Comment by throwaway173738
1 day ago
He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.
1 day ago
He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.
Yeah, but the guy writing the article seems to be bad at math and thinking.
Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes.
Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue.
His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage on his website.
Our b2b dashboard didn't support Safari for a while at all and it was entirely not an issue because everyone had a simple workaround to just use Chrome and the dashboard wasn't really the main product.
I think you're not being generous in your interpretation. How I read it he could be talking about the number of 9s a server's uptime is. If you pay for 1 9 you'll lose a lot of customers. Hell, true for even 3 9's. Look at all the complaints about GitHub this year. 5 9's is the standard and that's 99.999%!!
The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars.
The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues
He is saying the most inane things ever, I don't know why I need to be charitable here.
Kicking out 2% of your existing customers in a physical venue violates people's expectations, so it's going to get you disproportionate bad reviews and word-of-mouth.
Good thing that we've managed to keep everybody's expectations a hell of a lot lower for software quality then :)
Every nightclub in Berlin has a few Google reviews that say "we were black and they didn't let us in because they are racist." These are the reviews you will see on Google and it can dampen your excitement before you even leave your home.
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imagine not 2% of users not being able to use the site, but any given user not being able to use the site 2% of the time, and see if that changes the calculus for you.
Yeah, that changes it, in both positive and negative ways.
I can't tell if this is in support of the article or not though.
I mean that's my experience with a lot of modern software anyway. I have to reload or force close and reopen or please try again.
Except there was 0 analysis of the cost/benefit of supporting the end of the long tail, instead it was just economics-free shaming. Of course, you want to see who those 2% of users actually are. But nowhere in this article did I find any advice I'd actually want to use in a really business scenario.
Isn't the end of the article saying that their users are mainly in that tail? Seems to be exactly what you say: figuring out who those 2% are. In the OP's case, it's 30% of their users
98% of HN commenters reply to the interpretation of the article they feel most capable of arguing against, which is usually the least charitable one.
I mean the name was "98% isn't much" and the article made it sound like 98% isn't good enough