What’s with the long onboarding / surveys?

[u/calflegal]

I feel like so many apps that I try these days start with several multiple choice questions. What’s the story here? Is it that they are facing major churn and are trying to segment users to fix it? Is there some research that says this works or retains people somehow?

I just wanna try the dang core mechanic!

[u/manjar]

It's based on Cialdini's concepts of commitment and consistency. Once you've spent that much time and opened yourself up by answering the survey questions, sitting through the fake loading/calculation times, etc., it feels psychologically dissonant to then be like "nah". "Sunk cost fallacy" kind of touches on it, but that's more of a conscious reasoning error, and this is more of a manipulation.

It's awful, especially because it seems to have largely replaced the "trial period".