Comment by hansvm

> clearly getting value from it

Or clearly thinking they might get value from it. I personally agree they're likely getting value, but it's pretty easy to dupe otherwise smart people when handing them something with cabilities far outside their realm of expertise, so I'd caution against using a large user base as anything more than a suggestive signal when determining whether people are "clearly getting value."

For an example from a different domain, consider a lot of generic market-timing stock investment advice. It's pretty easy to sell predictions where you're right a significant fraction of the time, but the usual tradeoff is that the magnitude of your errors is much greater than the magnitude of your successes. Users can be easily persuaded that your advice is worth it because of your high success rate, but it's not possible for them to actually get any net value from the product.

Even beginning data scientists get caught in that sort of trap in their first forays into the markets [0], and people always have a hard time computing net value from products with a high proportion of small upsides and a small proportion of huge downsides [1].

It's kind of like the various philosophical arguments about micro murders. 10 murders per year is huge in a town of 40k people, but nobody bats an eye at 10 extra pedestrian deaths per year from routinely driving 35+ in a 25. Interestingly, even if that level of speeding actually saves you the maximal amount of time (rarely the case for most commutes, where light cycles and whatnot drastically reduce the average speedup from "ordinary" reckless driving), you'll on average cause more minutes of lost life from the average number of deaths you'll cause than you'll save from the speeding. It's a net negative behavior for society as a whole, but almost nobody is inclined to even try to think about it that way, and the immediate benefit of seemingly saving a few minutes outweighs the small risk of catastrophic harm. Similarly with rolling through stop signs (both from the immediate danger, and from the habit you're developing that makes you less likely to be able to successfully stop in the instances you actually intend to).

[0] Not a source, those are a dime a dozen if you want to see a DS lose a lot of money, but XKCD is always enjoyable: https://xkcd.com/1570/

[1] Also not a source, just another great XKCD: https://xkcd.com/937/