ivee's comments

here's some feedback on your feedback on the feedback about feedback: I like it

honored to be your first read of 2025!

yeah I'm worried it could be me getting bored instead of the writers getting boring, but nobody could look at the writing in The Black Swan vs Skin in the Game and not be able to tell the huge difference in fluency, coherence, and beauty.

interesting feedback, thanks - it was mostly a stream of consciousness written in a single three hour sitting with no editing. would appreciate more detail. I'm actually gratefully surprised you found my writing so skimmable, not something I optimize for

wait why would this require sociopathy?

I completely disagree. If you walked up to Marl, built trust with him, and asked him whether he wanted more meaningful content in his life (for a definition of meaningful which made sense to him) I think he would say yes. So it's not really about Marl's preferences but about the way those preferences are collected and Marl's (sadly mostly justified) lack of trust.

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?

> 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.

great essay! saving people a click: https://web.archive.org/web/20230606224134/https://old.reddi...

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.

"market targeting power users" is basically SaaS, right? I don't understand that market as well, but it seems to have similar dynamics where you only charge X$ / user / month and so are incentivized to grab more users instead of giving more value to existing users.

(author here) I agree monopoly & market power is a big part of the story here, but I feel like that is already well-understood; I was trying to describe what the incentives feel like from the inside.

I guess more anti-trust in tech would probably be good, but the reality of network effects & the advertising economy mean it's actually nontrivial for government to intervene in a way that's clearly net good for users. Google has gifted the world amazing free-to-use software that gives me probably thousands of dollars of consumer surplus yearly. Had OKCupid stayed separate they might have had to tinderify anyways just to survive. Same with YouTube and Instagram had they not been acquired.

If I had to point my way to a solution it would be something at the protocol or operating system level. Apple, for example, mostly doesn't make money from ads and could set up their OS in a way that makes apps compete to satisfy user intentions rather than hijack their attention.