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A comment on Removing email registration improved retention. Parent comment

Re:Removing email registration improved retention by snowwrestler on Thursday September 10, 2020 @04:33PM (#24436297)
"More serious trialers" will be more likely to commit by entering an email; people who are not willing to enter an email are obviously not very serious trialers. It's just two different ways of saying the same thing.
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Re:Removing email registration improved retention by black_puppydog on Thursday September 10, 2020 @04:35PM (#24436315)
No, one implies a causality that the other doesn't.
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Re:Removing email registration improved retention by snowwrestler on Thursday September 10, 2020 @04:50PM (#24436444)
"More serious trialer" is not a fixed attribute or category that you can select for. A person fits this description based solely on their behavior; they become a more serious trialer by the act of putting in their email address. From that point the causality is the same.
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Re:Removing email registration improved retention by edmundsauto on Friday September 11, 2020 @04:10PM (#24446822)
Yes - my point was that the narrative of "why" isn't useful. A/B tests tell you what happened. They do not provide insight into why. Yet everyone has a story they tell to fill in the why, and these stories are harmful to making good decisions.
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Re:Removing email registration improved retention by edoceo on Thursday September 10, 2020 @04:49PM (#24436440)
It's not a causality, it's a pre-filter. So, of the people who passed filter A more are likely to pass filter B.

Today's XKCD was basically about this (in the Alt text)

https://m.xkcd.com/2357/

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Re:Removing email registration improved retention by dependenttypes on Thursday September 10, 2020 @10:06PM (#24438480)
desktop version: https://xkcd.com/2357/
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