This seems to be common to suggestions for PB: ‘I’d use and really find PB useful if only it were executed better in this way’, which of course never happens.
How many times was a new feature implemented as a test of such a hypothesis?
PB.com seems like it would be a great place for things like A/B testing and other tactics in the “Lean startup” repertoire, but what actually seems to be the case is that the site isn’t under active development any more; no one is apparently trying to develop traffic or usage by improving the user experience there. (This isn’t to slight your own efforts or your obvious enthusiasm; merely my best current hypothesis.)
(I’m finding the comparison with cryonics ironically apt, as a fence-straddling LW user who’s not giving up on the entire project despite facing, as a non-US citizen, a battery of obstacles that I suspect also apply in the US, where they’re just less obvious and as a result people take it for granted that things will “just work”. Though it’s more likely that the comparison is entirely besides the point and just a red herring for the purposes of present discussion.)
If you really found tags all that valuable, you could start doing them inside comments.
How many times was a new feature implemented as a test of such a hypothesis?...PB.com seems like it would be a great place for things like A/B testing and other tactics in the “Lean startup” repertoire, but what actually seems to be the case is that the site isn’t under active development any more; no one is apparently trying to develop traffic or usage by improving the user experience there.
This is true. Trike is not doing anything but maintenance because their options are to work on PB, LW, or Khan Academy. When I asked for features to be added and argued that work on PB could be justified, Matthew Fallshaw gave me Analytics data to look at. At that point, LW had ~140,000 unique visitors in the previous 30 days. And Khan Academy had a total of 25.2 million video watches. And Trike had no shortage of valuable things it could do on LW or Khan—why should it work on PB? (Practice in Agile methodology? Better done on high-traffic sites where measurements are more trustworthy.)
The final crushing statistic: PB had just 4 visitors who visited more than 10 times that month. Including me.
Well, that’s Trike’s true rejection. Development of PB is worth a fair bit to me, the major user of it, so while I’m swayed by Trike’s argument—I agree that from a utilitarian point of view PB is a bad investment—it doesn’t affect my appraisal much. I just think those suggestions do not affect other people’s ‘true rejection’ of PB use.
How many times was a new feature implemented as a test of such a hypothesis?
PB.com seems like it would be a great place for things like A/B testing and other tactics in the “Lean startup” repertoire, but what actually seems to be the case is that the site isn’t under active development any more; no one is apparently trying to develop traffic or usage by improving the user experience there. (This isn’t to slight your own efforts or your obvious enthusiasm; merely my best current hypothesis.)
(I’m finding the comparison with cryonics ironically apt, as a fence-straddling LW user who’s not giving up on the entire project despite facing, as a non-US citizen, a battery of obstacles that I suspect also apply in the US, where they’re just less obvious and as a result people take it for granted that things will “just work”. Though it’s more likely that the comparison is entirely besides the point and just a red herring for the purposes of present discussion.)
I’ll try that, for a minimum of 30 predictions.
This is true. Trike is not doing anything but maintenance because their options are to work on PB, LW, or Khan Academy. When I asked for features to be added and argued that work on PB could be justified, Matthew Fallshaw gave me Analytics data to look at. At that point, LW had ~140,000 unique visitors in the previous 30 days. And Khan Academy had a total of 25.2 million video watches. And Trike had no shortage of valuable things it could do on LW or Khan—why should it work on PB? (Practice in Agile methodology? Better done on high-traffic sites where measurements are more trustworthy.)
The final crushing statistic: PB had just 4 visitors who visited more than 10 times that month. Including me.
Ah. So that is the “true rejection” of feature suggestions for PB, rather than “sounds nice but would not increase usage if implemented”?
Well, that’s Trike’s true rejection. Development of PB is worth a fair bit to me, the major user of it, so while I’m swayed by Trike’s argument—I agree that from a utilitarian point of view PB is a bad investment—it doesn’t affect my appraisal much. I just think those suggestions do not affect other people’s ‘true rejection’ of PB use.