7 ms·

> 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 o

> 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.
  - tqi 3y ago
    I think the problem is there isn't a clear delineation between "traps" and "meaningful improvement." Take Signal for example - early days they had a ton of success with a core group of users, in spite of a number of product warts. Ever since then, they've been making usability improvements to lower friction and appeal to more and more marginal users. Is that good or bad? Based on the hn threads I've seen, it seems like the jury is pretty mixed?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Signal is a special case because it's a generic messenger app - meaning it's target audience is legitimately everyone, and with its philosophy and E2EE in general preventing interoperability, it has to capture everyone. It has to be optimized towards a Marl, or else it'll fail to network effects. Some software is like that. Most isn't - but the enshittification culture is affecting it all the same.
      - tqi 3y ago
        I don't think signal is an especially special case. While it may be clear and obvious to you which apps are which, I think that the reality is that its never a clear delineation.
  - spott 3y ago
    Because there is an endless amount of human time spent like this, but we all have limited attention for other things. If you try to appeal to someone’s better parts, then there is a limit to the amount of attention that they can apply to your product. If you try to appeal to someone’s base need for dopamine, then the limit of attention is much higher.
- beefield 3y ago
  This is something important that people do not seem to grasp. Intelligence is a really high dimensional thing. Even the ones that are highly intelligent in some dimensions are dumb as rock in vast majority of other dimensions. So we all are basically morons with some occasional flashes of intelligence in some individuals.
  - checkyoursudo 3y ago
    Really dumb people don't know that they are really dumb. Dumb people know that they are dumb. Below average people think they are average. Average people think they are smart. Smart people know they are smart but not highly intelligent. Highly intelligent people think they are geniuses (including in all possible fields). Geniuses, real honest-to-goodness geniuses, know that they are smart in many ways but mostly dumb. I cannot prove it, but this is how I think it is. For the record, I think I am smart; however, because of the Iron Rule of Intelligence above, it is equally possible that I am only average.
srik 3y ago
That is the insight I’m surprised the author didn’t zero in on.
npsimons 3y ago
> It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people. That is incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate goal, especially of people.
- lifty 3y ago
  It’s not deliberate. It’s the tragedy of the commons. They are tapping into a shared resource (our well being) and everyone else is doing it.
  - Finnucane 3y ago
    There's no commons on a commercial website. This is deliberate.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    If you listen to Frances Haugen's testimony, you see that it is very much deliberate. There are probably thousands of psychology grads that went to school, hoping to help people, that are, instead, designing dark patterns. But they are probably making a lot more money than they would, helping people. Evil pays cash.
    - lifty 3y ago
      It's as deliberate as a cow eating grass. The cow deliberately eats the grass but because of the game theory involved (lack of information, lack of coordination, incentives etc.), the pasture disappears. The point of my comment (and the article's, I think) was that companies want the revenue, but don't deliberately want to harm us.
      - titzer 3y ago
        Companies aren't cows. They know. Big companies always have people studying the larger economic trends of the markets they are in and looking into the future--you know, people who are always ignored if they point out anything or advocate anything that would be counter to this quarter's profits.
andrewmg 3y ago
As Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."[0] [0]https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/ https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-me...
- waffletower 3y ago
  To Pogo: 'What do you mean "us"? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?'
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Is it really so hard to consider? Do you believe that intentions and outcomes are always aligned?
spott 3y ago
This is a key point. If you look at people, each of them have multiple different “personas” throughout the day/week/etc.[0] Some of them, sometimes, are builders or content creators. Some of them, sometimes, are conscientious consumers, looking to stretch their understanding or themselves and think hard about something that they are consuming. But all of them, sometimes, are Marl. There will always be a way to find more Marls to add to your user pool because Marl is the basest human need for a steady effortless dopamine drip. Just about everyone has some amount of time that they spend as Marl, so there is an almost limitless pool of Marl time to pull new users from. I’m trying to find some way to say that this isn’t what you actually want, but I’m struggling. If you are making a product for everyone, Marl is the only persona that is in everyone, so you should probably target Marl. However, if you are trying to build a product for a more constrained persona, you should probably be careful of using metrics that measure Marls. Because there are so many of them (even your users with other personas are sometimes Marls!) if you aren’t really careful, you will enshitify your product as you continue your A/B testing gradient descent into a user base of Marls, without anyone you were trying to get — even if you don’t loose your content creators and conscientious consumers, you have converted them into Marls, and lost what you were trying to achieve. Enshitification is the conversion of your target user from any other kind of persona, to Marls. [0] there are other personas, these were that the ones that immediately came to mind.
- butterNaN 3y ago
  I agree with your overall thesis. Just a nit, "Enshittification" is not what you describe, at least how the original author of the term intended: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
  - spott 3y ago
    Thanks, I misremembered.
- zbentley 3y ago
  Absolutely. I think there are two business behaviors that underly this phenomenon: growth culture and fear of being outcompeted. The culture of growth-at-all-costs has been condemned plenty in other threads here, I won't restate how/why. It's the problem that brings about, for example, "your A/B testing gradient descent" as the gravitational pull towards enshittification: the idea that robotically optimizing for greater growth/income/engagement is the right thing for a business to do. This ignores the huge range of ethical, profitable businesses that inhabit the space in the size/growth spectrum between "lifestyle boutique that pays the employees' bills and not much more" and "virally growing global superphenomenon". The presumption that those two extremes are the only inevitable outcomes for a business is poison. Unfortunately, sustainably inhabiting that middle ground requires a resistance to extreme greed on the part of a business's leadership/leadership culture--and again, the presence of some greed is just fine in non-hypergrowth businesses! There are loyal, lucrative, and sizable markets for carefully targeted products whose focus doesn't drift; "niche" is not a pejorative, and many niches are wide enough to be worth absolute shitloads of money! Unfortunately, continually resisting the extremity of greed is not something humans are good at. There's also the fear of outcompetition: the idea that a Marl-serving competitor will grow so large that they extinguish your non-Marl-focused business. That's sometimes true, but not inevitably so--and enduring the risk of that "sometimes" is one of the grit-your-teeth-and-stick-to-your-ethics behaviors that distinguishes beloved minority members of a market from self-immolating enshittification chasers. Remember, Apple was a beloved minority player in personal computing, staying (and generally performing well) within a luxury/loyalist niche, for more than a decade. Enduring risk in the face of the fear of outcompetition does require bravery from leaders, but can yield benefits both in the form of profits/loyalty and--rarely--by converting Marls into non-Marls by showing an example of how much better things can be. Short version is a cold take: the intersection of hypergrowth-legend-induced greed and outcompetition fear, applied across large groups of people with communication impedance, leads to crappy outcomes. As usual.
beefman 3y ago
There are stupid people. A large percentage of the population never regularly used PCs because keyboards and mice are too abstract. They only began regularly computing once they could touch things with their fingers. Today, Google search has more fuzzing and returns more Q&A results on mobile. A large percentage never used e-mail because e-mail addresses are too abstract. They only began using "social media" when they could address correspondence by photograph. There are a billion people who can speak but not read and write, and billions who can read and write but not well enough to earn karma on Hacker News. Though smart people are sometimes Marl, they are Marl less often, or in more sophisticated ways (like wasting time on Hacker News).
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  > There are a billion people who can speak but not read and write, and billions who can read and write but not well enough to earn karma on Hacker News. Karma on hackernews seems like a pretty arbitrary metric for intelligence
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> to the worse impulses In my experience, making stuff that provides no intrinsic value like video games, only value of meaning, my games have only gotten better by catering to those impulses, which are really not that negative or stupid. Really, who needs tutorials? Why make stuff that needs a tutorial? You can have complex games without tutorials and FTUEs. You don't need so much UI. It's not about scrolling so much as it is that so many apps obscure, rather than transmit, anything meaningful, through really obnoxious UI. This argument is the Malcolm Gladwell 140 character tweet complaint not being enough to have a deep conversation. Easy for him to say, he's got his!
bcrosby95 3y ago
It's a pretty interesting statement. I used to be fine with "microboredoms" and think about other things, such as a book I'm reading, a game I want to play, or even work. I noticed these days that I spend more time during those "microboredoms" on my phone. I have 10 seconds? Check out reddit! I've been trying to kick this habit, enjoy my surroundings more, or get lost in my head like I used to.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  Carrying around a fidget toy has helped me with this. Part of the urge to scroll on my phone is just to do something with my fingers. If my fingers are occupied with a bit of string or a finger-trap, my mind is more free to wander.
  - munificent 3y ago
    I started cross-stitching again for exactly this reason. Lately, I've been learning to knit, which is even better for scratching this itch.
- checkyoursudo 3y ago
  I sympathise. This is a really hard habit to break.
sirspacey 3y ago
Yes and no 98% of Spotify users never take any action other than “press play” on a radio station 2% take some kind of agency (create a playlist, like a song) A vanishingly small amount create personal or public curated playlists Yes, that very small amount may also listen passively sometimes, but the difference matters. Imagine if Spotify was just a radio station.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  Well this just isn't true
- rconti 3y ago
  Is this true, or just an invented number based on your intuition?
- webninja 3y ago
  I hate that new Spotify radios play nearly the same songs from your existing playlists and listening history. Little variety and mostly an echo chamber.
  - kmac_ 3y ago
    It works for me: Discover weekly + song radio + similar artists + genre and user playlists. I can listen to new songs until I'm tired. I love Spotify.
- Tokkemon 3y ago
  Those numbers are most certainly made up. I didn't even know about radios on Spotify for the longest time.
rglullis 3y ago
Now, let's find any single company/product that actually is successful by encouraging us to become better versions of ourselves.
- robotresearcher 3y ago
  In apps: Ten Percent Happier and Headspace? In meatspace: Nike, Adidas?
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Sport gear companies? Just selling you a lifestyle and an identity. Meditation apps feel more like someone exploiting a fad than some with an actual interest in your wellbeing.
    - robotresearcher 3y ago
      I dunno, I think that might be overly cynical. You might as well complain that a brain surgeon only removes tumors because they get money for it. Does Nike want me to run and jump less, to participate in sports less, to work out less often? No, they run expensive ad campaigns encouraging me to make exercise a regular part of my life. To sell apparel, yes, but they aren't telling me to eat more cheeseburgers or drink more booze like other corporations.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        Where is their skin in the game? A doctor that makes a bad diagnostic might suffer a malpractice lawsuit, or at the very least will be known for their incompetence. What happens with Nike for customers that bought their products but never get to do anything? Do they give any type of money back?
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - 3y ago
titzer 3y ago
Well put. And everyone plays along. When the big, popular apps become idiocracized, then the smaller apps follow suit. It really seems that there's a race-to-the-bottom effect going on. Case in point: Guitar tuner apps. Back in 2005 a good friend of mine had a startup that made the best-in-class guitar tuner app in the feature phone / flip phone era, before Android. Back then, they had to deal with all manner of constraints from vendors and the hardware of the day. They figured it out and shipped a featureful app that had a < 1MB binary and run at realtime speeds and had an intuitive UI. They sold it for something like a $6 one-time payment and were happy keeping their startup chugging along at $500k-$1M annual revenue. Fast forward to today, there are a zillion clones, typically weighing in at 40+MB, are "free with ads" and will nag you endlessly to sign up for $7, $10, even $15 per month. Their UIs suck, too. I have no idea what their revenue aspirations are, but this is totally driven by capturing consumer surplus from the orders-of-magnitude larger Android market. We all lose. I do not pay for these apps; I would gladly have back that $6 app, but can't have it. The market is absolutely saturated with enshittified Android apps. Instead, I intentionally spend significantly more than that on dedicated tuners (like the excellent but somewhat fragile Snark clip-on ones).

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.
- tqi 3y ago
  I think the problem is there isn't a clear delineation between "traps" and "meaningful improvement." Take Signal for example - early days they had a ton of success with a core group of users, in spite of a number of product warts. Ever since then, they've been making usability improvements to lower friction and appeal to more and more marginal users. Is that good or bad? Based on the hn threads I've seen, it seems like the jury is pretty mixed?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Signal is a special case because it's a generic messenger app - meaning it's target audience is legitimately everyone, and with its philosophy and E2EE in general preventing interoperability, it has to capture everyone. It has to be optimized towards a Marl, or else it'll fail to network effects. Some software is like that. Most isn't - but the enshittification culture is affecting it all the same.
    - tqi 3y ago
      I don't think signal is an especially special case. While it may be clear and obvious to you which apps are which, I think that the reality is that its never a clear delineation.
- spott 3y ago
  Because there is an endless amount of human time spent like this, but we all have limited attention for other things. If you try to appeal to someone’s better parts, then there is a limit to the amount of attention that they can apply to your product. If you try to appeal to someone’s base need for dopamine, then the limit of attention is much higher.
beefield 3y ago
This is something important that people do not seem to grasp. Intelligence is a really high dimensional thing. Even the ones that are highly intelligent in some dimensions are dumb as rock in vast majority of other dimensions. So we all are basically morons with some occasional flashes of intelligence in some individuals.
- checkyoursudo 3y ago
  Really dumb people don't know that they are really dumb. Dumb people know that they are dumb. Below average people think they are average. Average people think they are smart. Smart people know they are smart but not highly intelligent. Highly intelligent people think they are geniuses (including in all possible fields). Geniuses, real honest-to-goodness geniuses, know that they are smart in many ways but mostly dumb. I cannot prove it, but this is how I think it is. For the record, I think I am smart; however, because of the Iron Rule of Intelligence above, it is equally possible that I am only average.

srik 3y ago

That is the insight I’m surprised the author didn’t zero in on.

npsimons 3y ago

> It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people. That is incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate goal, especially of people.

lifty 3y ago
It’s not deliberate. It’s the tragedy of the commons. They are tapping into a shared resource (our well being) and everyone else is doing it.
- Finnucane 3y ago
  There's no commons on a commercial website. This is deliberate.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  If you listen to Frances Haugen's testimony, you see that it is very much deliberate. There are probably thousands of psychology grads that went to school, hoping to help people, that are, instead, designing dark patterns. But they are probably making a lot more money than they would, helping people. Evil pays cash.
  - lifty 3y ago
    It's as deliberate as a cow eating grass. The cow deliberately eats the grass but because of the game theory involved (lack of information, lack of coordination, incentives etc.), the pasture disappears. The point of my comment (and the article's, I think) was that companies want the revenue, but don't deliberately want to harm us.
    - titzer 3y ago
      Companies aren't cows. They know. Big companies always have people studying the larger economic trends of the markets they are in and looking into the future--you know, people who are always ignored if they point out anything or advocate anything that would be counter to this quarter's profits.

andrewmg 3y ago

As Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."[0] [0]https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/ https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-me...

waffletower 3y ago
To Pogo: 'What do you mean "us"? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?'
- uoaei 3y ago
  Is it really so hard to consider? Do you believe that intentions and outcomes are always aligned?

spott 3y ago

This is a key point. If you look at people, each of them have multiple different “personas” throughout the day/week/etc.[0] Some of them, sometimes, are builders or content creators. Some of them, sometimes, are conscientious consumers, looking to stretch their understanding or themselves and think hard about something that they are consuming. But all of them, sometimes, are Marl. There will always be a way to find more Marls to add to your user pool because Marl is the basest human need for a steady effortless dopamine drip. Just about everyone has some amount of time that they spend as Marl, so there is an almost limitless pool of Marl time to pull new users from. I’m trying to find some way to say that this isn’t what you actually want, but I’m struggling. If you are making a product for everyone, Marl is the only persona that is in everyone, so you should probably target Marl. However, if you are trying to build a product for a more constrained persona, you should probably be careful of using metrics that measure Marls. Because there are so many of them (even your users with other personas are sometimes Marls!) if you aren’t really careful, you will enshitify your product as you continue your A/B testing gradient descent into a user base of Marls, without anyone you were trying to get — even if you don’t loose your content creators and conscientious consumers, you have converted them into Marls, and lost what you were trying to achieve. Enshitification is the conversion of your target user from any other kind of persona, to Marls. [0] there are other personas, these were that the ones that immediately came to mind.

butterNaN 3y ago
I agree with your overall thesis. Just a nit, "Enshittification" is not what you describe, at least how the original author of the term intended: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
- spott 3y ago
  Thanks, I misremembered.
zbentley 3y ago
Absolutely. I think there are two business behaviors that underly this phenomenon: growth culture and fear of being outcompeted. The culture of growth-at-all-costs has been condemned plenty in other threads here, I won't restate how/why. It's the problem that brings about, for example, "your A/B testing gradient descent" as the gravitational pull towards enshittification: the idea that robotically optimizing for greater growth/income/engagement is the right thing for a business to do. This ignores the huge range of ethical, profitable businesses that inhabit the space in the size/growth spectrum between "lifestyle boutique that pays the employees' bills and not much more" and "virally growing global superphenomenon". The presumption that those two extremes are the only inevitable outcomes for a business is poison. Unfortunately, sustainably inhabiting that middle ground requires a resistance to extreme greed on the part of a business's leadership/leadership culture--and again, the presence of some greed is just fine in non-hypergrowth businesses! There are loyal, lucrative, and sizable markets for carefully targeted products whose focus doesn't drift; "niche" is not a pejorative, and many niches are wide enough to be worth absolute shitloads of money! Unfortunately, continually resisting the extremity of greed is not something humans are good at. There's also the fear of outcompetition: the idea that a Marl-serving competitor will grow so large that they extinguish your non-Marl-focused business. That's sometimes true, but not inevitably so--and enduring the risk of that "sometimes" is one of the grit-your-teeth-and-stick-to-your-ethics behaviors that distinguishes beloved minority members of a market from self-immolating enshittification chasers. Remember, Apple was a beloved minority player in personal computing, staying (and generally performing well) within a luxury/loyalist niche, for more than a decade. Enduring risk in the face of the fear of outcompetition does require bravery from leaders, but can yield benefits both in the form of profits/loyalty and--rarely--by converting Marls into non-Marls by showing an example of how much better things can be. Short version is a cold take: the intersection of hypergrowth-legend-induced greed and outcompetition fear, applied across large groups of people with communication impedance, leads to crappy outcomes. As usual.

beefman 3y ago

There are stupid people. A large percentage of the population never regularly used PCs because keyboards and mice are too abstract. They only began regularly computing once they could touch things with their fingers. Today, Google search has more fuzzing and returns more Q&A results on mobile. A large percentage never used e-mail because e-mail addresses are too abstract. They only began using "social media" when they could address correspondence by photograph. There are a billion people who can speak but not read and write, and billions who can read and write but not well enough to earn karma on Hacker News. Though smart people are sometimes Marl, they are Marl less often, or in more sophisticated ways (like wasting time on Hacker News).

Capricorn2481 3y ago
> There are a billion people who can speak but not read and write, and billions who can read and write but not well enough to earn karma on Hacker News. Karma on hackernews seems like a pretty arbitrary metric for intelligence

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> to the worse impulses In my experience, making stuff that provides no intrinsic value like video games, only value of meaning, my games have only gotten better by catering to those impulses, which are really not that negative or stupid. Really, who needs tutorials? Why make stuff that needs a tutorial? You can have complex games without tutorials and FTUEs. You don't need so much UI. It's not about scrolling so much as it is that so many apps obscure, rather than transmit, anything meaningful, through really obnoxious UI. This argument is the Malcolm Gladwell 140 character tweet complaint not being enough to have a deep conversation. Easy for him to say, he's got his!

bcrosby95 3y ago

It's a pretty interesting statement. I used to be fine with "microboredoms" and think about other things, such as a book I'm reading, a game I want to play, or even work. I noticed these days that I spend more time during those "microboredoms" on my phone. I have 10 seconds? Check out reddit! I've been trying to kick this habit, enjoy my surroundings more, or get lost in my head like I used to.

MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
Carrying around a fidget toy has helped me with this. Part of the urge to scroll on my phone is just to do something with my fingers. If my fingers are occupied with a bit of string or a finger-trap, my mind is more free to wander.
- munificent 3y ago
  I started cross-stitching again for exactly this reason. Lately, I've been learning to knit, which is even better for scratching this itch.
checkyoursudo 3y ago
I sympathise. This is a really hard habit to break.

sirspacey 3y ago

Yes and no 98% of Spotify users never take any action other than “press play” on a radio station 2% take some kind of agency (create a playlist, like a song) A vanishingly small amount create personal or public curated playlists Yes, that very small amount may also listen passively sometimes, but the difference matters. Imagine if Spotify was just a radio station.

Capricorn2481 3y ago
Well this just isn't true
rconti 3y ago
Is this true, or just an invented number based on your intuition?
webninja 3y ago
I hate that new Spotify radios play nearly the same songs from your existing playlists and listening history. Little variety and mostly an echo chamber.
- kmac_ 3y ago
  It works for me: Discover weekly + song radio + similar artists + genre and user playlists. I can listen to new songs until I'm tired. I love Spotify.
Tokkemon 3y ago
Those numbers are most certainly made up. I didn't even know about radios on Spotify for the longest time.

rglullis 3y ago

Now, let's find any single company/product that actually is successful by encouraging us to become better versions of ourselves.

robotresearcher 3y ago
In apps: Ten Percent Happier and Headspace? In meatspace: Nike, Adidas?
- rglullis 3y ago
  Sport gear companies? Just selling you a lifestyle and an identity. Meditation apps feel more like someone exploiting a fad than some with an actual interest in your wellbeing.
  - robotresearcher 3y ago
    I dunno, I think that might be overly cynical. You might as well complain that a brain surgeon only removes tumors because they get money for it. Does Nike want me to run and jump less, to participate in sports less, to work out less often? No, they run expensive ad campaigns encouraging me to make exercise a regular part of my life. To sell apparel, yes, but they aren't telling me to eat more cheeseburgers or drink more booze like other corporations.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Where is their skin in the game? A doctor that makes a bad diagnostic might suffer a malpractice lawsuit, or at the very least will be known for their incompetence. What happens with Nike for customers that bought their products but never get to do anything? Do they give any type of money back?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- 3y ago

titzer 3y ago

Well put. And everyone plays along. When the big, popular apps become idiocracized, then the smaller apps follow suit. It really seems that there's a race-to-the-bottom effect going on. Case in point: Guitar tuner apps. Back in 2005 a good friend of mine had a startup that made the best-in-class guitar tuner app in the feature phone / flip phone era, before Android. Back then, they had to deal with all manner of constraints from vendors and the hardware of the day. They figured it out and shipped a featureful app that had a < 1MB binary and run at realtime speeds and had an intuitive UI. They sold it for something like a $6 one-time payment and were happy keeping their startup chugging along at $500k-$1M annual revenue. Fast forward to today, there are a zillion clones, typically weighing in at 40+MB, are "free with ads" and will nag you endlessly to sign up for $7, $10, even $15 per month. Their UIs suck, too. I have no idea what their revenue aspirations are, but this is totally driven by capturing consumer surplus from the orders-of-magnitude larger Android market. We all lose. I do not pay for these apps; I would gladly have back that $6 app, but can't have it. The market is absolutely saturated with enshittified Android apps. Instead, I intentionally spend significantly more than that on dedicated tuners (like the excellent but somewhat fragile Snark clip-on ones).