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Comment by omegalulw | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be better to run the experiment longer _and_ discard the data from initial few weeks?

This could make the entire org/company run and innovate much slower. Ideally you can build better models that predict long term conversion from short term data. These models can be refined with long term experiments.

The current state of browser tracking preventions also means that you’re unlikely to identify conversions from the same user that saw your experiment after a week or sometimes even 24 hours.

Yes, browser tracking prevention is one of those things that seems like a good idea at first but likely makes the internet slightly worse overall.

Sites can only optimize for what they can see and we've made it so they can only see short-term engagement.

Another is all the annoying cookie popups as a result of GDPR.

You haven't convinced me that preventing browser tracking is making the internet "slightly worse overall".

If sites are having trouble converting me, perhaps it's not me that's the problem.

The issue is most sites can no longer tell if they are converting you

It's not obvious to me that that is a problem for me, or that it makes the internet worse

The popups are a result of tracking, not GDPR. Websites without tracking don't need to have them.

It's somewhat amusing that the overlap of garbage content farms and sites with annoying consent popups is almost perfect. I wonder if it could be used for search engine ranking.

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