way those preferences
| are collected and Marl's (sadly mostly justified) lack of
| trust.
| wk_end wrote:
| If you walked up to me, built trust with me, and asked me if
| I wanted more exercise in my life I'd say yes. And yet.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| and yet if you became friends with someone that encouraged
| you in the right way, or found a routine that let you get
| exercise in a way that didn't suck, you'd probably feel
| really good about yourself and want to keep doing it.
|
| It's not that its impossible to work with people to raise
| them to a higher stanardard. It's harder, sure. But not
| impossible. And the result is usually worth its weight in
| gold
| mbwgh wrote:
| I think you may both be right. Assume you start off with a
| small niche product and keep increasing your userbase.
|
| Then the characteristics of the users at the fringes will
| change the more you grow. That is to say, the former Marls in
| the middle are different (and likely not so shallow) from the
| next-generation Marls on the outside. Eventually, your notion
| of what is the average user, and OP's notion of what is the
| Marl that finally kills the UX, will align.
| timdumol wrote:
| "Marginal" in the blogpost is used in the economic sense, as in
| the next incremental user -- not "marginal" as in minority.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That is the way whack is using it. whack is correct that if
| there is a negative effect on the average user, a test will
| show that negative effect. That's what "average" means.
|
| To perceive an effect in new users without getting the same
| effect in existing users, you'd need to show different
| content to those two groups.
| lyjackal wrote:
| Hmm, I think the authors point is more towards attention
| addiction, rather than specific average types of people.
| It's more a matter of setting a low bar to encourage more
| people to be distracted by your app when they really
| shouldn't be using it. Basically increasing the number of
| apps that people check in on, especially when those users
| are in their marginal time (before bed, while cooking,
| etc.).
| callalex wrote:
| A/B tests, as they are run by current software companies, are
| inherently flawed. I have never, in my entire career, ever
| heard of an A/B test that ran for a year, let alone 3-5 years.
| That's where the true power of statistics comes alive, and
| nobody is financially incentivized to even consider that fact.
| eternal_braid wrote:
| Have you heard of long running holdbacks? Even if not, rest
| assured that for major features, they are very commonly run.
| eru wrote:
| Gwern runs tests that long.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I've seen one A/B test in the wild run for a full year.
|
| It was on a small part (test of a product name + description
| across the site), and the most interesting aspect was that it
| only made a small but measureable difference. Because of that
| there was no strong incentive to delete the AB test (not much
| harm to the user) nor make the B side permanent (too low of
| an effect).
|
| In that respect, AB Tests that end early aren't a bad thing
| IMO: either there's a clear improvement or it's really bad,
| and the choice is obvious enough to not have to wait much
| longer.
| mlyle wrote:
| What I think the grandparent is getting at:
|
| You can measure the direct effect of a change now on
| something like conversions. But you can't measure the
| second order effects: things like trust from your users, or
| the effects on community quality and composition, etc.
|
| This is a good part of why enshittification happens: lots
| of changes with immediate "good" impact that can be
| measured quantifiably, but there's also readily foreseeable
| negative consequences to them.
|
| Of course, just running the test longer doesn't really
| address this for most possible changes.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Generally you'll have a quarterly holdout to measure
| total impacts but I agree that yearly would be better.
| mlyle wrote:
| But even this doesn't work: if you are continually making
| choices that erode your users' trust in you, there will
| eventually be an impact. It happens outside of the
| experiment (e.g. communications between users, general
| sliding changes in sentiment, etc). And you can't just
| spot in the time series whether you're going too far or
| not.
| bonniemuffin wrote:
| You're certainly correct that software companies should do a
| lot more year+ A/B tests. You can learn really interesting
| things from it that a shorter test won't capture. I know of
| this one: https://medium.com/@AnalyticsAtMeta/notifications-
| why-less-i...
| broguinn wrote:
| Your point is a good one - what you're describing I've heard
| referred to as "the novelty effect". In fact, a lot in this
| article reminds me of another essay critical of the short-
| sightedness of many A/B tests:
|
| https://www.zumsteg.net/2022/07/05/unchecked-ab-testing-
| dest...
| jefftk wrote:
| When I worked on ads at Google we had many A/B tests that had
| been running that long, generally holdbacks where a feature
| was almost entirely but not 100% launched.
|
| It was relatively rare that the holdback would show markedly
| different results than the initial A/B test we used in
| deciding to launch. If that had happened more often we would
| have run more long tests and been slower to move to launch.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > That is why every product, no matter how noble it starts off,
| eventually degenerate into Marl-fodder.
|
| The big reason for that is that people do not want to pay for
| quality content or services. Ask any HN commenter if you doubt
| me. So companies instead focus on growth to get the ad cents
| from the millions of impressions, or trick "whales" by
| manipulating their addiction in the same manner as casinos.
|
| As long as people call anybody a fool for paying for online
| services, don't expect things to improve.
| hackerlight wrote:
| You're using a different definition of the world "marginal".
| _Marginal_ in context doesn 't mean rare or unusual. It just
| means the next user.
| cwkoss wrote:
| The penultimate paragraph of the article says almost exactly
| this
| 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
| JohnMakin wrote:
| not on mobile
| 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?
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| I'm allowed to say that much. I know my NDAs very well.
| 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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