Nothing Human is a Substack of essays on product metrics, user feedback, technology, language models, and Tolkien.
Commenters repeatedly cite its "Tyranny of the Marginal User" essay to explain products that chase engagement and degrade, such as Windows.
relevant post: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/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.
Some thoughts:
1. Too much focus on user measurements can optimize products for the least engaged "marginal users": https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user
2. Too much focus on measurements has also created the "engagement" trap on social media, where content is algorithmically optimized for click bait and rage bait.
3. As the post suggests, below a certain size, you don't have the data to measure. Depending on your market, you need to be well beyond product-market fit for even basic AB testing to be useful.
4. But yes, many a promising product has been killed by falling into a "consulting trap", where the dev team churns out incoherent features to win a few anchor clients.
My conclusion is that product design is hard. You can't just blindly follow metrics. You can't blindly throw poorly-integrated features at the wall.
This is one reason why good founders and product designers are incredibly valuable. They can be out there, listening to the customers, and trying to assemble everything they learn into a pattern. There may be data involved, but there's usually a lot of intuition, too. And engineering and support will also have valuable input.
I think the point is sound but the author is selling the fictional executives ("decision makers") short.
Design research will inevitably always lead to a place thats reductive, nostalgic, and average (i.e. https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user). Designers themselves are loaded with biases and often enough want to perform design work that doesn't serve the business (in software we would call this Resume Driven Development - building with shiny new things so you can put it on your resume).
On the flip side, design is constantly victim to Dunning-Kruger or "bike shedding" - people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence.
If the author was trying to write about the latter, they are failing to first acknowledge the former... for all we know the "decision makers" have decades of competent experience in brand, design, and user experience.
Elon's track record with effective management in the first decade of SpaceX was genuinely impressive and led to bullish misunderstandings about the rest of his career (and is still impressive today even after accounting for every other part of his character and contemporary drug use). The guy running the country today doesn't have the impulse control or intellectual curiosity to accomplish the stuff he used to accomplish.
The best generic explanation I've read on this phenomenon is the article "Shallow Feedback Hollows You Out" by Midjourney's Ivan Vendrov:
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/shallow-feedback-hollows-you-out
Tyranny of the Marginal User was reposted recently, after a very popular run 6 months ago. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tyranny%20of%20marginal%20user https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user
This feels like a solid discussion of very much the opposite. The computer as bicycle for the mind is a beautiful & well traveled metaphor. And Engelbart is back there in history, always encouraging us to take the training wheels off: to get deep into systems that would let us deeply Augment Intellect.
It's a "Tyranny of the Marginal User" problem.
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user
Microsoft execs believed nothing could drive Windows users away, because they're addicted, but changes -could- potentially bring in Mac users. So everything was designed by and for Mac users.