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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seeing as this career is a golden ticket with a guaranteed job for life if you’re half competent, I’d spin the complaints from some about these practices around: if an organisation is so detached from the realities of commercial software delivery and what makes a good hire that they’re asking about high school or your degree (and you do have experience), you’ve just received a boon of you all the information you needed. They’re not worth your time and don’t have their eyes on the ball. I’d just be thankful to have dodged a bullet!
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.
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.
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...
Have you ever heard about the MessagEase keyboard? It's a pretty radical departure from the usual touch qwerty. Once you get the muscle memory down, you can even disable the letters completely. Right now I'm typing on a featureless black 3x3 grid (save for a purple dot in the center). It's a great conversation starter too, cause folks see me typing and are universally like "wtf how are you typing".
I never thought of it, but now that you mention it, yeah my eyes are on the text, not on the typing.
I switched to messagease in the first place because I make far less mistakes and it's faster to fix a one-letter goof than redo a whole word with swype (sometimes several times, also the gestures fail on unusual or jargon words).
Everything you said + progressing hypermetropia for the last 25 years. When mobile screens got half decent sizes, I already hated the medium.
When people said that those text pages, around 2000, what was the name? WAP? were going to get everybody online, I was very skeptical. But of course, that was pre-iPhone.
I remember WAP, and had an early-phase smartphone with limited Web support (Palm Treo/Centro) which ... remains one of the better phones that I've had (hard keyboard among other features). You wouldn't want to read much on that, but as a quick on-the-go reference, particularly when travelling, it was handy.
One of my daily drivers is a large (13.3") e-ink tablet. Reading on that is actually a pleasure, though it's 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.
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:
On desktop, I have the option of scrolling via spacebar or page-up/down keys.
This is reasonably determinative (the scroll distance is the same in each case), convenient (it's easy to hit those keys), and not confusable with other intent actions. That last point is key as very often when I'm attempting a scroll action on a touchscreen interface I instead commit a click action (usually navigating off-page). Which is maddening.
On touchscreens, not only can I not scroll by a prescribed amount, not only is input through an onscreen keyboard completely crippled, but there's an ever-present drag/click ambiguity which on Android at least (and from my limited experience with iPhones suggests there too) is everpresent.
Add in e-ink, and there are the additional levels that refresh rates drop low enough that following scrolling is tedious, and the display technology makes the many, many paints of a long scroll expensive in terms of battery life. Web browsing drains battery at 10x the rate of my e-book reader.
Einkbro at least mitigates some of that. Going back to Firefox or Onyx's Chrome-based browser is excruciating.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if it becomes successful there will be someone that will decide to make something that gives it easy access to the luddites.
> 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.
Any system based on voting will be overwhelmed by clueless people upvoting "wrong" thing, just look at reddit.
Only moderation works but that brings all kinds of problems with who is moderator and who chooses them, and what they are allowed to do etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
"director" is probably a reference to Woody Allen quoting Groucho Marx in Annie Hall [1]. It's a great movie btw. Comes highly recommended from Roger Ebert [2].
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.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope, not really, not only it makes zero sense from evolutionary perspective (especially that of humans), but it also is very specific to one specific platform, and very much determined on the way it is structured and its target audience, business model, etc.
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.
I remember reading that analysis at the time and thinking it was flawed.
What it didn't seem to account for was if you rated someone high enough (I can't remember if it required 4 or 5 stars), OKCupid would notify the person in question that you had done so. If you didn't want these notifications being fired off you had to adjust your ratings accordingly - now 3 stars is the highest rating you are going to give.
I think the stats really just ended up reflecting that men were generally more comfortable having their ratings broadcast than women were.
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…
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you never heard "he has nice teeth and his arm pit doesn't stink" too? Because that's also another reason women find men attractive, they smell nice and have good teeth. Obviously we don't announce all our instincts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Not sure if it was DARPA, but the web server used Tame, a custom event-driven framework at a time where the thread vs. events debate was all the rage in the academic community. (I did a PhD on the topic and that's how I learned about Ok Cupid!)
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't blame the people who sold out. That team created a strong and delightful product.
To me, blame goes to the people who took over and started to make bad decisions.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, 90% of the time when I’m using my phone (e.g. right now), I’m at home, on my couch. I could be using my laptop or desktop which are both close within reach, but I like being able to read HN while my partner plays Zelda.
I’m not exactly the demographic of “only uses mobile” - I am very much a “pre-mobile internet user” (coding, games, music all required me to pick up some desktop skills) but can attest to the fact that I don’t hate the experience in a way that’s commensurate with how much I’d hate having a hot laptop on my stomach or sitting in some other room typing this out.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 ;-)
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!
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.
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
> 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.
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.
I met my wife on OKC. (we initially dated for a year, then split up, then got back together many years later after we both did some growing up). I moved someplace that OKC had no userbase in the intervening time and tried to use tinder. It was an absolute dumpster fire. Just a miserable experience. I was so sad to see it consume market share at the expense of sites like OKC. Ultimately OKC pulled through for me in the end!
Anyway all of which is to say 1. OKC was great and thank you for working on it, and 2. your story resonates so much with my experience and observations from the other side of the equation.
>> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
I don't think signal is an especially special case. While it may be clear and obvious to you which apps are which, I think that the reality is that its never a clear delineation.
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.
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.
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).
> There are a billion people who can speak but not read and write, and billions who can read and write but not well enough to earn karma on Hacker News.
Karma on hackernews seems like a pretty arbitrary metric for intelligence
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
A doctor that makes a bad diagnostic might suffer a malpractice lawsuit, or at the very least will be known for their incompetence. What happens with Nike for customers that bought their products but never get to do anything? Do they give any type of money back?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But even this doesn't work: if you are continually making choices that erode your users' trust in you, there will eventually be an impact. It happens outside of the experiment (e.g. communications between users, general sliding changes in sentiment, etc). And you can't just spot in the time series whether you're going too far or not.
Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement, through methodologies internally called HVA/DSI and DSE (to name just a couple).
- High Value Action / Downstream Impact == using a "twins" comparison, estimate the 12-month impact of a customer taking a particular action (e.g. sign up for Prime, watch their first Prime Video, etc.), compared to one who doesn't. HVAs are basically those "A's" which turn out to have a high numeric DSI value.
- Downstream Expectation == similar but very different - instead of quantifying the impact of a single action, DSE tries to estimate the combined downstream causal impact of a user taking an initial action... there's a sophisticated methodology there that tries to strip away confounding factors like "rich people who would've shopped more anyways, are also naturally more likely to sign up for Prime", because they truly want to measure the causal benefit of Prime itself, separate from the fact that richer customers generally spend more no matter what
These are both long-term methodologies, that were explicitly designed in response to the problems of: short term experiments that didn't capture long-term negative effects, and different parts of Amazon having vastly different methodologies for measuring business impact (e.g. page views vs search impressions vs downloads vs orders vs whatever... no, everyone should optimize for the same customer level financial metric which is a flavor of growth-adjusted composite contribution profit (GCCP) that's partly derived from DSE)
> Late to this comment thread, but Amazon actually excels at this type of long term measurement
It's funny-- Amazon is the exact case I'm thinking of. I went from spending high five figures to a few hundred, and I'm seeking to eliminate that. The exact impact of these kinds of data-driven management practices has lead me to expending a whole lot of work to figure out how to give Costco, Target, and Walmart my business instead.
My complaints:
- Cutting of customer service. I didn't use customer service often, but it was always exemplary There's something wrong with my account where if I pay with points from my Amazon Visa for a book, that the book gets yoinked away out of my account a couple of days later with a "payment failed" message. The points are still deducted. I spent a few hours with customer support twice on this issue, and each time the specific book that this happened to was fixed, but the problem remains. It's clearly a backend problem, but Amazon thinks it's a better move to keep a high value customer on hold while people not empowered to fix anything futz around.
- I (believe that I) was briefly in an experiment with an alternate "buy it now" order flow that would pretty reliably charge me for 2 of whatever item I was seeking to buy. Support wasn't helpful. I have video.
- Overall devolution of the retail marketplace into a flea market full of counterfeit, dubious goods.
- Aggressive attempts to upsell me back into the Prime ecosystem (e.g. the whole "Iliad flow" thing).
I'm sure all of these business decisions and changes looked great on initial measurements, but they're traps later. Worse, they turn people like me into people that were formerly Amazon evangelists to people who work to help friends use other marketplaces.
Even a year isn't sufficient time: none of these things pissed me off within a year of the change. And they're pretty difficult to capture, because they're hopelessly confounded with other changes in the market and consumer sentiment and Amazon doesn't roll things out slowly enough have a truly different contingent experiencing a different business.
Heck, maybe even all the interactions with me look positive on your metrics, depending on how you weigh downstream effects in your model: a previously valuable customer has "payment problems", begins consuming excessive support resources, then leaves.
There's a lot of good feedback to chew through, but I'll refrain from diving in too deep, and just mention that, as important as the HVA/DSI methodology is, there's been a comparatively lower amount of research done in "negative HVAs". In theory, one can do the same type of analysis to compare "twins" and pick out the NEGATIVE value of having repeat payment problems or repeat unsuccessful customer service interactions. Optimizing for growing the positive HVAs, is fundamentally different from optimizing to reduce the negative ones, but Amazon has the tools to get there or to do both, if it wants/needs to.
And yes, 12 months is arbitrary and doesn't capture everything, and longer windows of analysis are possible, but waiting even longer just throws the signal-to-noise ratio too far in the direction of noise.
FWIW, I no longer at Amazon, but I've yet to see a company of significant scale apply this level of econometrics so rigorously in day to day business decisions, or that they would evaluate 12 months as a baseline (most companies and most A/B tests are much shorter, obviously). I'm sorry you've had bad experiences, and anyways I think it's overall good for society to cultivate strong alternatives to Amazon, but as invisible as it may be to you as a consumer, your data and your lost value as a customer are definitely accounted for within these methodologies, even if no visible changes are happening or they're not winning you back.
I appreciate your comment. I guess what I'm saying is:
I love statistics and econometrics and testing beliefs with data.
But at some point, you do need to think about how to relate to human beings and what is, overall, "good business." That is, data are not replacements for clinical judgment about what is reasonable.
Coming up with ever-more-sophisticated ways to measure what is revenue maximizing but "not quite too abusive" isn't how we keep a good reputation or create a good world to live in.
Of course, completely ignoring indicators and making choices purely based on intuition and values isn't great, either.
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:
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...
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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
Marl behavior does not convey Marl's actual preferences, and this is where A/B testing zombies with no artistic instinct or creative bone in their body sacrifice the gift of their influence on the world.
To design for humanity, you need to look deeper into what Marl wants without relying on Marl to tell you what that is, because he is incapable of expressing it with words or actions.
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.
Or you choose a niche that is willing to pay for value. If engagement is a meaningful metric for a business, that’s a red flag. This is why I don’t work on general purpose consumer apps and instead work on utility B2B products, because your job becomes to provide value to a business, not marginal entertainment to Marl.
What does it even mean what a user "wants"? I want to eat 3 cinnamon rolls. I also want to be fitter. Everyone has contradictory wants, it is not a binary choice.
The point is whether the tools feed our best or worst intentions, and which are easier to exploit. To put the onus on the individual is skewed.
I half-agree with you. I think it's possible to cultive environments where content consumption is more intentional and anti-Marlian. I think HN does a pretty good job of this.
> 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.
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 10N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100N 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
Right and workers are the ones who build the country. The more workers there are the bigger the gross domestic product. Now if some money enriches people in other countries that means they will buy more Coca-Cola! This planet is not a zero-sum game. When people help each other that helps everybody. The exception is of course countries which start wars.
I mean if USA had never allowed immigrants to come here where would we be economically?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if they are illegal immigrants, even better, they will work hard for a very small salary. They even do very little crime because they don't want to be thrown out of the country.
I think in general immigration from say Mexico to US is a loss for Mexico and a win for US.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 ...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If you remember Fark, they did the exact same thing. At some point in these sites' growth/success they always seem to have this irresistible compulsion to do The Grand Redesign which always, always shittifies itself.
I wonder if there were any dissenters inside of Reddit who have actually been on the Internet in 2007, desperately warning the designers that they were "Farking" themselves with that redesign.
What killed Fark was the founder ran for office and we all found out what a terrible person he is. It’s still fun to visit that ghost town and look at the tombstones occasionally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
>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!
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
"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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier, or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
> 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!
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?
One guy liked to send dick pics, another was doing a lot of drugs and sent deranged messages for 48 hours straight to random people and the last was "just" a compulsive liar, who seemed to invite a prostitute to the office who then stole servers. I wasn't even sure why we even had the servers, since we barely bad any software written yet.
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
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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! :) )
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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
"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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
(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.
>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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
Partly, it’s the business model. I was at OkCupid and we made money by ads, rather than successful matches, and this drives the business.
Another is the metrics. OkCupid tried to focus on “three ways”, which was a message, a reply, and a reply to the reply. That’s just enough communication to make a date for Marl. If we had focused on users who had a better-than-marginal experience, it might have preserved the features this author liked.
But, really, a different business model makes a big difference.
I think it is more the question of sites/apps being more layered to tackle different segments.
Broadly one segment is the superficial, reptilian brain, one, which are the vast majority of the population. They will crave quick, non-complex, interactions, in order to get quick and easy rewards (dopamine).
The other would be neocortex segment, much smaller base, that would actually seek seek more rational, or deeply emotional, long term results that they see as more fulfilling in the long run.
They are obviously not all different people, as we all have both brains, but we always start our experiences with the reptilian brain and only some of us move towards the neocortex phase when experiencing things.
I think if more services and products took that into consideration, they would have a strategy to move those people along this journey and would have both the reptilian base so needed for growth, but also the neocortex folks needed for long-lasting client relationship.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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..."
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
;)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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"
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.
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!
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").
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.