<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>I suspect smartphones affect this in two ways.&lt;p&gt;One is that they put the Internet in &lt;i&gt;everybody&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; hands, literally.&lt;p&gt;The other, though, is that by virtue of the interface, both display (tiny) and input (shitty, to put it mildly), &lt;i&gt;the effective IQ of those participating, regardless of whatever it was initially&lt;/i&gt;, is severely penalised.&lt;p&gt;When I&amp;#x27;m typing at a keyboard, I can look at the words I&amp;#x27;m typing, or the source I&amp;#x27;m typing from, or just off into space as I&amp;#x27;m thinking my thoughts ... and be reasonably assured that what I &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; I&amp;#x27;m typing is what&amp;#x27;s actually appearing on screen.  And if not, editing to correct and fix issues is reasonably straightforward.  If necessary I&amp;#x27;ll switch to a Real Editor (that is, vim, Vale Bram Moolenaar) which is another quantum leap beyond in-browser textbox editing.&lt;p&gt;When I&amp;#x27;m typing at a virtual touchscreen keyboard, &lt;i&gt;I am staring at the keys themselves and trying to hit the the keys I&amp;#x27;m actually intending to hit&lt;/i&gt;.  I&amp;#x27;m not monitoring the output (which invariably has errors), I&amp;#x27;m not looking at source text, I&amp;#x27;m not thinking and composing my thoughts.&lt;p&gt;And then &lt;i&gt;editing&lt;/i&gt; what I&amp;#x27;ve written is &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; painful.&lt;p&gt;The resulting typos, losses of thought, and general incoherence &lt;i&gt;in my own writing&lt;/i&gt; absolutely &lt;i&gt;pains&lt;/i&gt; me to look at.  From what I can tell, other people seem to suffer similarly.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve given up using mobile devices for input (unless I can use a hardware keyboard, and even that rarely), and ... frankly it&amp;#x27;s a much improved situation.&lt;p&gt;Smartphones shallow the mind in many ways.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Jensson</author><text>Smartphones was the final nail, after that close to 100% of young adults are active online participants.&lt;p&gt;The good thing is that things aren&amp;#x27;t getting worse at least, all the idiots are already online.</text></item><item><author>lovich</author><text>Isn’t that just Eternal September? At least in the internet</text></item><item><author>User23</author><text>When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100.&lt;p&gt;Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about.&lt;p&gt;That’s also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to talk about many more cases would become apparent.</text></item><item><author>sneak</author><text>A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it wasn&amp;#x27;t just OKC&amp;#x27;s userbase, but it was the median of the whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated&amp;#x2F;more basic.&lt;p&gt;When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today.  Now that&amp;#x27;s just a median member of the general public, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.</text></item><item><author>lr4444lr</author><text>I met my wife on OkCupid.&lt;p&gt;The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that&amp;#x27;s a real shame.</text></item><item><author>wbobeirne</author><text>I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It&amp;#x27;s not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.&lt;p&gt;OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder&amp;#x27;s trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes &amp;#x2F; no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.&lt;p&gt;I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Tyranny of the Marginal User</title><url>https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>checkyoursudo</author><text>Check out the Flynn Effect. It is possible that all of us online idiots and the cohorts coming after are getting stupider every generation. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be so hasty with the &amp;quot;things aren&amp;#x27;t getting worse&amp;quot; part just yet. It could get much worse!</text><parent_chain><item><author>Jensson</author><text>Smartphones was the final nail, after that close to 100% of young adults are active online participants.&lt;p&gt;The good thing is that things aren&amp;#x27;t getting worse at least, all the idiots are already online.</text></item><item><author>lovich</author><text>Isn’t that just Eternal September? At least in the internet</text></item><item><author>User23</author><text>When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100.&lt;p&gt;Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about.&lt;p&gt;That’s also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to talk about many more cases would become apparent.</text></item><item><author>sneak</author><text>A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it wasn&amp;#x27;t just OKC&amp;#x27;s userbase, but it was the median of the whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated&amp;#x2F;more basic.&lt;p&gt;When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today.  Now that&amp;#x27;s just a median member of the general public, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.</text></item><item><author>lr4444lr</author><text>I met my wife on OkCupid.&lt;p&gt;The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that&amp;#x27;s a real shame.</text></item><item><author>wbobeirne</author><text>I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It&amp;#x27;s not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.&lt;p&gt;OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder&amp;#x27;s trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes &amp;#x2F; no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.&lt;p&gt;I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Tyranny of the Marginal User</title><url>https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user</url></story>