Re:Grindr and OKCupid Sell Your Data, but Twitter’s MoPub Is...
by choward on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:20AM
(#22170151)
> They're answering two different questions: what do vocal customers say they want and what does the mean customer actually do?
The only question they're answering is "how do we maximize our profit?". If that happens to mean adding features users want that's just a nice side effect.
Re:Grindr and OKCupid Sell Your Data, but Twitter’s MoPub Is...
by maccard on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @06:15PM
(#22175225)
Claiming companies only care about profit is a bad faith argument. By that argument, the only reason the product exists in the first place is for profit. It's coming from the same place as claiming the only reason people work for companies is because they would starve to death otherwise. Distilling the argument to that point removes any opportunity to discuss the actual question being asked.
I work on a live service, and we use analytics to determine the impact of a crash. If someonr crsshes, often they go straight to reddit and conplain If you took everything at face value online, you would never correctly assess the impact of an issue, and you'd spend all your time fixing rounding errors of issues rather than improving the experience for a large number of people. If you ask people, they'll tell you it's the worst issue, even if it's never happened to them.
History is littered with beautiful products that only like five people actually wanted. I love the Chevy Volt, it fits my use case perfectly and is everything I would ask for in a hybrid right now, but it's sales numbers were objectively crap. It was basically a Chevy Cruze, but sold something like 1/20th the number of units over the same time period; I'm not surprised it was discontinued.
Analytics-driven design leads to unexciting products that are useful enough to most people, with only occasional forays outside the mean when a subteam manages to launch an "unnecessary" feature with neutral metrics (until another subteam discovered the feature can be turned down with neutral metrics). It's not surprising companies love that style of development.