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> and people do not lose confidence in the site owner. No, but some of us do get incredibly pissed off with them. It's unendingly tiresome to find that some p

> and people do not lose confidence in the site owner. No, but some of us do get incredibly pissed off with them. It's unendingly tiresome to find that some piece of content has disappeared from the web, or been moved without a redirect. Often archive.org can help but there's plenty of stuff that's just ... gone. I don't necessarily run into this problem every day, but anything up to two or three times a week depending on what I'm looking for.

gwoplock 5y ago
I swear this happens every time I visit a form. Either the 1 image I need has been purged or every post links to some other dead form. I've had pretty bad luck with archive.org for these things.
npteljes 5y ago
I see this just as how ads are perceived to be annoying. People can complain all the time but this annoyance, or in this case distrust, just doesn't seem to affect anything.
- parafactual 5y ago
  Gwern found that placing banner ads on his site significantly decreased traffic: https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads
  - gwern 5y ago
    It's a good comparison. An effect can be real, and people just not notice it, ever. Let's round off the ad effect to 10% loss of users. How do you notice that? You can simulate out traffic, and decrease the mean 10% at some random point and draw time-series: it's actually quite hard to see, particularly with any kind of momentum or autocorrelation trends. And that's with website traffic where you can quantify it. How do you measure the impact on something more intangible? If people can not notice that effect of ads, they can certainly not notice subtler effects like the long-term harm of casually breaking links... Is <10% worth caring about? It's certainly not the difference between life and death for almost everyone; no successful business or website is going to shut down because they had ads, or because they broke old URLs. On the other hand, <10% is hardly trivial, people work hard for things that gain a lot less than that, and really, is defining redirects that hard?
    - parafactual 5y ago
      This principle seems like it extends far beyond site traffic, especially since something like life satisfaction is much harder to measure.
      - gwern 5y ago
        Yes, it's a kind of slippery slope: as typically set up, changes are biased towards degrading quality. If you run a normal significance test and your null is leaving it unchanged, then you will only ever ratchet downwards in quality: you either leave it unchanged, or you have a possibly erroneous choice which trades off quality for degradation, and your errors will accumulate over many tests in a sorites. I discuss this in the footnote about Schlitz - to stop this, you need a built-in bias towards quality, to neutralize the bias of your procedures, or to explicitly consider the long-term costs of mistakes and to also test quality improvements as well. (Then you will be the same on average, only taking tradeoffs as they genuinely pay for themselves, and potentially increasing quality rather than degrading it.)
    - sbierwagen 5y ago
      Speaking of noticing small effects, Mechwarrior Online was four months into its open beta before anyone noticed that an expensive mech upgrade that was supposed to make your weapons fire 5% faster actually made them fire 5% slower. http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2013/02/20/competitively-priced-small-disabilities/ http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2013/02/20/competitively...

gwoplock 5y ago

I swear this happens every time I visit a form. Either the 1 image I need has been purged or every post links to some other dead form. I've had pretty bad luck with archive.org for these things.

npteljes 5y ago

I see this just as how ads are perceived to be annoying. People can complain all the time but this annoyance, or in this case distrust, just doesn't seem to affect anything.

parafactual 5y ago
Gwern found that placing banner ads on his site significantly decreased traffic: https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads
- gwern 5y ago
  It's a good comparison. An effect can be real, and people just not notice it, ever. Let's round off the ad effect to 10% loss of users. How do you notice that? You can simulate out traffic, and decrease the mean 10% at some random point and draw time-series: it's actually quite hard to see, particularly with any kind of momentum or autocorrelation trends. And that's with website traffic where you can quantify it. How do you measure the impact on something more intangible? If people can not notice that effect of ads, they can certainly not notice subtler effects like the long-term harm of casually breaking links... Is <10% worth caring about? It's certainly not the difference between life and death for almost everyone; no successful business or website is going to shut down because they had ads, or because they broke old URLs. On the other hand, <10% is hardly trivial, people work hard for things that gain a lot less than that, and really, is defining redirects that hard?
  - parafactual 5y ago
    This principle seems like it extends far beyond site traffic, especially since something like life satisfaction is much harder to measure.
    - gwern 5y ago
      Yes, it's a kind of slippery slope: as typically set up, changes are biased towards degrading quality. If you run a normal significance test and your null is leaving it unchanged, then you will only ever ratchet downwards in quality: you either leave it unchanged, or you have a possibly erroneous choice which trades off quality for degradation, and your errors will accumulate over many tests in a sorites. I discuss this in the footnote about Schlitz - to stop this, you need a built-in bias towards quality, to neutralize the bias of your procedures, or to explicitly consider the long-term costs of mistakes and to also test quality improvements as well. (Then you will be the same on average, only taking tradeoffs as they genuinely pay for themselves, and potentially increasing quality rather than degrading it.)
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    Speaking of noticing small effects, Mechwarrior Online was four months into its open beta before anyone noticed that an expensive mech upgrade that was supposed to make your weapons fire 5% faster actually made them fire 5% slower. http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2013/02/20/competitively-priced-small-disabilities/ http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2013/02/20/competitively...