49 ms·

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

• renanoliveira0 3y ago
  Worse for whom? The purpose of the absolute majority of software is to make money. The means of achieving this are varied, that's all.
• amai 3y ago
  Funnily the acronym DAU (Daily Active User) in German also means “dümmster anzunehmender User” (https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dümmster_anzunehmender_User https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dümmster_anzunehmender_User) the dumbest imaginable user, which fits to the point of the story.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• epivosism 3y ago
  I wonder whether the flattening of product depth is a unique founder effect, or is destined to happen due to the eventual formation of monopolies? Take photo sharing as an example. Early Flickr was amazing. It had tons of features - great varied groups of all types, a huge licensed image search system, great tags, etc. I joined regional groups, and also criticism groups for street photos, etc. Their comment system wasn't just text, it had annotations and they were doing interesting things with geolocation, too. Then yahoo killed it and now Instagram rules, with fewer features, more addiction and less depth. Flickr had addiction loops too but that wasn't the main focus. What causes this shrinking of product space? Is it that the first companies to get mindshare have more product-exploration power than later entries? So if the early companies are creative, they can expand the product space a lot, and uniquely have time to do so. If so, we can just blame yahoo for ruining Flickr, and they actually had a chance. Alternatively, maybe at late stages competition is so high you'll always get the extreme focus on the best DAU maximizing loops? And eventual monopoly with a small product.
  • candiddevmike 3y ago
    Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier, or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?
    • freedomben 3y ago
      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.
    • vsskanth 3y ago
      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.
      • epivosism 3y ago
        This is an often used argument by PMs, definitely. Kind of a headshot on anything sophisticated The fact that it also kills known useful things like VS, Photoshop isn't recognized and we continue to allow this invalid argument
      • fsckboy 3y ago
        > smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity this is a good hypothesis, except smartphone apps have much less UI feature complexity than is possible on a smartphone, i.e. it still seems to be a conscious choice to dumb down smart phone apps beyond what the UI and users can handle. A familiar example is banking apps, I have accounts at a number of large US banks, and in every case the phone apps leave out swaths of capabilities that their websites have, things like letting me see what Zelles I've sent to a particular person, "contact the bank" messaging, etc. image editing apps are another example, 100's of them in the app stores, but they're less feature rich than Windows Paint from 30 years ago. when they do something fancy, it's frequently because they are an app for doing that one thing.
• epivosism 3y ago
  I would like more info on the factors hinted at in the article: The effect of buying and closing innovative potential competitors? Product design distortion due to companies being valued by unreal factors, so most of the market is acting on partly false data (raw MAU rather than sophisticated analysis of likely actually meaningful paying DAU) Actual errors due to not measuring user sentiment: failing to build long term value since the life cycle of users from new-> user-> advocate -> generational aligned customer is not understood at all. In this thesis, most companies profit model is just wrong on long term time scales. They're actually burning the goodwill of potential dedicated customers in return for flat growth and revenue. This is Google to me; they have no way to detect that I've gone from loving to hating their products over the last ten years, since I spend as much as ever. But I'm looking for any way to jump to another product. In the end I still don't know. Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them? It feels so true that if they respected power users more it would be so beneficial to them, but in a hard to measure way. Recruiting, advocacy, lobbying, let alone bug fixes, wanting to work there. It could be that the hate they receive doesn't hurt them. But I think a certain type of person will always exist, who wants to love and respect the groups they're associated with, beyond just realized profit. I would jump at the chance to associate with a company which makes 50% as much money as google, but which I can still admire and feel aligned with. And long term it seems people will try to form societies and economies where companies can be viewed as actually aligned. So day to day google does fine, but maybe they're not pricing in the rare negative effects of existing in a less loved state?
  • ivee 3y ago
    > 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.
• freedomben 3y ago
  > 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.
  • ftxbro 3y ago
    > We’ve all been Marl at one time or another - half consciously scrolling in bed, in line at the airport with the announcements blaring, reflexively opening our phones to distract ourselves from a painful memory.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      And I want to do different things when I'm this way than what I want when I'm in a conscious state. Why is it that every single company only wants to serve the same one of those personas?
  • carlossouza 3y ago
    Totally agree: it's hilarious because it's true. Good startups target power users. By "good" I mean companies that find true PMF and grow exponentially at near-zero CAC (i.e. the ones that earn - not buy - their growth).
    • ahstilde 3y ago
      this would mean for many companies Marl is the power user
      • notpachet 3y ago
        I think for many companies, Marl is the CEO
• lapcat 3y ago
  > 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.
  • guestbest 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • postmodest 3y ago
    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.
    • pohl 3y ago
      It sounds like a build-to-flip startup idea is to create a dating service geared towards creating LTRs and growing it to the point where you get on Match's radar.
      • hooverd 3y ago
        Nationalize it. 'partner.gov' here we come.
• densh 3y ago
  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.
• koch 3y ago
  > 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.
  • mayormcmatt 3y ago
    Also the UI redesign they pushed through and bad search that precipitated the flourishing of third-party clients.
  • dale_glass 3y ago
    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.
    • wmichelin 3y ago
      Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.
      • dale_glass 3y ago
        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.
• nicbou 3y ago
  That was a pleasant read. I love the writing style amd the type of humour.
• adolph 3y ago
  I like how this article doesn't mention dopamine. On the other hand, I think that the key challenge is that brain activity that was well suited for contexts that prevailed for a long time long ago are less well adapted for things available today. From Nir Eyal, author of "Hooked:" Here, companies leverage two pulleys of human behavior – motivation and ability. To increase the odds of a user taking the intended action, the behavior designer makes the action as easy as possible, while simultaneously boosting the user’s motivation. [...] Bizarrely, we perceive this trance-like state as fun. This is because our brains are wired to search endlessly for the next reward, never satisfied. Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire. https://www.nirandfar.com/how-to-manufacture-desire/ https://www.nirandfar.com/how-to-manufacture-desire/
  • ivee 3y ago
    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.
• Kapura 3y ago
  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.
  • malfist 3y ago
    > say something, and leave So you want me to give up my mid-six figures job so your dates go a little bit better?
    • vimax 3y ago
      Do you really want to spend your life adding dark patterns to a dating website?
      • manicennui 3y ago
        Most things you can work on are equally bad, so why not? We all want to survive, and survival in America is expensive.
        • allarm 3y ago
          Mid-six figures have absolutely nothing to do with survival.
          • ryandrake 3y ago
            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.
• xorcist 3y ago
  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.
  • davio 3y ago
    I'm mixed on the shorts. I like it when they do a "you fix this by pushing this button here" in 15 seconds instead of it being 8+ minutes so they can get mid roll ads.
    • robert_tweed 3y ago
      I'd be fine with shorts if they didn't disable the normal player controls.
      • davio 3y ago
        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.
      • NoGravitas 3y ago
        Yet another reason to use NewPipe or SmartTube rather than the YouTube app or the browser.
        • bakugo 3y ago
          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.
      • worble 3y ago
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  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.
• dredmorbius 3y ago
  I'd arrived at a similar conceptualisation which I call "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User": <https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://old.redd...> In terms of impacts on software / application complexity, capability, and suitability to the needs and interests of advanced users, I feel somewhat similarly. I do take exception however with the notion that serving the needs of the much larger set people with less-advanced skills or interests is necessarily bad. In general I do support the effort of expanding access to computers and digital technologies. A large part of the degredation Vendrov describes is less an element of the people using these tools as it is the financial and economic incentives of the entities providing them, encapsulated in Cory Doctorow's ever-more-widely-known term enshittification. That's driven by the dynamics of winner-take-all monopolies, advertising, surveillance capitalism, and the inherent challenges of monetising information goods. What I would very much like to see, though, is a world in which both general and advanced-skills access are available and supported. A general characteristic and problem of media and information goods, going back to the advent of printing, is that popular tends to equate to degraded quality. This shows up in other products and services as well, though I'd argue it's most pernicious with information and media.
  • ivee 3y ago
    great essay! saving people a click: https://web.archive.org/web/20230606224134/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230606224134/https://old.reddi...
    • dredmorbius 3y ago
      Thanks, on both points. And I'd meant to post the direct URL.
• munificent 3y ago
  > We’ve all been Marl at one time or another This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article. It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.
  • somedude895 3y ago
    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.
    • telios 3y ago
      The reason it works is because they've done the research to make it work. It isn't a coincidence DAUs increase. I think it is important to recognize that it can impact you, and take steps to account for that, even if - or especially if - you don't want it to. You are not immune to propaganda, and all that.
      • raxxorraxor 3y ago
        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.
    • npsimons 3y ago
      > No matter how enlightened we think we are, we're all part of the masses and behave this way at one point or another. While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do better? If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?
      • intended 3y ago
        Spitballing - Perhaps due long tail effects. Tech (platforms) will always be advertising focused, because information systems scale with compute. marginal costs are so minor, that the limit becomes human attention. Which is also why apple may be able to focus on user centric design better. They are product + tech. Then again I can see other physical product firms delving into advertising - so its most likely corporate behavior/values.
• efitz 3y ago
  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.
  • hyggetrold 3y ago
    If you read the writing of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, he calls out growth as the underlying cause of these issues. Our current economic system is oriented around growth and the assumption that it can continue indefinitely.
    • bad_user 3y ago
      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.
      • kridsdale3 3y ago
        Sustainable growth means prosperity. Unsustainable growth is taking out a loan against the future without any certain plan that it can be paid.
      • nequo 3y ago
        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.
• xkcd1963 3y ago
  "A substantial fraction of the world’s most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people ... spend their lives serving Marl" that is a logical fallacy because smart people don't waste their time on something as useless as that.
  • gipp 3y ago
    That's not what a logical fallacy is
    • xkcd1963 3y ago
      "A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that occurs when invalid arguments or irrelevant points are introduced without any evidence to support them." invalid argument => x people doing y where x is "brilliant" and y is "serving Marl". Serving Marl is not brilliant. It doesn't count to work for a FAANG company to be considered brilliant, at least by my standards and view on how time is well spend.
      • gipp 3y ago
        Yeah, that's cool and all, but a) a logical fallacy is a particular pattern of invalid argument, not just an argument that is invalid. So just on like a semantic level, an individual argument can't be a fallacy, though it can commit one. b) fallacies are invalid inferences by construction. You just don't agree with the premise in this case (and are also implicitly proposing a second premise that doing something not-brilliant means a person is not themselves brilliant) And most importantly c) whether or not working for a FAANG company is "brilliant" is entirely a question of your opinion.
        • xkcd1963 3y ago
          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"
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  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.
• hedora 3y ago
  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.
• golergka 3y ago
  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.
• 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  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.
• ultra-jeremyx 3y ago
  Are there any examples of _consumer_ software that has an interface for the Marginal User, and a different interface for others? The only example that comes to mind is something like TweetDeck, but I believe that was killed off in the new Elmo/X era.
  • BWStearns 3y ago
    gmail had a kind of hidden option for adding keyboard shortcuts and their labs options. Not really a fully different interface but for a long time they kept that pretty lively. Unfortunately gmail has fallen off pretty hard lately. I can't even reliably expect my attachments to actually send the past few weeks.
    • ultra-jeremyx 3y ago
      Oh yeah, and they had Inbox, which I LOVED, and sadly, they killed off
    • TheDong 3y ago
      email still has non-marginal-interfaces available in general though. You can still configure some combination of mutt, offlineimap, sendmail, etc to work with gmail and view your emails locally in a proper viewer. Or use thunderbird I guess, though thunderbird feels pretty "marginal user" focused compared to mutt.
• throwawaymaths 3y ago
  The good news is, if this becomes too much of a problem, we can always give software feature and purchasing decisions to a nonuser!
• bdcs 3y ago
  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. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/repugnan...
  • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    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).
    • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
      Yeah, utilitarianism means you want to act in a way that's beneficial to most people. There's many ways you can interpret that, though. But I think if you say, before we had 1 apple per person, and now we have 2x as many apples, but they're all owned by one person - that's hard to argue it's utilitarian. If before you had 100 apples, and everyone who wanted one had one, and now you have 10,000 apples distributed to people at random, but only 1 in 100 people who wants one has one - that also seems hard to argue as utilitarian. Businesses are value maximization functions. They'll only be utilitarian if that happens to maximize value. In the case of software - if you go from 1m users to 10m users - that doesn't imply utilitarianism. It implies that was good for gaming some metric - which more often than not these days is growth, not profit.
    • tasty_freeze 3y ago
      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.
• unconed 3y ago
  If you want to complain about software getting worse, maybe don't post it on a website that forces a pop-up on readers after they have already started reading and scroll down...
• nonrandomstring 3y ago
  The margins are always where the interesting stuff happens. The interesting people gather there. The interesting ideas are shared. The new fashions. Think of Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street, Notting Hill, Bloomsbury, Mercer New York.... Sure, Capitalism always devours it, but by then the party has moved on somewhere new. Marginals know how to find each other. By the books we read. By the fact that we're the only ones not staring at phones in public. Spotting another vaguely attractive person with a dumb phone or interesting book is good enough reason to strike up a conversation. Oh, and in case you we're feeling all "mainstream"... Hacker News? WaaaaaaaaaaaaY out marginal! We're practically on another planet here ;)
  • footy 3y ago
    Unlike you, the article is using "marginal" in the economic sense.
    • nonrandomstring 3y ago
      different dialect
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  A great article. "Growth" is the culprit. "What if we just acted like the successful restaurant: packed every night, very profitable, solid employment for my kids?" Nah. We have to keep growing.
  • epx 3y ago
    +1. Software companies should accept that there is a ceiling to their revenue, and this ceiling won't need that many engineers to maintain the software. But many actors are benefied by believing in infinite growth. It is a collective illusion.
  • evouga 3y ago
    It's not so easy for several reasons: 1. It's easy enough for a lone entrepreneur with no investors to make principled long-term decisions. It's not so trivial when you owe a fiduciary duty to a board of venture capitalists. 2. Your team of engineers (which has grown steadily as you've scaled up) have built The Thing and everyone loves it. Now what? You only need 5% of the team to maintain the software. You could fire 95% of the team, which will make your company mighty unpopular to future hires, and moreover your best developers won't want to stay and do maintenance for the next decade. Easier to have them work on gratuitous frontend redesigns, bloated features that increase engagement metrics, etc. In a restaurant the contractors who build and furnish the place aren't your employees.
• MostlyStable 3y ago
  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.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    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.
  • ivee 3y ago
    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?
  • genewitch 3y ago
    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.
• wrs 3y ago
  This is sad to see as a user, but I can tell you it’s really sad when you have to do it to your own product.
• theresistor 3y ago
  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.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  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.
• iamnotsure 3y ago
  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
• layer8 3y ago
  > 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.
• nullifidian 3y ago
  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?
• adasdasdas 3y ago
  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.
• iamwil 3y ago
  This reminds me of the post on Product Market Fit the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490300 That PMF is never done, and you are just chipping away at more and more market segments. There's no negative feedback for people to think that they're done with a market and they're starting to squeeze blood from rocks.
• epivosism 3y ago
  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.
• PaulHoule 3y ago
  Totally wrong about OKCupid. The whole point is that you're not supposed to find anybody but keep looking because if you find somebody you're no longer a customer. Match buys every dating site that gets even 2% of traction because they can't stand the possibility that somebody makes a dating site that works and destroys their customer pool. If the government was serious about antitrust they'd break up match.com
• menacingly 3y ago
  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..."
• iteratethis 3y ago
  Marl isn't born that way, Marl is made by the same tech you're talking about. You're not a victim of Marl, you actively produce new Marls. Whenever you introduce convenience into the world, you reprogram people. You create the short attention span and passiveness.
• diegof79 3y ago
  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.
• s0rce 3y ago
  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).
• tikkun 3y ago
  Related concept: Enshittification (I've seen this mentioned on HN) A company starts out focused on building a great product. Then, they reach product-market fit. Then, they raise money. Now, the best way for them to grow is to go upmarket. Sell to enterprises. Unfortunately, then the resources of the company are directed to features that enterprises buyers care about, because that's the best way for the company to make more money. The actual product stagnates. (This does leave an opportunity for bootstrapped founders to come in and swim in the "wake" of B2B startups that built a great product, then let their product stagnate while they went upmarket. Eventually some of those bootstrappers might choose to get bigger and move upmarket themselves, and then the opportunity opens up again for new bootstrappers. Or the bootstrapper can remain niche, focused on winning users who choose the best product and who don't require enterprise features, which is a smaller market but still can be quite profitable and would be a much smaller and simpler to run business.) Examples: Airtable (it's a great product, I still love it, but it hasn't really improved for me as an end user since about 2016), Notion, Docusign (maybe it wasn't ever a great product, I'm not sure, but it sure hasn't improved for me as a user). Instead of going from "good to great" it unfortunately seems like many startups go from "great to good"
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• mrcartmeneses 3y ago
  So it goes
• dakial1 3y ago
  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.
• tristanMatthias 3y ago
  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_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...
• varelse 3y ago
  [dead]
• kazinator 3y ago
  I wrote a comment about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457753 "Marl" is an interesting angle on it.
• mrshoe 3y ago
  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.
  • egonschiele 3y ago
    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.
  • brap 3y ago
    You assume that your goals are aligned with the company’s goals. They’re not. There is no “problem”, it’s all working as intended. From the company’s point of view, they actually are doing the right thing. They’re making money (which, I’d argue, is ultimately a good thing for everyone involved). Netflix and Apple are no different, the goal is always $$, Apple just sells different things.
    • JohnMakin 3y ago
      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.
• WD40forRust 3y ago
  At risk of an avalanche of knee-jerk downvotes, I will suggest this angle: 'Inclusivity' is in vogue. It's a meme (Dawkins) which is so deep into the psyches of normies today it integrates into everything. Normie is the fish and inclusivity is the water. What I think is being left on the side lines is 'exclusivity' not in class of product, but in intended customer. "KDE 3.5 is an advanced product, it was not meant for average users like you. Go check out $LATEST_GNOME, it also comes at a more affordable price too!" Sure you're going to turn off some customers, but what you're really saying is "you're not good enough to be within the set of intended users" and I think this dynamic can drive some users into saying "nuh uh I'm not some normie goy, gimmie gimmie gimmie!" Well that's my shitter thought away, time to flush this turd!
  • AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    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").
• can3p 3y ago
  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
• avip 3y ago
  I'd like to give a shoutout to the one app in my life which actually gets better overtime - whatsapp. The only app, to my goldfish-like limited knowledge, which always delivers.
• dkarl 3y ago
  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.
• par 3y ago
  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.
• unoti 3y ago
  The article says: > Google Search itself, has decayed to the point of being unusable for complicated queries. Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time I was contemplating the truth of this, and thinking about how much of the internet's wealth of useful content gets overshadowed by nonsense and UI antipatterns. It was right at this moment that I continued reading and scrolled down and the stuff I was trying to read got greyed out and replaced by one of those annoying popups about something or other before I could finish reading the article. Oh the irony...
• darkerside 3y ago
  The problem is not metrics driven design or marginal users. It's that OKCupid wasn't successful, and that it probably can't be. So far, there isn't a tool that has successfully matched up looking term romantic partners with a high degree of success. That work has to come from people, and they don't get as much leverage from tools as they hoped. That's why the successful apps make it a numbers game and leave it to people to solve the actual problem of matchmaking.
• JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  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.
• gunshai 3y ago
  > the attention span of a goldfish on acid I happen to have quite a long attention span on acid I'll have you know!
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    What is it like to be a goldfish?
• oconnor663 3y ago
  > Of course, “Marl” isn’t always a person. Marl can also be a state of mind. We’ve all been Marl at one time or another This is an incredibly useful and healthy way of thinking. I think this is how we fight the actor-observer bias in practice.
• weare138 3y ago
  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.
• rendall 3y ago
  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.
• wbobeirne 3y ago
  I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It's not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time. OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first. I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.
  • Iulioh 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model
    • pif 3y ago
      You mean: another thing destroyed that a few people used to enjoy when the developers had no chance to have it economically better!
• throwaway128128 3y ago
  I hate that I love this article. It's so true.
• pc_edwin 3y ago
  "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" You either die as a cool edgy app/platform or you live long enough to face the innovators dilemma. Surprisingly, I think its a good thing on balance. It creates room for disruption from newcomers.
• shrimpx 3y ago
  The problem is that short-term profitability isn't compatible with the long-term health of society, because often the easiest way to make a lot of money quickly comes as a form of societal exploitation. The most direct examples being chemically addictive products like painkillers and cigarettes, and now ad-based attention sinks like TikTok and Instagram.
  • ssss11 3y ago
    The question is how would we (and can we) change corporations to value things other than short term profit? I’ve seen B-corps - those seem good, social/environmental focussed. No idea how widespread they are. Are there other corporate structure models that could become mainstream and solve some of these issues? At least for the companies adopting them and therefore customers signed up to them.
    • shrimpx 3y ago
      I think it's hard because we have GDP growth as the #1 KPI, and VCs seeking large-multiple exits in single-digit years, with no major concern for negative effects on society. Veering too deeply into pure capital acquisition will destroy capital though. A zombied out, addicted and unhealthy population isn't a source of capital. Ad revenue and demand plummets as nobody has the money or will to buy shit. But there's a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone passes the buck to some abstract "other" who will work on keeping society healthy. Traditionally, government is the balancing force that puts limits on capitalism and makes sure some profits are re-invested into society. But when top capital holders become political power brokers, government power recedes. I think the best hope is a new vision where young generations are intrinsically motivated to build a healthy society, and not just to push private capital acquisition as far as it can go.
      • ssss11 3y ago
        I agree, sad state of affairs.
• LAC-Tech 3y ago
  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.
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  I think it's unnecessarily unkind to Marl. The reality is, your core user base is always your easy-to-get captive market that intrinsically want what you do. A corollary of that is that gradient towards more users is always going to be eating into people more at the fringe or even totally outside the core intent of your product or service. So intrinsically, optimising for them is very unlikely to be optimising for your core users. We can believe a fairy tale where we tell ourselves that we can optimise for new users while still maintaining equal service for existing users, but it's really just a fairy tale - invariably these things end up in competition with each other.
• sublimefire 3y ago
  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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• throwmeout123 3y ago
  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
• gz5 3y ago
  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.
• michaelteter 3y ago
  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...
• scoofy 3y ago
  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 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.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?" I once asked someone this question and he replied with a single word. "Greed", he said. I wanted the opinion of someone who was not biased, i.e., who did not believe, AKAIK, that, as stated by the author of this blog post, "software is getting worse". This person was longtime shareholder in one of the companies that engages in what's being described here and their success has been his success. If anything, I thought, he should be biased in favour of "modern" software not against it.
  • nine_k 3y ago
    The software in question only gets worse for you, the audience, not the people running it. For them, it gets better as it brings in more profits. (Another reason why free software is essential.)
• cbare 3y ago
  Fuck that guy Marl.
• redbell 3y ago
  > why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time This reminds me of Jonathan Blow’s presentation about the collapse of our civilization: https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?si=0HZJzEvIYqIlmPqe https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?si=0HZJzEvIYqIlmPqe
• Vicinity9635 3y ago
  The question I have is why is Match Group allowed to have a monopoly on online dating? >Match Group is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and other dating global brands. I can't even name another dating site.
  • generalizations 3y ago
    Bumble is the notable exception.
    • eep_social 3y ago
      I had to go fact check this because I understood the opposite. And you’re right! What confused me is that Whitney Wolfe Herd founded Bumble and was also a Tinder co-founder. Bumble is owned by Blackstone Group now so they presumably have all the same incentives as Match properties under different owners.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • genewitch 3y ago
    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.
• YmiYugy 3y ago
  "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.
• whack 3y ago
  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.
  • liamwire 3y ago
    Well said.
  • presentation 3y ago
    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.
  • gmd63 3y ago
    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.
  • broscillator 3y ago
    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.
• pier25 3y ago
  By Reddit he means old Reddit, right?
• lanza 3y ago
  This is also how politics works at this point. Politicians get A/B tested to maximize DAUs -- e.g. Fox News viewers and thus their voters. Political party stances are the local maxima of AB testing talking points to their userbase around engagement.
• foxfired 3y ago
  Many years ago, I felt frustrated by this marginal user we were catering to at work. I called him "The Busy Man" [1] and wrote about it because no one at work would listen to me. > The busy man only has 48 hours to spare to learn JavaScript. The busy only has 24 hours to get more friends on your new social network. Only has 12 hours to decide which shoe to buy. Only has 10 minutes to wait for that email. Only has 2 minutes to read that long article you wrote. Only has 30 seconds to know what your product does. Only 8 seconds to register on your website. The busy man has only 2 seconds to spare to like your website. [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/the-busy-man https://idiallo.com/blog/the-busy-man (2015)
• bhauer 3y ago
  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.
• Semaphor 3y ago
  > 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.
• MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  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.
• mikpanko 3y ago
  I worked on and with growth teams in established tech companies for a while (including Google) and am running an early stage startup right now and my experience is very different. Mature products often focus on user retention and resurrection even more than attracting new users. Even VCs of early stage startups constantly keep asking about retention and stickiness as better metrics than new users. As I am now working on a brand new product [1], I talk daily to potential and early users and observe the short attention spans all the time. These are smart people with college degrees. But the ever increasing amounts of information hitting every person on a daily basis leads to shorter and shorter attention spans of everybody, not just a “marginal” user. If anything, first users provide less attention to new products than later users for well-established brands. [1] https://motifanalytics.com https://motifanalytics.com
• pickingdinner 3y ago
  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.
• mikpanko 3y ago
  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.
• a-dub 3y ago
  the internet has been gentrified lol
• croes 3y ago
  Fun fact in german the acronym DAUb means Dümmster anzunehmender User = Dumbest Assumable User
• p0w3n3d 3y ago
  This would mean that quality and complexity of apps will constantly decrease asymptotically to 0
• tippytippytango 3y ago
  The insight that we are all Marl at some point is really important. People who think they are never Mark are the most vulnerable.
• mellosouls 3y ago
  This article seems to misdiagnose completely what is going on, using an established description to boot and flipping it (without explaining where he has lifted the phrase from). The Tyranny of the Majority [1] for instance is a well-known phrase that when applied to markets succinctly describes the tendency to blandness and conformity as once-niche products remove bit by bit the original and distinguishing features that made them marginally successful. The hypothetical user described is just a representation of short-attention spans; the mix of concepts apparently adding to the author's confusion here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
• soorya3 3y ago
  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.
• Biganon 3y ago
  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.
• emodendroket 3y ago
  > 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.
• capybara_2020 3y ago
  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.
• throwaway290 3y ago
  > 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!
• kinnessa60 3y ago
  [dead]
• gytdev 3y ago
  amazing essay, does anybody have a list of sites that promote human agency instead of decreasing it?
• FridgeSeal 3y ago
  > What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here? Capitalism. It’s capitalism.
• Arech 3y ago
  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...
• edelwax 3y ago
  I worked on this problem for more than a decade, as co-founder of what became the Center for Humane Tech, and in other roles. One way to break it down is different users, but as Ivan notes towards the end, we all have Marl in us. So, another way to get at the same thing is to exclude certain engagements from the metrics — the things we click on but would not reflectively endorse as meaningful. You get a lower engagement number that represents meaningful choice, rather than just "revealed preference" / engagement. This is what I work to align LLMs with at the Institute for Meaning Alignment[1], and Ivan is helping! I also have a paper[2] on the difference between revealed preference and meaningful choice. (It's also worth noting that this process of enshittification doesn't just happen in software. Markets and voting also have this revealed preference vs meaningful choice problem. So, making this distinction is a chance to upgrade all of our large-scale systems.) [1] https://meaningalignment.org/ https://meaningalignment.org/ [2] https://github.com/jxe/vpm/blob/master/vpm.pdf https://github.com/jxe/vpm/blob/master/vpm.pdf
• adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  > What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here? Sounds familiar: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
• camgunz 3y ago
  I like this article, but I have to say it spills a lot of ink just to say that engagement metrics fucked us. These products stopped trying to empower us and started commodifying us. Marl isn't the problem; those execs are the problem.
  • brainwad 3y ago
    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.
• TalEs 3y ago
  I always wanted to make something like OkC, that caters to power users, but also to Marl. I will admit, I am Marl a lot of the time, so I know what Marls' want in a product. I already have an outline of my idea, but I won't give it away fully. Basically, I wanted something that is simple enough for Marl, but the internal features can be quite complex if you want to tweak them to find the perfect someone. It has to be an app primarily, and have a website as secondary. My ADHD brain is only good at ideating but I can't bring myself to work on them. I am no software dev, so it's always been just a dream. I wanted an app, that has the question and answer capabilities of OkC, to get to know a person, without actually having to type anything. It would have filters for partners or personalities. It can have more provocative questions to get the users desires, morals and values. It would be a blind date sort of deal, to prevent it becoming a beauty contest. Meeting in-person would be the main goal, with safety in mind of course. Dating would not be the main point of the app, meeting people would be, doing activities together and such. It would have a public dashboard of users, like ratio of M:F. I would love the return of the OkC blogs too. In terms of scaling, I don't care about infinite growth, it would be like a B-Corp with a sustainable growth model. The monetisation could be a 3-6 month full-feature subscription. If it didn't work out, the user could just move on. The other worse option would be ads. The app could be open-sourced or a freemium model, I am not sure about the feasibility. After going through the comments here, it seems @com2kid had already made something similar but I have some ideas to make it better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512127 Would love to know what he had learnt from working on that project!
• smukherjee19 3y ago
  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...
• sharas- 3y ago
  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.
• nilslindemann 3y ago
  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.
• davidthewatson 3y ago
  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?
• epolanski 3y ago
  > And I just don’t expect to meet my wife in a nightclub. I did? I mean, you can meet a significant other or friend in any kind of place. I kind of get what the author is trying to say but it's ill phrased.
• Communitivity 3y ago
  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.
• harpiaharpyja 3y ago
  This really seems to give words to a feeling that I've had, which is that technology has been steadily getting worse - i.e. less useful and more user-hostile - over the past decade or so. It's too bad, because there was some amazing product creativity going on in the past, and the future really did seem bright. But I feel not that we missed out on an imagined future, but that we are actually going backwards - thanks to enshittification and this perverse incentive structure.
  • seabass-labrax 3y ago
    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.
• ozim 3y ago
  Should discussion be about what people think is good for them vs what is good for them. Just like smoking or sugar.
• pxoe 3y ago
  am i the only one who finds the vilifying of a "dumb user", of internet, of anything, if not just dumb in itself, then just a bit unethical. sorry guys, you are all just here on this planet along with dumb people. that's so sad, huh. sucks to be you. making accessible things is actually good. not sure how that "dumbification of software for the marginal user" really aligns with what happens with apps. sometimes things don't get "dumber", or "simpler", or "easier to get even for the most basic of users". sometimes things just get worse. or get more complicated, internally (to exploit that user) or externally (dark patterns). simplification is really not the reason nor the 'evil thing-ruining machine' running behind the 'worsening of everything'. it might be the myriad of business processes, including a/b testing and orienting on whatever metrics analytics spit out, but like, despite almost pointing to that, this still diverts to 'things get simplified for the sake of the user' (boo hoo cutting features removing buttons). sure. but that's not the problem. the problem is the process that leads to, not just 'simplification' but whatever changes that happen. >nearly all popular consumer software is it really?
• zoogeny 3y ago
  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.
• sdeframond 3y ago
  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.
• wrineha2 3y ago
  Some shameless self promotion. I wrote about this exact idea back in 2021: https://www.williamrinehart.com/2021/big-tech-regulation-spence-distortion/ https://www.williamrinehart.com/2021/big-tech-regulation-spe...
• mdnahas 3y ago
  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.