Listening to users is bad.

Well, he does run a dating site with millions of users and a staff of 1.5. He couldn't listen to users even if he wanted to. Additionally, the majority of his users are transients (online dating = if you are successful using the product you should never be back) and any long-term user community he builds up is almost pathological by definition (see earlier point).<p>Contrast this with your typical business: your best customers are the ones who join early and stay <i>forever</i>. Customers have an interest in the site/software continuing to evolve because they anticipate they will continue using it. Long-term customers are excellent sources of feedback because expertise with your problem domain is something to be sought after and carefully cultivated, rather than a black mark.

<i>Name me a single hugely successful internet company that is driven and built by user suggestions.</i><p>Flickr? Craigslist?<p><i>To create something game changing you have to be like apple, you just build interesting stuff and test it on users until you find something that works and then you release it to everyone.</i><p>How will we know if it works if you don't listen to the users? Quantitative information always benefits from qualitative feedback. It's really not enough to know <i>what's</i> successful if we can't tell how or why it's successful.<p>Also, the advice from almost anybody creating new and interesting products is to place yourself in the shoes of the user and build things that you yourself would find useful. Who should we be listening to then?

anecdote! w00t! <i>victory</i> <i>lap</i>

He's right. Software design is art, software development is a craft. You can't create art by consensus. You need creative people, and the creative people need to be in-sync with each other.<p>Movies don't have 10 directors.

Oh, and Google listen VERY closely to what their users say. I've been involved in several user studies there, and qualitative feedback is huge to them.

Why do people listen to this guy? He's got the English skills of a third-grader (though he does seem to be improving). He built a really bad site (even by online dating standards I'm told) and spammed it until the network effect took over. Yet a lot of people take his words as the gospel just because he gets a big AdSense check.

we'll he's onto something, but that doesn't mean you don't have to listen. The most active users are often several hundred percent more active than the average joe. In fact, there's no relevance of the "average" user because the the user pattern doesn't follow a bell curve, it's a power law. Check out <a href="http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shirky.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shi...</a> for some interesting math on many-to-many people networks.

There are no absolutes in this. Listening to users blindly while ignoring your quantitative metrics is bad. Ignoring user sentiment and relying solely on quantitative metrics is also bad. The art is in how you use the two types of data to inform your product decisions.

Mistitled.<p>Probably should have been, "To create something game changing, listening to users is bad."<p>For the other 99%, ignore your users at your own peril.

We user uservoice feedback tab and react to the top two to three suggestions that get up voted.<p>Like 500 people suggested and agreed about X. Definitely want to listen to that!

An important skill as a designer is to learn how to filter user feedback. This cannot be underestimated.<p><i>Then</i> pay attention to how they react to it.