The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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.

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!

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.

Same here (second wife) and the thing is once OKCupid did it's job you didn't need it anymore - and that was a good thing.

The problem is that when you choose eternally needing customers you have to switch to the types of people who will never have a long term relationship - which Tinder style apps work better for.

But those kind of people also drive away the ones looking for a long-term partner.

Really sounds like poisoning the well.

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.

These were different times... I met my partner of 25+ years on my town's IRC channel. Imagine that happening now.

The best dates I ever had came from a language exchange site that doesn't exist anymore.

Seems to resonate with the "filter for brainy people" filter OKC seems to once have had.

Hey, at least you can say you had a direct role in how couples meet and their resulting progeny.

Our personal misery and loneliness aside, the long-term societal effects as generations wear on will be fascinating.

I appreciate your candor. Though I am upset, I realize this is the kind of thing that would be hard to see coming.

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

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.

I find I comment and write much less on mobile than on a computer, because the writing experience on mobile is still very sub-par.

Adding to this, the thought I've heard is that mobile/pad devices are great for consumption but terrible for contribution.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Founder wrote a book. Blog is still at archive.org

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.

100%. When I play video games, I am Marl. Not going into menus or whatever to set things up, just using it to specifically not use my brain.

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

If you use the internet from a phone you're pretty much forced to be Marl.

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.

> No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another.

While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do better?

If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?

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.

> 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

To Pogo: 'What do you mean "us"? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?'

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.

I sympathise. This is a really hard habit to break.

It’s not deliberate. It’s the tragedy of the commons. They are tapping into a shared resource (our well being) and everyone else is doing it.

Is this true, or just an invented number based on your intuition?

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.

Those numbers are most certainly made up. I didn't even know about radios on Spotify for the longest time.

Well this just isn't true

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.

Have you heard of long running holdbacks? Even if not, rest assured that for major features, they are very commonly run.

Your point is a good one - what you're describing I've heard referred to as "the novelty effect". In fact, a lot in this article reminds me of another essay critical of the short-sightedness of many A/B tests:

https://www.zumsteg.net/2022/07/05/unchecked-ab-testing-dest...

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...

Gwern runs tests that long.

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.

What's your background, and what are your skills?

I did this in 2022 [1] and have really liked my new work. There are a lot of nonprofits doing important things, and I think it's likely you could switch to one.

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...

there are lots of swe jobs with the government.

If you walked up to me, built trust with me, and asked me if I wanted more exercise in my life I’d say yes. And yet.

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.

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.

[1] https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning

> 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...

Here's a simpler way to phrase the problem.

The current world population is about 8 billion.

By this argument, and also by your argument, it should actually be 999 billion. Or a number even higher than that.

The conclusion boils down to:

1. Find maximum population number earth can support.

2. Hit that number.

I do think that, when put this way, it seems simplistic.

Rawls's original position and the veil-of-ignorance he uses to support it has a major weakness: it's a time-slice theory. Your whole argument rests on it. You're talking about the "existing population" at some particular moment in time.

Here I am replying to you 3 hours later. In the mean time, close to 20,000 people have died around the world [1]. Thousands more have been born. So if we're to move outside the realm of academics, as you put it, we force ourselves to contend with the fact that there is no "existing population" to maximize happiness for. The population is perhaps better thought of as a river of people, always flowing out to sea.

The Repugnant Conclusion is relevant, perhaps now more than at any time in the past, because we've begun to grasp -- scientifically, if not politically -- the finitude of earth's resources. By continuing the way we are, toward ever-increasing consumption of resources and ever-growing inequality, we are racing towards humanitarian disasters the likes of which have never been seen before.

[1] https://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/world-death-cl...

> 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.

>The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics.

Not even for academics. It's something for "rational"-bros.

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.

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.

Assuming linearity of utility either in individuals or in aggregation is a very common straw man of utilitarianism.

> (e.g. sad neighbors make neighbors sad)

I much prefer, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." At least in that case nobody will confuse a trucker hat slogan for a viable system of ethics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I left Reddit after the API changed and Apollo died.

Last week I realized I still kept doing a bunch of reddit searches so I went back and tried the app.

The app is not that bad, hope the users stick around

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.

"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.

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!

Table formats are easier to implement I guess...

Try no/low code tools like WeWeb or Glide. Still more of a design/dev toolkit, but a leap closer.

> 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.

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"

Err, nope.

As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:

Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.

This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".

> 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.

> Good startups target power users.

Growth-oriented startups then run out of power users and start targeting the wider population; when the latter outnumber the former, power users fall by the wayside at best and are explicitly told to fuck off as uneconomical at worst.

Acquisition-oriented startups sell their power user base to a large company that’s unlikely to care about them and proceeds to tell them to fuck off (usually after some large-company-scale fleeting instant, like a couple of quarters).

That is why, most of the time, I now preemptively fuck off when I see a (VC-funded) startup targeting me as a power user of whatever they’re making. I’ve been burned too many times, and with all due respect to the cuddly techies running things at the moment, they don’t own the company.

this would mean for many companies Marl is the power user

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.

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?

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.

[dead]

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.

Comeon tell us what the app is!

Do you really want to spend your life adding dark patterns to a dating website?

I want you to have some amount of self respect, and appreciation for your craft.

hey in this instance does this mean you are making ~150,000 or ~500,000?

I'd be fine with shorts if they didn't disable the normal player controls.

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.

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.

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.

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

The average user used to be an 18-40 year old person with post-secondary education, in a mid to high income country, using a laptop.

Now, The average user is a 10-65 year old person using a smartphone.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Companies dumb down their products to appeal to the masses, who then get dumber because they have nothing nudging them to get better. It's a vicious cycle imo.

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.

> 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.

There is a reason Patagonia is consistently rated as the most favorable brand in America.

Growth means prosperity.

Also, the idea that the economy requires growth is BS, it's just that economic stagnation or recession currently means some people are going to be starving. And if you actually look at the world, with its still growing population in some countries, or an aging population in others, it's pretty clear why people starve when growth stops, and it has nothing to do with capitalism, or The Man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore.

The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like auto-repair post-warranty period.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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

There is, you will just have zero users because everybody uses the Match.com and Bumble duopoly

> There is abundant competition in the search engine market: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Brave, Yahoo.

DuckDuckGo and Yahoo both use Bing's search index. (Which sucks whenever Bing randomly removes your website for no reason.)

Brave Search is a very recent addition, just within the past year or two.

> Nobody uses Google because they have to, they use it because it is the best.

Oh yeah, you sure its not because its the default browser on Android ?