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.
If you look at people, each of them have multiple different “personas” throughout the day/week/etc.[0]
Some of them, sometimes, are builders or content creators.
Some of them, sometimes, are conscientious consumers, looking to stretch their understanding or themselves and think hard about something that they are consuming.
But all of them, sometimes, are Marl.
There will always be a way to find more Marls to add to your user pool because Marl is the basest human need for a steady effortless dopamine drip. Just about everyone has some amount of time that they spend as Marl, so there is an almost limitless pool of Marl time to pull new users from.
I’m trying to find some way to say that this isn’t what you actually want, but I’m struggling. If you are making a product for everyone, Marl is the only persona that is in everyone, so you should probably target Marl.
However, if you are trying to build a product for a more constrained persona, you should probably be careful of using metrics that measure Marls. Because there are so many of them (even your users with other personas are sometimes Marls!) if you aren’t really careful, you will enshitify your product as you continue your A/B testing gradient descent into a user base of Marls, without anyone you were trying to get — even if you don’t loose your content creators and conscientious consumers, you have converted them into Marls, and lost what you were trying to achieve.
Enshitification is the conversion of your target user from any other kind of persona, to Marls.
[0] there are other personas, these were that the ones that immediately came to mind.
The culture of growth-at-all-costs has been condemned plenty in other threads here, I won't restate how/why. It's the problem that brings about, for example, "your A/B testing gradient descent" as the gravitational pull towards enshittification: the idea that robotically optimizing for greater growth/income/engagement is the right thing for a business to do. This ignores the huge range of ethical, profitable businesses that inhabit the space in the size/growth spectrum between "lifestyle boutique that pays the employees' bills and not much more" and "virally growing global superphenomenon". The presumption that those two extremes are the only inevitable outcomes for a business is poison. Unfortunately, sustainably inhabiting that middle ground requires a resistance to extreme greed on the part of a business's leadership/leadership culture--and again, the presence of some greed is just fine in non-hypergrowth businesses! There are loyal, lucrative, and sizable markets for carefully targeted products whose focus doesn't drift; "niche" is not a pejorative, and many niches are wide enough to be worth absolute shitloads of money! Unfortunately, continually resisting the extremity of greed is not something humans are good at.
There's also the fear of outcompetition: the idea that a Marl-serving competitor will grow so large that they extinguish your non-Marl-focused business. That's sometimes true, but not inevitably so--and enduring the risk of that "sometimes" is one of the grit-your-teeth-and-stick-to-your-ethics behaviors that distinguishes beloved minority members of a market from self-immolating enshittification chasers. Remember, Apple was a beloved minority player in personal computing, staying (and generally performing well) within a luxury/loyalist niche, for more than a decade. Enduring risk in the face of the fear of outcompetition does require bravery from leaders, but can yield benefits both in the form of profits/loyalty and--rarely--by converting Marls into non-Marls by showing an example of how much better things can be.
Short version is a cold take: the intersection of hypergrowth-legend-induced greed and outcompetition fear, applied across large groups of people with communication impedance, leads to crappy outcomes. As usual.
Case in point: Guitar tuner apps. Back in 2005 a good friend of mine had a startup that made the best-in-class guitar tuner app in the feature phone / flip phone era, before Android. Back then, they had to deal with all manner of constraints from vendors and the hardware of the day. They figured it out and shipped a featureful app that had a < 1MB binary and run at realtime speeds and had an intuitive UI. They sold it for something like a $6 one-time payment and were happy keeping their startup chugging along at $500k-$1M annual revenue. Fast forward to today, there are a zillion clones, typically weighing in at 40+MB, are "free with ads" and will nag you endlessly to sign up for $7, $10, even $15 per month. Their UIs suck, too. I have no idea what their revenue aspirations are, but this is totally driven by capturing consumer surplus from the orders-of-magnitude larger Android market. We all lose.
I do not pay for these apps; I would gladly have back that $6 app, but can't have it. The market is absolutely saturated with enshittified Android apps. Instead, I intentionally spend significantly more than that on dedicated tuners (like the excellent but somewhat fragile Snark clip-on ones).
While this is true, it stands to question: why build systems to encourage this? Shouldn't we be trying to do better?
If nothing else, how can one avoid falling into these traps?
If you try to appeal to someone’s better parts, then there is a limit to the amount of attention that they can apply to your product.
If you try to appeal to someone’s base need for dopamine, then the limit of attention is much higher.
until incentives change, people will continue to encourage this. The base instinct behaviors when one is stressed and tired and checked out are the most profitable, the most susceptible to adverts etc.
The way to encourage conciencousness, taking pride in creation etc is to see a few (the right amount of) others (who are seen by the user as peers, not unnatainable far off creators) doing the same. Maybe stretched/challenged a little - one or two at most people above their skill level, who appear approachable and humble.
It's the format of most true knowledge creation, be it classrooms, effective workplaces, sports programs, and others
Perhaps due long tail effects.
Tech (platforms) will always be advertising focused, because information systems scale with compute. marginal costs are so minor, that the limit becomes human attention.
Which is also why apple may be able to focus on user centric design better. They are product + tech.
Then again I can see other physical product firms delving into advertising - so its most likely corporate behavior/values.
Take Signal for example - early days they had a ton of success with a core group of users, in spite of a number of product warts. Ever since then, they've been making usability improvements to lower friction and appeal to more and more marginal users. Is that good or bad? Based on the hn threads I've seen, it seems like the jury is pretty mixed?
Some software is like that. Most isn't - but the enshittification culture is affecting it all the same.
I cannot prove it, but this is how I think it is. For the record, I think I am smart; however, because of the Iron Rule of Intelligence above, it is equally possible that I am only average.
A large percentage never used e-mail because e-mail addresses are too abstract. They only began using "social media" when they could address correspondence by photograph.
There are a billion people who can speak but not read and write, and billions who can read and write but not well enough to earn karma on Hacker News.
Though smart people are sometimes Marl, they are Marl less often, or in more sophisticated ways (like wasting time on Hacker News).
Karma on hackernews seems like a pretty arbitrary metric for intelligence
[0]https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-me...
I noticed these days that I spend more time during those "microboredoms" on my phone. I have 10 seconds? Check out reddit!
I've been trying to kick this habit, enjoy my surroundings more, or get lost in my head like I used to.
That is incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate goal, especially of people.
There are probably thousands of psychology grads that went to school, hoping to help people, that are, instead, designing dark patterns.
But they are probably making a lot more money than they would, helping people.
Evil pays cash.
98% of Spotify users never take any action other than “press play” on a radio station
2% take some kind of agency (create a playlist, like a song)
A vanishingly small amount create personal or public curated playlists
Yes, that very small amount may also listen passively sometimes, but the difference matters. Imagine if Spotify was just a radio station.
In my experience, making stuff that provides no intrinsic value like video games, only value of meaning, my games have only gotten better by catering to those impulses, which are really not that negative or stupid.
Really, who needs tutorials? Why make stuff that needs a tutorial? You can have complex games without tutorials and FTUEs. You don't need so much UI. It's not about scrolling so much as it is that so many apps obscure, rather than transmit, anything meaningful, through really obnoxious UI.
This argument is the Malcolm Gladwell 140 character tweet complaint not being enough to have a deep conversation. Easy for him to say, he's got his!
In meatspace: Nike, Adidas?
Does Nike want me to run and jump less, to participate in sports less, to work out less often? No, they run expensive ad campaigns encouraging me to make exercise a regular part of my life. To sell apparel, yes, but they aren't telling me to eat more cheeseburgers or drink more booze like other corporations.
A doctor that makes a bad diagnostic might suffer a malpractice lawsuit, or at the very least will be known for their incompetence. What happens with Nike for customers that bought their products but never get to do anything? Do they give any type of money back?
Like the duolingo redesign.
It's one of the reasons I generally seek out smaller companies for stuff like this. The biggest company in these sorts of categories gets there by being entirely unhelpful at its stated goals :(
Even the shoes. You'll get so much better service from a mid sized distributor that actually cares than mass market conglomerates. If you ask for advice it will be sincerely given rather than a premade statement calibrated to tap into base impulse version of you to increase your likelihood of spending the most