# The Tyranny of the Marginal User Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/nothinghuman/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user?r=3ptcv Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-Tyranny-of-the-Marginal-User?index=0x65cf2b460c1b06294c56a22177724d7ecea45930e98b7178fb484c9c5ce853344a69d7a8 Submitted by tim on 2024-02-16 UTC, 13 upvotes, 6 comments ## Summary The essay argues that popular consumer software keeps getting worse because companies optimize for the "marginal user," the least engaged person whose daily use drives growth metrics like Daily Active Users, rather than for the existing users who value the product most. The author, who says they spent six years at Google, calls this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User and says they do not yet know how to fight it. The author cites OKCupid, which once used detailed questionnaires and match scores of 0 to 100% but now resembles Tinder's swipe format, and says Reddit and Craigslist remain useful because their software has stayed largely unchanged. ## Article A friend and I were recently lamenting the strange death of OKCupid. Seven years ago when I first tried online dating, the way it worked is that you wrote a long essay about yourself and what you were looking for. You answered hundreds of questions about your personality, your dreams, your desires for your partner, your hard nos. Then you saw who in your area was most compatible, with a “match score” between 0 and 100%. The match scores were eerily good. Pretty much every time I read the profile of someone with a 95% match score or higher, I fell a little bit in love. Every date I went on was fun; the chemistry wasn’t always there but I felt like we could at least be great friends. I’m now quite skeptical of quantification of romance and the idea that similarity makes for good relationships. I was somewhat skeptical then, too. What I did not expect, what would have absolutely boggled young naive techno-optimist Ivan, was that 2016-era OKCupid was the best that online dating would ever get. That the tools that people use to find the most important relationship in their lives would get worse, and worse, and worse. 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. This isn’t just dating apps. Nearly all popular consumer software has been trending towards minimal user agency, infinitely scrolling feeds, and garbage content. Even that crown jewel of the Internet, 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. Like old Victorian mansions in San Francisco they stand, shielded by a quirk of fate from the winds of capital, reminders of a more humane age. 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? In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User. Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period. What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. 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. So in practice, the design of popular apps caters almost entirely to the marginal user. But who is this marginal user, anyway? Why does he have such bad taste in apps? 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. Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion. As a product designer concerned about the wellbeing of your users, you might wonder - does Marl really want to be hate-reading Trump articles for 6 hours every night? Is Marl okay? You might think to add a setting where Marl can enter his preferences about the content he sees: less politics, more sports, simple stuff like that. But Marl will never click through any of your hamburger menus, never change any setting to a non-default. You might think Marl just doesn’t know about the settings. You might think to make things more convenient for Marl, perhaps add a little “see less like this” button below a piece of content. Oh boy, are you ever wrong. This absolutely infuriates Marl. On the margin, the handful of pixels occupied by your well-intentioned little button replaced pixels that contained a triggering headline or a cute image of a puppy. Insufficiently stimulated, Marl throws a fit and swipes over to TikTok, never to return to your app. Your feature decreases DAUs in the A/B test. In the launch committee meeting, you mumble something about “user agency” as your VP looks at you with pity and scorn. Your button doesn’t get deployed. You don’t get your promotion. Your wife leaves you. Probably for Marl. all hail King Marl! 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 - 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. We don’t usually think about Marl, or identify with him. But the structure of the digital economy means most of our digital lives are designed to take advantage of this state. A substantial fraction of the world’s most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people, armed with near-unlimited capital and increasingly god-like computers, spend their lives serving Marl. By contrast, consumer software tools that enhance human agency, that serve us when we are most creative and intentional, are often built by hobbyists and used by a handful of nerds. If such a tool ever gets too successful one of the Marl-serving companies, flush with cash from advertising or growth-hungry venture capital, will acquire it and kill it. So it goes. Thanks to Ernie French (fuseki.net) for many related conversations and comments on this essay. ## Comments **macbudkowski.eth**: This essay is an instant Kiwi classic. Few comments from me: "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. " Never liked Tinder and couldn't nail why - 'digital nightclub' is a perfect name for its vibes. "What's wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of." What's interesting about DAU is that it tells you whether a person opened the app, which is a binary metrics. But it doesn't tell you how happy your user was using your app, which is not a binary metric. Tech typically uses some engagement metrics to measure it, like "Time spent in the app," but I don't think it correlates with user happiness. The more time I spend on most social media the less happy I am. "Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn't actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn't stop using the app. 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 stickinness is a great point. And you don't even need network effects to build it. I still check the same Polish news site I've been checking since 2001. It changed a lot since then, I don't like most of the changes, but the habit is there. So metrics-wise, they can prove that the new shiny features haven't alienated the old users. **rolf.eth**: I like the focus on the core dynamic of many consumer apps today, which is towards extreme simplicity at the UX level. Ivan also says he doesn't know how to counteract it. There are some potential solutions I think. First, a comment: "a billion-user product doesn't actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn't stop using the app." That does not ring true. A billion-user product does care more about its 1,000,000,000 users than it cares about 1 new user. In fact, it likely cares about what it is optimized for, which in OKCupid's case as a privately owned company, is shareholder profit. That profit comes from whoever can be monetized better: if new users generate more profit than existing users, focus is on new users. If existing users generate more profit than new users, focus is on existing users. At a billion-existing-users, focus is likely on existing users. Second, another thought: this may be what the market wants, which the more general trend among other players in the industry suggests as well. If not just OKCupid but other companies simplify their UI/UX dramatically as well, this may be a customer-driven outcome, not a producer-driven outcome. Producers may adapt to customers rather than customers adapting to producers. Third, a potential solution to the trend towards simplified UI/UX. Decoupling the backend from the frontend is a solution to the problems posed here. That is, were OKCupid's db and data open, like in Farcaster, then anyone could build different UI/UXs. Some of those frontends would retain the old, personality-test driven UI/UX experiences; others would mimetically copy the more simplistic Tinder-like UI/UX experiences. If you want to preserve old UI/UXs, like the way a Polish news site used to look in 2001, then store the site's frontend on Arweave (pay-once-store-forever) and you'll have access to the same UI/UX in 2024 as you had in 2001, with updated content if data is stored openly and permissionly on the backend, web3-style, via some headless CMS-like tool. This promise is one rooted in Web3, and for pointing towards that solution I really like the article even though I don't agree with all of it! **macbudkowski.eth**: hey @rolf.eth, thanks for sharing your thoughts; I got some comments :) "If existing users generate more profit than new users, focus is on existing users. At a billion-existing-users, focus is likely on existing users." I generally agree with it. One angle I tried to add by sharing my Polish news site example is the power of habit. Let's say your billion users are, on average, 80/100 happy with your product. They built a strong habit of using your product, so they won't easily break it. Let's say only if they get to 40/100 happiness will they stop using the product and rebuild their habits just to use something else. It means you can add a feature that would turn 80/100 happiness into 70/100 happiness without seeing that in your metrics. So there's this latent old user happiness decrease. And if that feature makes the marginal user more happy, the metrics will show it's a net plus for the product. This is what I experienced with this Polish news site. I'm less happy than I used to be, but I haven't reached the 40/100 happiness threshold, so I won't rebuild my habits to use another site. "Second, another thought: this may be what the market wants, which the more general trend among other players in the industry suggests as well." I'd rephrase it and say this is what the biggest/most profitable market segment wants. If you run a profit-oriented company and seek to maximize profits, you must follow the segments that generate the most money. So why run feature-rich OKCupid for 1M users when you can run a Tinder-like app for 100M users? It doesn't mean that old users stopped wanting old OKCupid. Some of them still like it. But they aren't the most profitable market segment to focus on. In the long run, thanks to free markets, I believe some 'old school dating apps' will emerge to serve them, though their profit ambitions would be smaller than those of Tinder-like apps. "That is, were OKCupid's db and data open, like in Farcaster, then anyone could build different UI/UXs. Some of those frontends would retain the old, personality-test driven UI/UX experiences; others would mimetically copy the more simplistic Tinder-like UI/UX experiences." This is a brilliant idea. I mean, in web3 this back-end/front-end decoupling is something we know very well. But never thought about it from the dating app POV - this would be something really cool :) **rolf.eth**: Love your thoughts and they make a ton of sense. Agree with all of them, thanks for digging in and sharing your clarity of thought here! **uncledavo.eth**: Great read. DAUs not being an ideal metric remind me of the quote "the map is not the terrain". Heard it a lot when doing work w governments and the public sector in a previous life. In a lot of governments, there was a push in the 80s towards being more metrics-driven (New Public Management), but in complex systems governments operate in, this led to a bunch of unintended consequences. There's been a shift away from that reductive thinking in a lot of public service orgs, but only in pockets, and it's hard to make conversations about UX and systems thinking fit with the old ways of doing things. I feel flattening of nuance and greater abstraction will become more common as AI proliferates. What's interesting and makes me hopeful is the rise of 'luxury software' that sometimes isn't as obsessed with DAU, and has a better relationship with their users because of serving a v niche community. **macbudkowski.eth**: @uncledavo, that reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Andy Grove had a solution called pairing indicators: “Indicators tend to direct your attention toward what they are monitoring. It is like riding a bicycle: you will probably steer it where you are looking. If, for example, you start measuring your inventory levels carefully, you are likely to take action to drive your inventory levels down, which is good up to a point. But your inventories could become so lean that you can’t react to changes in demand without creating shortages. So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured.” So, e.g., if you measure the number of users, you should also have a way to measure their satisfaction. Since satisfaction is typically much harder to estimate, many projects tend to focus on DAUs. I think your point about 'luxury software' as a solution is interesting because the whole luxury industry is very focused on user satisfaction. And since there are very quantifiable ways to express satisfaction with luxury products (typically by buying more and more expensive stuff), brands like LVMH can grow to multi-billion valuations. Wondering how it could translate into software.