I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It's not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.
OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.
I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.
The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that's a real shame.
I feel a twinge of guilt whenever I see things about how OKC got crappy.
Not that long before the acquisition a certain jackass brought in as a consultant (ahem) happened to point to OkC as the leading competitor against the acquiring company's properties specifically for mobile.
Sorry everyone...
If it makes it any better, I've had to use the product since then too, and suffered alongside all the rest of you.
Almost all internet algorithms seem to converge around maximising time spend on the app in question. A dating website simply doesn't want to be too effective, as you would lose two customers every successful match. Similar to the approach used in slot machines, you want to give the illusion of winning, but I'm reality only provide moderately succesful matches rather than perfect ones.
Of course there is a human element too. Dating sites give the illusion of choice, and a result a lot of potential matches aren't realised on, as the partner is good looking enough.
The upside of dating app bootstrapping is that it's an inherently local phenomenon. People want to meet people near them, which means you can gain traction one locale at a time. Maybe some kind of promotion where you cut deals with some local bars or restaurants to get some kind of discount / freebie if you match with someone (with the implication being that they'll use it for the date). Still takes capital, just not "nation-wide aggressive advertising push" levels of capital.
You raise a really interesting point that I hadn't really thought about before - the possibility that the move to mobile first is directly responsible for making things worse, dumber, simpler with less functionality.
The best thing about OKCupid was the data-backed articles. It was our source of inspiration and data point to continue on a dating website we built. We started as a side project in 2006 but got shelved after my company was acquired. I returned to it in 2010-2011, and OKCupid was our constant fodder for data and inspiration.
This post reads like Eternal September[1], and I write that without any cynicism or snark. It makes good sense that text-heavy web apps would fall prey to image-heavy mobile apps. I still think there is potential for dating apps that target higher intellect users. Most of the dominant apps today are mobile-first, largely visual, and disappointing for both sides. One idea: Could speech-to-text technology help to allow users to create OkCupid-style essays from a mobile phone? Maybe. Although, a few discussions here on HN said that speech-to-text is still a super hard problem in 2023.
I met my wife on OKC. (we initially dated for a year, then split up, then got back together many years later after we both did some growing up). I moved someplace that OKC had no userbase in the intervening time and tried to use tinder. It was an absolute dumpster fire. Just a miserable experience. I was so sad to see it consume market share at the expense of sites like OKC. Ultimately OKC pulled through for me in the end!
Anyway all of which is to say 1. OKC was great and thank you for working on it, and 2. your story resonates so much with my experience and observations from the other side of the equation.
>> The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions.
A voice interface might help. By default in the app of course, not a phone feature the user has to use to TTS into the app.
> OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth.
Okay... what was the ratio of active men to women on OkCupid each year? How about on Tinder? You worked there, and that's an unfair assessment of Tinder.
The fundamental trend in these dating apps is that ratio, and the relative growth (or decline!) of that gender's active user base. And it's not something Match, or for that matter Dataclysm ever discussed, even though it's kind of the most important single metric for a dating app.
I mean ask demographers, they talk about 3m:2f being a crisis ratio [1]. And on Tinder it's probably closer to 10:1-20:1, I'm sure they pay AppAnnie (or whatever they're called now) to push out some fake ass numbers here and there. If it wasn't a horrible number - anything worse than 3m:2f is pretty horrible! - they would write about it, and they simply won't.
On the one hand I really liked Dataclysm, and I was bought into the ideas it put forward. There's this post from 2018 by the author that used to say, oh well the reply rate to black women was 20 percentage points lower, which is the same in 2008. Well, trends showed about 18 percentage points more interracial marriages, the data was totally counter to trend: that indicated a problem in OkCupid, not in the user base as the author claimed. The Tinder PR team kind of put the kibosh on that kind of transparency for the wrong reasons, but it was the right idea.
So this big essay prompt format that the app used to use, I don't know if it was part of the problem where OkCupid was fundamentally against trend. In some respects, clearly, the essays versus swiping didn't matter. It certainly seems intuitive that the essays matter, it appeals to a sense of superiority in a particular audience's way of believing how online dating should work, but those guys are operating in the vacuum of the single most important data point (the actual ratio) and are forced to essentially generate fictions for why the apps work the way they do and why it worked for them.
I appreciate that from your point of view, 2013-2017 was a focus on "mobile" and that in your opinion that was "bad." But c'mon, show me a category of free app that didn't have a focus on "mobile." I personally think the apps are doing the best given the circumstances - the ratio! - and that everything else is dancing around this because, if people knew, you know, they'd stop using them.
This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article.
It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.
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.
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.
> Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time
Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.
Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem - Reddit is social media that succeeded.
This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit.
It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc.
So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows.
You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.
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.
I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user.
OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed that the majority of them don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they have to exist for ads to generate any revenue.
I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care about different things.
Other Reddit enshittification is their pushiness to use the mobile app. Great UX case study here, this guy makes them very entertaining - https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit
> Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again.
This is hilarious and sad because it feels too accurate. Damnit Marl, please for the sake of us power user minority, please change.
Alternatively and more seriously, I do hope to see markets emerge that target power users. I'm not optimistic though. Open source seems like the only real hope there.
I felt this article was so spot on. Everything feels optimized for those who are semi-lobotomized.
I recall years ago (maybe this was late '00s or early 2010s) when Facebook changed their interface to be much more "Twitter like", i.e. a semi-random list of items in your feed. Before that, for me it was much easier to actually follow conversations with my real friends. After that it was just a sea of posts - and by the way if you scrolled past a post and wanted to find it again, good luck. After all everything must be new and fresh to keep you engaged!!
This type of architecture has helped to lower the value of online relationships, and has continued to destroy our attention spans. I guess the only good news is that I feel like it's gotten so bad I can hardly use apps like FB or Instagram anymore, which is probably a good thing.
Feels like this is tyranny of easily measured metrics. If your north star metric is something more focused (number of fun dates!) that incentivizes features and experiments that push that number up, but if the number is DAU, suddenly you've decoupled "success" from the actual intention of the website or app.
Obviously, "number of fun dates" is a lot harder to measure, relying as it would on surveys with low response % and a variety of circumstantial factors. Whereas you can easily measure DAU, and put them on nice charts that point up and to the right to justify a bonus for some executive. Such is life.
Finally, there's a level of personal responsibility. Code doesn't get worse without developers making it that way. If you think your job is bullshit, making things worse, say something, and leave. Do your best to not be part of the problem.
Thoughtful article that doesn't even mention Youtube Shorts, perhaps the most glaring example of the trend.
When online services maximizes the number of daily users, perhaps in the hundreds of millions, the vast majority of them won't be very interested. So of course any data driven service will optimize keeping uninterested users occupied. That does explain a lot actually.
I'm mixed on the shorts. I like it when they do a "you fix this by pushing this button here" in 15 seconds instead of it being 8+ minutes so they can get mid roll ads.
The other thing I find amusing about things like Shorts (as well as things like Reels or Tok Tok) is that it is the perfect example of Goodhart's Law.
Basically all these platforms use dwell time as an indication that you liked (or at least were interested in) a video. So then these sites got flooded with completely inane videos of the "Just wait for it!!!" variety that last for 5 minutes, always making it seem like something is going to happen, but it's just video of an intersection or people at the grocery store or whatever.
I wonder whether the flattening of product depth is a unique founder effect, or is destined to happen due to the eventual formation of monopolies?
Take photo sharing as an example.
Early Flickr was amazing. It had tons of features - great varied groups of all types, a huge licensed image search system, great tags, etc. I joined regional groups, and also criticism groups for street photos, etc. Their comment system wasn't just text, it had annotations and they were doing interesting things with geolocation, too.
Then yahoo killed it and now Instagram rules, with fewer features, more addiction and less depth. Flickr had addiction loops too but that wasn't the main focus.
What causes this shrinking of product space?
Is it that the first companies to get mindshare have more product-exploration power than later entries? So if the early companies are creative, they can expand the product space a lot, and uniquely have time to do so. If so, we can just blame yahoo for ruining Flickr, and they actually had a chance.
Alternatively, maybe at late stages competition is so high you'll always get the extreme focus on the best DAU maximizing loops? And eventual monopoly with a small product.
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.
> 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.
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.
I would like more info on the factors hinted at in the article:
The effect of buying and closing innovative potential competitors?
Product design distortion due to companies being valued by unreal factors, so most of the market is acting on partly false data (raw MAU rather than sophisticated analysis of likely actually meaningful paying DAU)
Actual errors due to not measuring user sentiment: failing to build long term value since the life cycle of users from new-> user-> advocate -> generational aligned customer is not understood at all. In this thesis, most companies profit model is just wrong on long term time scales. They're actually burning the goodwill of potential dedicated customers in return for flat growth and revenue. This is Google to me; they have no way to detect that I've gone from loving to hating their products over the last ten years, since I spend as much as ever. But I'm looking for any way to jump to another product.
In the end I still don't know. Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them? It feels so true that if they respected power users more it would be so beneficial to them, but in a hard to measure way. Recruiting, advocacy, lobbying, let alone bug fixes, wanting to work there. It could be that the hate they receive doesn't hurt them. But I think a certain type of person will always exist, who wants to love and respect the groups they're associated with, beyond just realized profit. I would jump at the chance to associate with a company which makes 50% as much money as google, but which I can still admire and feel aligned with. And long term it seems people will try to form societies and economies where companies can be viewed as actually aligned. So day to day google does fine, but maybe they're not pricing in the rare negative effects of existing in a less loved state?
> Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them?
No, I think you're right that Google is suffering in the long term. It's a combination of measurement difficulty and agency problems - there's no way for the VP of the product to get a credible signal about whether a change was good or not other than by looking at something incontrovertible like DAUs. You might try to introduce a metric like "user happiness" but the design space of such metrics is so large that a misaligned product manager could always use it to shove a bad change through.
Kind of like we all know GDP is a bad metric for human flourishing, but everything else feels even worse.
I like how this article doesn't mention dopamine. On the other hand, I think that the key challenge is that brain activity that was well suited for contexts that prevailed for a long time long ago are less well adapted for things available today.
From Nir Eyal, author of "Hooked:"
Here, companies leverage two pulleys of human behavior – motivation and ability. To increase the odds of a user taking the intended action, the behavior designer makes the action as easy as possible, while simultaneously boosting the user’s motivation.
[...]
Bizarrely, we perceive this trance-like state as fun. This is because our brains are wired to search endlessly for the next reward, never satisfied. Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.
yeah designing anti-dopaminergic (maybe serotonergic?) tech is a class of solutions I'm especially excited about. Like browser extensions that cut out the little dopamine-triggering UI elements that designers keep adding in.
That's not the tyranny of the Marginal User, that's a primitive mindset of growth at all costs, which doesn't realize growth is a phase of the existence of an entity, and just like teenagers stop growing eventually, so should companies, once they find their niche. Instead they keep overaddressing their audience, until entropy takes over and destroys the company altogether, to be replaced by another startup that has the same infinite growth one bit mentality.
Our understanding of how to create systems is primitive. Our understanding how to effectively maintain and refine them over time is broadly speaking non-existent. Collapse and destruction is not inevitable, it's plan B when the entity in question cannot maintain its own constitution. Our companies, products, cultures, nations, civilizations don't know how to do that. So they keep collapsing and get replaced.
It's massively wasteful, it causes endless pain and suffering, immense waste, it's the tragedy of our existence. And the hope is we'll learn eventually, before our entire species collapses. But so far I don't see it. We keep making the same mistakes over and over, but faster and faster, at higher and higher scale. That light at the end of the tunnel is not what you think it is.
"How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?"
I once asked someone this question and he replied with a single word. "Greed", he said.
I wanted the opinion of someone who was not biased, i.e., who did not believe, AKAIK, that, as stated by the author of this blog post, "software is getting worse".
This person was longtime shareholder in one of the companies that engages in what's being described here and their success has been his success.
If anything, I thought, he should be biased in favour of "modern" software not against it.
The question I have is why is Match Group allowed to have a monopoly on online dating?
>Match Group is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and other dating global brands.
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.
[+] [-] wbobeirne|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|2 years ago|reply
The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that's a real shame.
[+] [-] kromem|2 years ago|reply
Not that long before the acquisition a certain jackass brought in as a consultant (ahem) happened to point to OkC as the leading competitor against the acquiring company's properties specifically for mobile.
Sorry everyone...
If it makes it any better, I've had to use the product since then too, and suffered alongside all the rest of you.
[+] [-] sirspacey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxfordmale|2 years ago|reply
Of course there is a human element too. Dating sites give the illusion of choice, and a result a lot of potential matches aren't realised on, as the partner is good looking enough.
[+] [-] wvenable|2 years ago|reply
It seems to have over and over where a product and brand that makes decent profit is utterly destroyed in an attempt to acquire a new market.
[+] [-] OkayPhysicist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoofy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angostura|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2037|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[+] [-] carabiner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iulioh|2 years ago|reply
Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model
[+] [-] talldatethrow|2 years ago|reply
I always had this weird vague hunch that spark match become OKCupid. Any info on this?
[+] [-] swacket|2 years ago|reply
Anyway all of which is to say 1. OKC was great and thank you for working on it, and 2. your story resonates so much with my experience and observations from the other side of the equation.
[+] [-] cbeach|2 years ago|reply
I’m sad to read that it’s gone downhill since it moved into new ownership.
[+] [-] phkahler|2 years ago|reply
A voice interface might help. By default in the app of course, not a phone feature the user has to use to TTS into the app.
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|2 years ago|reply
I feel this is the turning point leading to downfall of many companies.
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|2 years ago|reply
Okay... what was the ratio of active men to women on OkCupid each year? How about on Tinder? You worked there, and that's an unfair assessment of Tinder.
The fundamental trend in these dating apps is that ratio, and the relative growth (or decline!) of that gender's active user base. And it's not something Match, or for that matter Dataclysm ever discussed, even though it's kind of the most important single metric for a dating app.
I mean ask demographers, they talk about 3m:2f being a crisis ratio [1]. And on Tinder it's probably closer to 10:1-20:1, I'm sure they pay AppAnnie (or whatever they're called now) to push out some fake ass numbers here and there. If it wasn't a horrible number - anything worse than 3m:2f is pretty horrible! - they would write about it, and they simply won't.
On the one hand I really liked Dataclysm, and I was bought into the ideas it put forward. There's this post from 2018 by the author that used to say, oh well the reply rate to black women was 20 percentage points lower, which is the same in 2008. Well, trends showed about 18 percentage points more interracial marriages, the data was totally counter to trend: that indicated a problem in OkCupid, not in the user base as the author claimed. The Tinder PR team kind of put the kibosh on that kind of transparency for the wrong reasons, but it was the right idea.
So this big essay prompt format that the app used to use, I don't know if it was part of the problem where OkCupid was fundamentally against trend. In some respects, clearly, the essays versus swiping didn't matter. It certainly seems intuitive that the essays matter, it appeals to a sense of superiority in a particular audience's way of believing how online dating should work, but those guys are operating in the vacuum of the single most important data point (the actual ratio) and are forced to essentially generate fictions for why the apps work the way they do and why it worked for them.
I appreciate that from your point of view, 2013-2017 was a focus on "mobile" and that in your opinion that was "bad." But c'mon, show me a category of free app that didn't have a focus on "mobile." I personally think the apps are doing the best given the circumstances - the ratio! - and that everything else is dancing around this because, if people knew, you know, they'd stop using them.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Date_onomics/7GDVBgAAQB... (page 22)
[+] [-] munificent|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whack|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bdcs|2 years ago|reply
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/repugnan...
[+] [-] koch|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Night_Thastus|2 years ago|reply
This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit.
It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc.
So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows.
You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.
[+] [-] dale_glass|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cole-k|2 years ago|reply
OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed that the majority of them don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they have to exist for ads to generate any revenue.
I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care about different things.
[+] [-] hiidrew|2 years ago|reply
Also related, Cory Doctorow's essay on this where he labeled it 'enshittification' - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
[+] [-] mayormcmatt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qingcharles|2 years ago|reply
If you find a much finer-grained niche subreddit you will probably find the quality is still 2010 Reddit.
[+] [-] freedomben|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Kapura|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xorcist|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
Basically all these platforms use dwell time as an indication that you liked (or at least were interested in) a video. So then these sites got flooded with completely inane videos of the "Just wait for it!!!" variety that last for 5 minutes, always making it seem like something is going to happen, but it's just video of an intersection or people at the grocery store or whatever.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epivosism|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] efitz|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lapcat|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MostlyStable|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epivosism|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adolph|2 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] ivee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3cats-in-a-coat|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
(Another reason why free software is essential.)
[+] [-] Vicinity9635|2 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
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.