[HN Gopher] But what if I want a faster horse?
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But what if I want a faster horse?
Author : saeedesmaili
Score : 1144 points
Date : 2025-04-11 11:39 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rakhim.exotext.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rakhim.exotext.com)
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| Welcome to what happens when everyone optimises for the same
| metrics, and looks at the same companies for inspiration as to
| what to do.
|
| At most of these corporations, over time they've learned to be
| product and financially oriented, because it's what the markets
| reward and it's easy to do, rather than customer orientated,
| because as long as they're not _unusably_ shit for the majority
| of their customers, then that 's good enough.
|
| It's an attempt to reverse backwards to the worst possible thing
| that works, because that gets you more ad revenue, rather than
| the best possible thing.
|
| I say this as someone who's walked away from strategy consult
| gigs for multinationals where the objective was literally to do
| things like this. Revenue and margin maximisation in ways the
| stock market and PE/VC investment rewards is frequently
| orthogonal to building the best thing for the customer.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Sorry, no money in horses, donkeys are all that we can offer you.
| What color would you like your donkey in?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Any color as long it is black (of course).
| arkh wrote:
| All the result of A/B tests. Everything will converge to give you
| an engaging experience for most people. The only not too bad
| student is reddit which lets you keep using their older UI if you
| want to. But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests
| UI optimized for engagement.
| bflesch wrote:
| With the onslaught of Javascript-parsing bots and crawlers, how
| useful are A/B testing results any more?
| wazoox wrote:
| "Engaging experience" being actually a weasel word for "sucking
| your brains out to make you watch ads and valueless nonsense".
| ballenf wrote:
| My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long
| tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not
| edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to
| these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling
| using Youtube and Netflix these days.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the
| fact that their catalogue is actually really small. They
| can't let you narrow your search at all because then they
| wouldn't have any content to give you.
|
| Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and
| it says "Content related to <thing that you actually
| wanted>".
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Meanwhile, a lot of this content is on places like Tubi.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding
| the fact that their catalogue is actually really small.
|
| I agree with you for Netflix.
|
| However, Youtube's catalog is almost certainly larger today
| than it was a decade ago. Even if you could somehow weight
| by quality, I think it would be hard to argue that
| Youtube's content catalog has gotten worse. _Maybe_ average
| quality per video has gone down, but there is so _much_
| content on Youtube nowadays, assuming you 're able to find
| it.
|
| I'm not sure about Spotify.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| This is absolutely true. Spotify employs "ghost artists" that
| create the most inoffensive, royalty-free background music
| possible, and then they prioritize them in their auto-
| generated playlists.
|
| https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-
| machin...
| mxfh wrote:
| Not just A/B test but all happening while cost optimizations
| happen.
|
| The key metric seems to be no longer how many users you can
| make sign up, but how can I keep an subscription running at
| lowest cost to serve possible.
|
| The UHD price is not worth it for a long term subscription, and
| the HD quality is subpar.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is an "old man shakes fist at clouds" opinion, but I
| think HD video is a huge waste of time/money for living room
| watching. Your eyes cannot effectively resolve that
| resolution at normal "couch" viewing distances for common TV
| sizes. This is kind of like how audio quality peaked at CDish
| quality. Anything better is largely inaudible.
| spicyusername wrote:
| I think it's very likely this kind of optimization is giving
| people want they "will" want, instead of what they "do" want.
|
| If you ask a heroine user if they want to use, I suspect most
| will say no.
|
| But if you A/B test their behavior and build a product based on
| what they actually do, you're going to start selling more
| heroin and encourage more heroin use.
|
| To everyone's detriment.
| nyclounge wrote:
| >But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI
| optimized for engagement
|
| That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined
| web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do
| on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.
|
| Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't
| care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps
| developer makes better software.
|
| How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!
| dwedge wrote:
| I fear old reddit is going to be killed off this year. They're
| getting rid of the red envelope for messages/replies, they've
| pushed the notification and chat with red icons into old reddit
| and more and more content seems to "accidentally" link to new
| reddit.
|
| They left it alone for years but now they're converging them,
| looks like it's only a matter of time
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| Going back to horses sounds so nice.
| thijson wrote:
| I see people riding them around the hood here in Philly.
| There's also pop up stables here and there.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Funny I use the recommmender to listen to music in Plex a lot
| these days.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said
| faster horses."
|
| This line is especially silly when making B2B products,
| especially very expensive enterprise ones. It's often used to
| justify building "great ideas" from some exec or overzealous
| PM/engineer over concrete asks from customers. Like you really
| think that a team of 20 experienced people paying >$1M to help
| run their multi-billion dollar business, both have no idea what
| they actually want and don't understand the capabilities of new
| technologies in the market? Totally condescending.
| hobs wrote:
| Have you ... done enterprise sales? The idea that a group of
| people working for a multi-billion dollar business having no
| idea what they want and no understanding of capabilities of new
| technologies is ... standard?
|
| I have seen it personally ... dozens? of times? Its the reasons
| startups can even succeed at all given the enormous momentum
| and cash reserves of these bigger companies - their goals,
| management, approach - it all becomes more diffuse and poorly
| executed.
| 1dom wrote:
| Strong agree.
|
| I've also seen it a lot: sales person at a small tech startup
| convinces business person in large tech company to ignore
| their own engineers. I suspect most engineers at large firms
| have been on one side of this experience at somepoint, and
| most engineers at small but successful tech startups have
| been on the other side (lead engineer to sales: "You told
| them our our product could do _what?!_ That's fine. I never
| wanted my PTO anyway...:(")
| hobs wrote:
| Hell, small in this context can be Snowflake or Databricks,
| this is the concept of Shadow IT - a slick sales call can
| convince and move things in a business that an army of
| engineers will struggle to convince their bosses of.
|
| External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with
| that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if
| you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes,
| everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project
| is a mess)
|
| External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with
| that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if
| you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes,
| everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project
| is a mess)
|
| You get the idea.
| 1dom wrote:
| Daily I carry the shame of having been an engineer on
| both sides. I went from big enterprise to small start up.
| It's horrible speaking to an engineer at a new client,
| knowing they can probably do the work you're about to
| have to do, but better, faster, quicker and cheaper than
| you. Ultimately we're all just there for "the business"
| so we just have to get on with it.
|
| Knowing you've built the solution perfectly to the spec,
| whilst also knowing that the spec wasn't reviewed or
| endorsed by any technical people so the client's entire
| engineering team thinks you're incompetent, for just
| doing what their colleagues asked you to do...
| clan wrote:
| Been there. Done that.
|
| But it doesn't even stop there. It goes down to the SMB
| market as well. Granted not the S but in Medium and larger
| places.
|
| I have been dragged into multiple sales calls with the agenda
| "we need an app".
|
| Full stop.
|
| Fun day to be the "Solution Architect" on call.
| bluGill wrote:
| What I don't like about the line is it only applies when there
| is a non-horse option. No amount of effort in 1600 would have
| resulted in either a bicycle or an automobile - there were too
| many needed things not available. In 1600 most people wouldn't
| have wanted a faster horse - sure they knew what a horse was
| but they couldn't afford to feed it and so they were not
| interested - a car is cheaper than a horse for nearly all uses.
| furyg3 wrote:
| The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is
| terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making
| money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which
| mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend
| doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for
| the platform as a place to find jobs or employees.
|
| Netflix I understand much less. They make money from
| subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on
| the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy
| watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-
| scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than
| imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and
| want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for
| something to watch means less time streaming?
|
| I don't get it.
| kilian wrote:
| This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video
| costs _a lot more money_ than streaming some JSON to populate a
| UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing
| a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.
| nottorp wrote:
| But they play those previews automatically... and that's
| still bandwidth used.
| tonightstoast wrote:
| And tragically most users prefer the auto playing previews.
| Theprimeagean has a YouTube video about how he tried to a/b
| test it before release thinking "no way that's what users
| would prefer" and was unfortunately wrong.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Well, there is a setting to turn it off.
| zerd wrote:
| My problem with turning it of is that if you _do_ want to
| watch the preview it's very cumbersome. Clicking on it
| goes to the movie/episode. So to get to the preview you
| have to go to the list of Episodes, scroll down (and try
| not to get spoiled) to trailers then play it. So I have
| one profile with it on and one with it off, depending on
| if I'm browsing or not.
| nottorp wrote:
| Who's that and do they work for Netflix?
|
| Tbh I don't mind the previews as long as they don't make
| the UI lag*. I was just pointing out that they don't save
| bandwidth.
|
| * I'm also aware that they're blatant lies and have
| little connection with what's in the actual movie.
| tonightstoast wrote:
| 100%. Wasn't trying to contradict your statement - just
| giving some additional context.
|
| And he is a semi popular tech YouTuber that has risen to
| popularity in the last couple of years. I think he also
| streams on twitch but I'm not on that site so I can't
| say. But he worked for Netflix for about 10 years.
| kilian wrote:
| A short, compressed, small video that's edge-cached beats
| always out a 4K stream, so it even works as a tactic to
| keep you in that overview longer.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| At this stage the cost is probably more in licensing fees and
| production costs than data streaming though.
| chii wrote:
| > More time spent looking for something to watch means less
| time viewing?
|
| or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie
| snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like
| a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to
| watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up
| getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to
| encounter a perfect series to watch.
| demaga wrote:
| But this doesn't explain what the incentive for Netflix is if
| you pay for subscription regardless.
| munificent wrote:
| It's about two things:
|
| 1. Cutting costs on the other side.
|
| Studios don't want to license content to Netflix now that
| they are direct competitors, so Netflix has fewer and fewer
| movies and shows that they didn't produce themselves. And
| they want to spend as little as possible on producing their
| own content.
|
| That way they make as much profit from the subscriptions as
| they can.
|
| 2. Reducing the value of competitors.
|
| They are competing for _user time_. They want you to spend
| as many minutes as possible on Netflix because any minute
| not spent their is a minute you might be spending on Hulu
| or Apple TV. At the end of the month when you decide that
| you can 't afford that many streaming services and decide
| to cut one, you'll pick based on which one you use the
| most. They don't want that to be the other guy.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Netflix is winning, see net income trends:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...
|
| Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing
| to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon.
| And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it
| is always easier to pontificate than execute.
|
| I don't buy Netflix solely because they don't integrate with
| the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.
|
| Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and
| Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions.
| If you recall, "reality" TV shows were taking over in the
| 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering
| of quality).
| krige wrote:
| Netflix was changing a lot to drain more money out of users
| recently, which is why income rose recently. What I'd like to
| see is active / recurring users instead.
| soco wrote:
| It's important to look at the competition as well for this.
| I think we can all agree that streaming is here to stay.
| But how are the others faring here? In a more and more
| fragmented landscape, Netflix still has the fattest
| offering. Also the quality of the service (aka, search,
| languages offered, subtitles, trailers, stream quality, own
| productions...) is way better than say Prime or Disney+. So
| why shouldn't they be leading the stats? Even if you think
| they suck, compared to the rest of the pack they suck the
| least.
| hedora wrote:
| #2 is youtube. #3 (BitTorrent) saw 40% 6-month growth in
| 2024 (the same year Netflix had 60% YoY growth):
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-traffic-
| increases-40-in-...
| teeray wrote:
| > Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really
| can't really explain
|
| Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends
| upon it, investors have been trained that "engagement" is
| inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase
| engagement, stonk price go up.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The most valuable businesses have desirable net income
| trends, not "engagement".
| kaoD wrote:
| In the ad-tention economy, engagement means more eyes on
| your ads. Advertisers desire engagement which is therefore
| a proxy for future net income.
|
| Then investors transposed that proxy to non ad-tention
| businesses, driving up engagement-rich stocks in a self-
| fulfilling prophecy.
| teeray wrote:
| Also, engagement is a measure of how rich the oil field
| is for enshittifying the platform to extract ad dollars.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I guess my thing with LinkedIn is that there's just no reason
| to use the feed. It's still a place to connect with people I've
| worked with and keep up with what they've been doing. It's
| incredibly useful for that. I really don't find the feed to be
| either a boon or a hindrance in that use case. I know it's
| there, I know it annoys some people, but it's just irrelevant
| to me.
| petesergeant wrote:
| For some reason I kept opening it up and the feed would
| irritate me. This has fixed it:
| www.linkedin.com##main[aria-label="Main Feed"] .scaffold-
| finite-scroll__content
| marc_abonce wrote:
| The LinkedIn feed would actually be very useful if it only
| showed my contact's milestones such as job updates, their own
| product/service launches and events like conferences or
| conventions that involve them.
|
| Of course, such a feed would take me 2 minutes per week to
| read through so that wouldn't be good for the business.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| You've got it backwards, Netflix doesn't want people to just
| doom-scroll, the users want to doom-scroll.
|
| Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward
| centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably
| feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I
| know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their
| phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > the users want to doom-scroll.
|
| That's depends on your definition of "want". They might not
| want to on, but their monkey brain does.
| ikanreed wrote:
| I can't agree.
|
| Because my netflix subscription is cancelled specifically
| because the "Finding something I want to watch drains my
| energy" phenomenon. Gradually over the course of like a year
| I got more and more frustrated with being suggested things,
| and not having a good way to find things.
| metabagel wrote:
| I wish Netflix and other streaming services had more
| information about a movie or show for me to base my decision
| on. I would like more text. Maybe, some reviewer snippets.
| The full major cast members, not just the top names. The
| director should be prominently displayed. Let me easily see
| what else that director has done, even if it's not on that
| streaming channel.
|
| Apple TV is the worst, because it dumps you right into the
| program, and you have to back out in order to get more
| information.
|
| They all just want me to trust them that I'll love it. I end
| up having to pull up reviews on my phone.
| pharrington wrote:
| As is always the case, they are high on their own supply.
| Netflix, and a ton of other companies, are terminally ill
| gambling addicts.
| gnatolf wrote:
| Mostly it's to cover up that the catalogue isn't as great
| anymore, isn't it? Since almost every big label took back the
| rights and started their own streaming service, Netflix simply
| doesn't have as much content (that anyone would want to see)
| anymore.
|
| I quit all those platforms recently and I'm not missing the
| frustration of having to 'switch channels' through their
| incomprehensible categories and views anymore.
| neutronicus wrote:
| I assume it's about papering over the gaps in their content
| library.
|
| You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and
| watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office.
| They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix
| actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic
| for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content
| libraries that you hop between month-to-month.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Yep. If they can't get you to watch unknown, b/c grade
| content - you will quickly exhaust everything on the top
| shelf and log off.
| neutronicus wrote:
| And even if that isn't the case right at this moment, they
| have to be prepared for rights-holders to fuck with them
| and they have to be prepared to cut production costs (or
| for a rival to spend big on production in a way they don't
| think they can match).
|
| So regardless of the state of their content library it's
| necessary future-proofing.
| mailund wrote:
| I think you're right!
|
| A short while ago, I noticed I only used Netflix to watch 2
| classic comfort shows, and I started to doubt if it was worth
| a 2-classic-comfort-shows-as-a-service subscription. I tried
| looking through the catalog to see what else I was paying for
| and ended up cancelling my subscription.
|
| Netflix does an amazing job in giving the impression that
| they have an endless library of top quality content, but in
| reality, it seems like it's only a handful good shows and
| some filler, but presented in a way that makes it look like
| there's way more than it actually is.
| tsm wrote:
| My wife and I realized we were only really using Netflix to
| watch Seinfeld. I got a complete set of DVDs for less money
| than a month of Netflix and canceled my subscription
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Careful, or the IP owners of Seinfeld will decide it's
| stealing to not pay a monthly subscription to keep
| watching Seinfeld every month.
| patapong wrote:
| I think Netflix faces the problem that measuring the causality
| between a user watching specific content and choosing to stay
| subscribed is super hard. Therefore, they focus on a metric
| that is easy to measure, namely time spent in the app. This is
| likely not the metric they should be optimizing for, but since
| they _can_ measure it, it becomes the target anyway.
| duped wrote:
| > Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really
| can't really explain
|
| Entertainment is a zero-sum market. More time spent doom
| scrolling means less time spent on another service, which
| probably reduces their churn (also, ads)
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Think of it this way, the less time they spend actually
| WATCHING content, the longer they will pay their monthly
| service because they have this massive "watch list" that they
| never actually get through. They just keep paying month after
| month never getting through a backlog that they inspire to
| watch. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me. If you
| can never feel satisfied, you will pay over and over again
| chasing that satisfaction of watching "everything."
|
| Many people will pay Netflix for years hardly watching content
| for months just because the convenience factor of not having to
| subscribe/unsubscribe when they know a new season of X will be
| out in the next year. It's wild to me, but people are lazy. So
| again, the more you keep them from actually watching the
| content and realizing they are "done", the longer they likely
| just keep their subscription active. Get them to add as much
| potential content they want to watch to a never ending backlog
| watch list.
| raincole wrote:
| > Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really
| can't really explain
|
| They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old
| IP owners).
|
| They don't want the customers to search for a specific show.
| They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them.
| This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators
| - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how
| good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing
| outside Netflix.
| codexb wrote:
| Netflix's primary goal used to be to _attract_ new subscribers.
| Now it 's a more about maintaining subscribers and finding new
| ways to monetize the existing subscriber base. That's why
| you're seeing things like "sharing" subscriptions, and
| advertising, and premium plans.
| notatoad wrote:
| i think people's view of netflix's business model is heavliy
| biased by what they _want_ netflix to be.
|
| i get it, i hate what they've become too. i'd like to believe
| there's a world where paying for content is a better model than
| selling ads. but the reality is that every time netflix makes a
| decision that the internet gets angry about, their balance
| sheet looks better.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about the situation is, now that when Tik-tok-
| ification has grown big enough, it (no-choice interfaces,
| "enshitification", etc) becomes the only paradigm UI designers,
| managers and investors understand. Moreover, it's interface
| that essentially completely controls the user - all the choices
| they have are essentially fake and control always appeals to
| managers and control may not immediately make money but it can
| make money long term so it can be justified.
|
| You can see how Sonos enshitified their interface and even with
| a user rebellion wouldn't back down, just as an example.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| For any given _thing_ or _category of thing_ , a tiny minority of
| the human population will be enthusiasts of that _thing_ , but
| those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining
| everyone else's taste for that _thing_. For example, very few
| people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but
| Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as
| desirable cars, because the people who _are_ into cars like those
| marques.
|
| If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix
| or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user
| analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to
| inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate
| its results over all your users, and won't pick out the
| enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about
| your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by
| people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever
| they're given.
|
| Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape
| Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla
| Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google
| Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these
| changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser
| they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts
| recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-
| inclined friends and family.
|
| So if you develop your product by following your analytics,
| you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content
| into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's
| what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to
| say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a
| connoisseur of _something_ , it's just that for any given
| individual, that _something_ probably isn 't _your_ product.) But
| who knows - maybe that really _is_ the most profitable way to run
| a tech business.
| soco wrote:
| Then, how could a business identify its (or market's) trend-
| setters, enthusiasts, or whatever we call them, which will push
| towards something new? I see this as essential for either
| making the business better, shinier, or to avoid losing users.
| _kush wrote:
| It has to be built by those enthusiasts
| ozim wrote:
| That's leg work you have to do on your own.
|
| Just like football scouts need to actually visit some niche
| teams and watch not that interesting stuff to find talent
| before it is too late.
|
| With tech it might be easier because you might create niche
| groups so those people come to you.
|
| Just like PG created HN. Nowadays HN is too mainstream so all
| ideas here are seem already popular so it is like going to
| scout high school t am that won local championship everyone
| already knows which players are lined for pro contracts.
| another-dave wrote:
| By risk taking on good ideas rather than always trying to
| pivot your way from the status quo.
|
| Product-Market fit is great if you're developing a SaaS
| business but it's not necessarily going to give you new
| inventions -- something new is speaking to a potential gap in
| the market that doesn't currently exist.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| By participating in the community. Content moderation on HN
| is so much better than on Facebook because dang is one of us,
| whereas on Facebook, it's a team of people in a developing
| country, in a different cultural context. Netflix needs to be
| run by film enthusiasts, not UX engineers trying to disguise
| the fact that all the good IP has been pulled back to the
| streaming platforms of the original producers. Spotify needs
| to be run by music enthusiasts, not people pushing covers of
| pop songs to avoid paying royalties to the original artists.
| And so on.
|
| Indie Hackers is full of people trying to flog their shit AI-
| powered marketing SaaS, because they've never done anything
| other than software engineering, so they don't know any good
| problems to solve. There are uncountably many good problems
| out there, each with thousands of people who would pay you
| money to solve them, but those people don't know their
| problems can be solved by a computer, so you have to go out
| into the world to find them yourself.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| The Hustler and the Nerd are the co-founding duo. Domain
| expertise is an obvious plus, but a "non-technical" Domain
| Expert is a third wheel.
| bsoles wrote:
| > ... because they've never done anything other than
| software engineering, so they don't know any good problems
| to solve.
|
| That is indeed a big problem with software
| engineering/engineers today. No other expertise other than
| being a framework monkey.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Teams should identify their drivers of key metrics and do
| power user analysis based on this. A halfway decent analytics
| team should be thinking this way.
|
| Ultimately, analytics are just a view into the business. This
| thread is complaining about doctors not using microscopes
| when diagnosing system issues - sometimes a narrow slice is
| important, sometimes you need to zoom out. If you focus on
| your "early adopters" or power users exclusively, without
| understanding how they affect the business, then you are at
| risk of building things that most of your user base doesn't
| want.
|
| Power User Analysis: https://andrewchen.com/power-user-curve/
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches
|
| For street usage, I think those cars are popular because
| they're beautiful more than because they're fast (or because
| enthusiasts like them).
|
| My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to
| get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel
| stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche
| coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful to
| many, even those who can't tell the three marques apart or even
| unaided recall the name Lamborghini.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I would say they're popular because they are expensive. It's
| bragging rights, conspicuous consumption...
| thfuran wrote:
| If they were cheap, I might have one. As is, I never will.
| world2vec wrote:
| But people desire them as a conspicuous symbol because some
| people decades ago were really into fast cars and picked
| those brands as the best of the best. It was the true
| enthusiasts that promoted them and then other people copied
| them because they wanted to be in the same "gang" and over
| time that evolved into a status symbol, far removed from
| the original one. But it did start with a small group of
| true fans.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And professional racing.
| shakna wrote:
| If it was just expense, then Koenigsegg would be a
| household name. Most enthusiasts will know them, but the
| average person won't. There's something more that leads
| culture in such a way to uphold a particular brand.
| bbor wrote:
| Really great, succinct way to make this point. Here's an
| NGRAM of mentions of these brands in the English Fiction
| corpus, 1860-2025 -- Ferrari dominates until ~1970, when
| Porsche gains dominance. Obviously, Koenigsegg is barely
| on the graph at all.
|
| P.S. I think it's telling that Porsche wasn't mentioned
| almost at all in English until the mid 1950s, given their
| role in the war!
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ferrari%2CL
| amb...
| shmeeed wrote:
| I'm not sure what it's supposed to be telling about, but
| it's probably not about their involvement in the war,
| which was hardly out of line for any german engineering
| company at the time. Ferdinand Porsche was arrested for
| war crimes, but never tried (which IS telling in its own
| way). Rather, the NGRAM just traces the rise of the
| company as it's known today:
|
| Up until about 1948, Porsche was a pure development
| contractor mostly for the government. They only started
| manufacturing cars under their own brand in the early 50s
| (a few 356 built basically in a shed notwithstanding)
| after Ferry Porsche had taken over, and with the
| introduction of the 911 began a meteoric rise as a volume
| manufacturer for international markets.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Don't they make like 5 of those, and for absurdly high
| prices?
|
| Ferraris, Porsches and similar are somewhat attainable,
| which, I think, helps with their being symbols, since
| most people have already actually seen them and know
| they're real. A Koenigsegg is as good as a story. Hell, I
| live in Paris and I've never actually seen one. Porches
| and Ferraris? They're seemingly everywhere.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Ferrari and Lamborghini predate Koenigsegg by a
| generation so my guess is it's about the history.
| teqsun wrote:
| I guess the term would be "conspicuous consumption".
|
| As to why Koenigsegg doesn't get the rep, I'll take the
| outside opinion that it's because their name is too
| inaccessible whereas "Bugatti" slips easily into rap
| lyrics.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Indeed, Andrew Tate's tagline when someone criticised him
| was "I drive a Bugatti and you don't".
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Not for the enthusiasts. My neighbor has a $120k Porsche
| and a $20k Porsche and appears to adore them both
| nradov wrote:
| It's not just that they're expensive markers of conspicuous
| consumption, it's about _exclusivity_. Exotic car
| manufacturers like Ferrari intentionally make fewer cars
| than the market demands. Only "special" customers are even
| allowed to buy them regardless of price. Ownership,
| especially of the higher end models, marks a consumer as a
| member of a high-status exclusive club. (I am not claiming
| that this is rational or sensible, but it is an effective
| marketing strategy for luxury goods.)
| amrocha wrote:
| That doesn't explain why japanese manufacturers who used to
| make sports cars in the 90s don't anymore.
|
| It's a mixture of enthusiasm and conspicuous consumption.
| Most enthusiasts love 90s japanese cars, but the average
| person sees an old mazda and recoils.
|
| But put an old ferrari in front of anyone and they have a
| completely different reaction.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ
| derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW.
| Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're
| bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one
| out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name.
|
| There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing
| against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they
| stopped making sports cars.
| lloeki wrote:
| > There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing
| against Lamborghinis and McLarens
|
| Well there was the NSX
| amrocha wrote:
| Key word was, because nobody wants to spend 200K on a
| Honda no matter how many F1 drivers swear by it.
| kod wrote:
| I get where you're coming from, but describing the
| fastest production FWD car as the "closest thing" is
| really funny
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Yeah I mean dedicated sports car models, rather than
| sportified versions of existing models
| cestith wrote:
| It's no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that
| was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It's also
| basically a BRZ. It's a little sad that's no longer an
| option.
|
| The WRX has a turbocharged Boxer engine, manual gearbox
| or optional CVT, and all-wheel drive. It's a sedan, but
| it does a 13.9 second quarter mile stock off the showroom
| floor. That's not bad.
| tristor wrote:
| > It's no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that
| was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It's also
| basically a BRZ. It's a little sad that's no longer an
| option.
|
| The FRS/BRZ/GR86 are identical cars mechanically, Toyota
| owns Scion, so the FRS was replaced by the GT86 and later
| GR86 within the Toyota line-up when Toyota killed off the
| Scion brand in the US, and the FRS never existed outside
| the North American market, because Scion was a North
| American exclusive brand.
|
| The BRZ/GR86 has a Subaru Boxer engine, with Toyota D4S
| Port+Direct Injection, using a Toyota ECU/ECM,
| Toyota/Aisin transmission, Toyota TCU/TCM, and Toyota
| infotainment (in some generations), but with a mostly
| Subaru designed chassis and nearly entirely Subaru
| suspension and post-transmission driveline, but the
| wheels and tires off a Prius (in the first generation),
| and a handful of things that were only created to be
| jointly used by the BRZ/GR86. Except no matter which part
| you pick on the car, it'll be marked "Subaru", including
| ironically the Toyota badge on the front of the GT86.
|
| It's better to think of them as what they are, which is
| different branding for the same vehicle, that was jointly
| developed and manufactured.
| amrocha wrote:
| Right, they still exist, but now they're budget sports
| cars, which isn't really what I was talking about. A GR86
| is cheaper than most SUVs. A miata is even cheaper. The
| civic type r is neat, but that's not a sports car. That's
| a performance model of a family car.
|
| The comment I was replying to said that people buy
| porsches because they're beautiful.
|
| That's not it, because the NSX is beautiful, the LFA is
| beautiful, the FD is beautiful, but nobody wants to spend
| 200K on a Toyota.
|
| Cars are a signifier, and the viewer needs to understand
| that sign. Luxury car makers bank on that. Put an LFA and
| a Cayman next to each other and 9/10 people would think
| the Cayman is worth more.
|
| The original commenters idea works for content, because
| content is not a signifier of money. Rich people can't
| have more expensive media taste than you, so the
| enthusiasts set the pace.
|
| But they can have a more expensive car, so no matter how
| awful a car a lamborghini is, nobody envies the Integra
| type R next to it.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| It's funny, really.
|
| My girlfriend thinks my cheap modern shitbox is more
| expensive than my old 90's 4x4 truck.
| rasz wrote:
| Are you saying nobody will recognize old NSX as something
| special? R34?
| amrocha wrote:
| An NSX stands out, but anyone who doesn't know what it is
| would just think it's a ferrari.
|
| GTRs absolutely do not stand out. They look like your
| your average sedan.
| Zak wrote:
| Stylish mid-engine cars like the NSX look exotic because
| they remind people of Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
|
| The average person who doesn't know much about cars will
| think a second generation MR2 is more exotic than it is.
| Toyota probably wouldn't make their top three brand
| guesses. The R34 GT-R will thrill every car enthusiast
| (and probably everyone who had a Playstation around the
| turn of the millennium), but most people won't give it a
| second look.
| nradov wrote:
| Back in the 90s a Japanese sports car actually offered a
| noticeable performance advantage relative to regular
| passenger cars. The regular passenger cars generally had
| weak engines, terrible suspensions, slow shifting automatic
| transmissions, and little in the way of driver assistance
| features. Now any generic modern crossover SUV can be
| driven well beyond the legal speed limit on any public road
| without really approaching the vehicle's limits, so except
| for hard core enthusiasts who intend on tracking their cars
| there's just not much advantage to buying a sports car any
| more.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Didn't the US put in a trade agreement that crushed the
| Japanese economy by overvaluing its currency?
| jt-hill wrote:
| > No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty
|
| Except for the Toyota nerds who will want to come talk to you
| about the LFA. Ask me how I know!
| lmz wrote:
| Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly
| soulless"?
| jt-hill wrote:
| Tbf I don't think the parent meant all Lexuses (Lexes?
| Lexi?) are soulless, just theirs. But the brand has its
| fans.
| tristor wrote:
| > Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly
| soulless"?
|
| When it came out the LFA was widely lampooned by the car
| media for being too "soft", not fast enough, and
| generally lacking spirit and individuality. It's not
| pretty much recognized in hindsight that it's one of the
| single greatest cars ever made, and everybody who
| regularly buys/drives supercars regrets not buying one
| when they were still being produced.
|
| Weirdly, many people realized this when it was new, that
| the LFA was actually excellent, but like anything else
| cars go through different hype cycles where media
| organizations and insiders focus on different parameters
| for what they think makes something good, and the LFA
| came out during a hype cycle that was focused on raw
| speed, as it was released around the time that
| "hypercars" were gaining steam as a concept.
|
| Personally, having driven an LFA one time, I quite
| literally have regular dreams about the memory, and I
| wish that I owned one. It's on my bucket list.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| But a large portion of their beauty is reflective. The
| Countach was seen as a very ugly car by many when it was
| released. But it was lust-worthy for its performance. That
| lust-worthiness over time transformed the car's image, and
| now it's seen as iconic.
| HPsquared wrote:
| A lot of Veblen goods are kinda "unpleasant but striking".
| I mean just look at recent BMW design.
| butlike wrote:
| I agree, and I feel the beauty oftentimes comes from the
| intrinsic love evident in the machine. Looking at a Ferrari
| it's evident Enzo had a passion for autos. This can also
| cross boundaries (eating at fine dining restaurants, fine art
| gallery layouts, etc.) and is probably discernible in MOST
| things people put out.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Honest question: are you not a "car guy/girl"? Lexus people
| absolutely love Lexuses. I recently sold mine (needed
| something larger after having another kid) and I miss it
| every day.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I am ~98th percentile car guy. I own two classic Mustangs,
| one stock, one restomodded by me, and have had a variety of
| interesting daily drivers over the decades, including
| dailying an 80s Alfa Spider year-round including 4 winters
| in Boston.
|
| It's comfortable, safe, and dead-nuts reliable, but no one
| gives a shit about or even notices my hybrid RX450h.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| hahahaha, yeah the RX450h is soulless
|
| You're more of a car guy than me
| Marsymars wrote:
| Well, some people. My friend with a Lexus just has a base
| model RX 350 because she couldn't find a RAV4 in stock and
| her buying criteria were basically "crossover built by
| Toyota".
| neogodless wrote:
| It always surprises me how quickly people forget nuance.
|
| OK so we're discussing niche vs mainstream, or "what most
| people want" vs "what a few want".
|
| The few cars you listed are not _popular_ in the ownership
| sense, but they are well-known and aspirational.
|
| People can buy them to show off status / money / exclusivity,
| or perhaps beauty. Speed is table stakes, of course. They
| have to objectively be better than most _cars_ but also
| special. They can be strikingly beautiful or strikingly
| hideous but they must not be ordinary.
|
| If you watch / read reviews of those cars, then it tends to
| be from the enthusiast driver point of view. Is it good at
| racing, cornering, reading the driver's intentions and
| reacting instantly and accurately? But then more often than
| not, those that can afford them do not buy them to use them
| for that purpose (or at least not frequently.) Many are
| treated a bit like investments or merely items in a
| collection.
|
| What a long-winded way to get back to the original point of
| faster horses and enshittification of software, eh?
|
| Netflix and Spotify might as well be a Toyota Corolla or
| Prius. I lost my train of thought. I think I just wanted to
| pontificate about exotic cars for a while.
|
| (I drive a Polestar 2. It looks like a Volvo, is heavy as a
| dump truck, but damn is it fast as hell.)
| another-dave wrote:
| which is also what I feel about the Spotify algorthim at times
| -- no matter what I'm listening to, it invariably brings me
| back to what it thinks are my "old reliables" once it gets onto
| recommending stuff.
|
| I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background,
| which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the
| "correct choice", but it's a million miles away from, say,
| listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but
| they're cherry-picking what to play next.
| fourneau wrote:
| To this point, I've been using Qobuz as an alternative and
| it's recommendation engine is laughably bad, but the
| experience is somehow better. I'll get the most random songs
| pop up in the list, and sometimes it's a very pleasant
| surprise.
|
| In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine
| is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.
| bee_rider wrote:
| FWIW good old Pandora now has options to influence their
| how their stations explore (so, you can for example pick
| "discovery" to have it try and find similar artists it
| hasn't shown you as often).
| nthingtohide wrote:
| > if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds
| the algorithm that it made the "correct choice"
|
| I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I
| slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my
| recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part
| of algorithm.
| fer wrote:
| I have something worse. One morally questionable video
| popped in my Instagram that showed some disabled person
| doing something outrageously stupid capitalising on their
| disability for engagement.
|
| I didn't like it, I didn't share it, I didn't do any other
| thing than just stare at it in shock.
|
| Big mistake.
|
| For over 6 months that became +50% of my feed. Incredible
| and depressing amount of people monetising the disability
| of their friends, siblings, children, or their own. Really
| effed up content that makes you stop and say wtf out loud.
| But they also earn a living. But they should do it in a
| honorable manner. But maybe they don't have the chance. So
| I flag as not interested but that just swaps those videos
| with new BRAND NEW "content creators" of this kind that I
| hadn't yet seen. Wow thanks Instagram.
|
| At some point they changed something in the algorithm and
| now those videos rarely pop anymore, and I'm wary and
| scroll away fast.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I
| slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my
| recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the
| part of algorithm.
|
| None of the music services seem to understand that just
| because you like multiple genres, that doesn't mean that
| you want it to randomly jump around between them without
| any consideration for how they flow together.
| int_19h wrote:
| That's something I'd actually pay good money for - a
| streaming music service with a library as extensive as
| the major contenders (or better yet let me bring my
| own!), which learns my preferences not in isolation, but
| tracking how they affect each other and environment -
| this song is normally followed by that song, or this song
| usually gets skipped if playing while driving etc.
| subpixel wrote:
| I'm experiencing this in Peloton-land. They have an app that
| purports to be for home gym enthusiasts but is actually
| optimized for people who want to take instructor-led classes on
| their phone. Certain features don't work as advertised and I
| quickly reasoned that while this is a pain in my side most
| users don't care. If they did, Peloton would fix it.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest
| and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and
| family
|
| No it wasn't. It was driven by shady crapware distribution
| schemes and intentionally subtly broken sites under the big G
| umbrella.
| SamBam wrote:
| > However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all
| your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape
| discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently,
| your results will be dominated by people who don't really have
| an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
|
| > In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really
| care what browser they were using: the change was driven by
| enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-
| technically-inclined friends and family.
|
| I'm confused as to whether your saying change is caused by
| catering to the median who doesn't care, or the enthusiast who
| recommends the latest and greatest. You seem to be saying both.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Yeah, I could have been clearer there. The browser developers
| started by catering to the enthusiasts, who switched. The
| enthusiasts then told the majority of the userbase that the
| new thing was better, and so the majority switched, causing
| the large-scale changes in market share.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You're giving it way too much of a positive spend. None of the
| companies are using analytics to increase the desirability for
| the majority of users.
|
| They are doing it to increase "engagement" and so more people
| will stay on their site longer.
|
| Why else wouldn't Netflix show the "continue watching" row
| first instead of forcing you to scroll past algorithmic
| generated crap?
|
| It is the same reason that Google went from describing success
| as people getting off their site faster and going to one of the
| "ten blue links" to the shit show it is today.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Huh, why should "continue watching" be the first row?
|
| If I don't care enough to finish a movie I may as well start
| a new one. At the very least it's not a clear choice.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Binge watching TV series. The easiest signal that you don't
| want to continue watching a movie would be to thumbs down
| it.
| butlike wrote:
| On the flip side, the only reason I don't finish a movie or
| TV show is because I run out of time. Either it's time for
| bed, time to go, or I fell asleep. In all 3 cases I'm still
| interested in the movie; it's why I put it on in the first
| place!
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Well, of it was user-centred then "because that use scrolls
| to 'continue watching' more often than not".
|
| Why not let users choose? Because, sadly, it's about money
| and not about users.
| bobxmax wrote:
| What's the difference between that which optimized for what
| you call "engagement" and what the average user wants?
|
| Presumably the best thing for Netflix is to have a happy
| userbase, so why do you assume it wouldn't optimize for that?
| jMyles wrote:
| > What's the difference between that which optimized for
| what you call "engagement" and what the average user wants?
|
| People want joy, education, entertainment, etc. from
| watching a video.
|
| But there may be other ways of appealing to people
| (addiction, insecurity, base stimulation) which boost
| engagement but which do not give users what they want.
|
| Obviously on even slightly longer time scales, users will
| gravitate toward services that do not trade their health
| for engagement, but equally obvious is that many of today's
| apps are not optimizing for long time scales.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The average user wants to watch what they want right now.
| Netflix wants to surface shows that will keep you
| subscribed after you watch what you want to watch .
| chasd00 wrote:
| Luxury watches are a good analogy too. A $5 watch from the gas
| station will give you the time just fine but there's a market
| for watches costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| $31 million: https://www.gq.com/story/patek-
| philippe-31-million-most-expe...
| tiagod wrote:
| In the case of watches, the luxury ones will actually be much
| worse at telling time than the $5 quartz one, by design!
| nthingtohide wrote:
| You don't even need a watch. Smartphones can tell you time
| (you can configure to show times for many timezones) yet
| there is a market for watches (luxury or normal)
| xigoi wrote:
| A watch is more convenient. I don't need to take my phone
| out of my pocket to see the time, I just look at my wrist.
| karn97 wrote:
| I think you're quite underestimating how many times a
| person takes their phone out and it's way more than they
| turn their wrist around to see their watch
| xigoi wrote:
| I bought a watch about half a year ago just because I was
| tired of taking out my phone to check the time, so I know
| what I'm talking about.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Watches, are just jewelry for most people any more. There
| are few people that can't check their phone for whatever
| reason that need functional watches, the rest of society
| mostly uses them for fashion.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I'm convinced expensive watches are exclusively used as a
| vehicle for money laundering
| bluecalm wrote:
| My friend does some trades in watch market as he gets
| access to limited editions from time to time (if you know
| right people in dealerships you can sometimes buy a watch
| out of line if the original "subscribed" buyer doesn't show
| up). There are quite a few people who want to buy an
| expensive watch or two to show off on their social media.
| People just really like shiny status symbols.
| srveale wrote:
| Shady business, potentially, but you might be
| underestimating how much some guys really, really need to
| have the most expensive watch in their friend group.
| golergka wrote:
| Beauty is worth something.
| yapyap wrote:
| eh, I feel like this is a nicely typed out comment but it hits
| some wrong notes.
|
| 1. I wouldn't say the car veands you mentioned are popular
| because they can hit high speeds. In my experience nearly any
| car can with the right engine and equipment in it (of course
| due to weight distribution and other details I assume they're
| not all equally safe but that aside).
|
| Personally when I look at those brands I think they're sleek
| and pretty and when I feel like wanting one it's because
| they're expensive cars, driven by the rich. They're not chosen
| only by the rich cause they have the best taste, they're chosen
| by the rich because they are the only ones to have the
| financial means to afford one.
|
| Also I feel like the changes made based on analytics arent made
| to please (more) users but to make as much money as possible,
| whether that be pleasing users in the starting phases of your
| company or in the latter phases when you already dominate the
| market squeezing money out of your big existing userbase.
| whall6 wrote:
| Wow - this is great insight. I hadn't thought of it this way.
| Thank you for sharing.
| tlogan wrote:
| > But who knows - maybe that really
|
| > is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
|
| Yes, I agree. This does seem to be the most profitable model
| for running a tech business: maximizing user engagement or
| increasing the time users spend on the platform. Whether that's
| achieved through intentionally convoluted UI or by aggressively
| surfacing certain content, the end goal remains the same.
|
| That said, I don't think there's much room left for significant
| innovation in video streaming interfaces. The core challenge
| continues to be content -- whoever offers the best or most
| compelling library wins. UI changes might tweak engagement
| metrics by a few percentage points, but they're marginal
| compared to the impact of strong content.
|
| At the end of the day, if there's a great movie or series to
| watch, people will show up. If the content isn't there, no
| amount of clever interface design will convince someone to
| spend 30 minutes on something they're not actually interested
| in.
| _kush wrote:
| This is the cycle I keep seeing:
|
| Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by
| enthusiasts. They're opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but
| exciting.
|
| Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a
| broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule
| decisions.
|
| Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The
| product's no longer for them.
|
| So a new product comes out, started again by enthusiasts for
| enthusiasts. And the cycle repeats - unless someone chooses to
| grow slowly and sustainably, without raising, and stays focused
| on the niche.
| bluGill wrote:
| Can can git rich by growing slowly in many cases - but it
| will be a long hard road. You could instead sell out today
| and get rich instantly.
|
| If you start the slow growth path at 30 and retire at 65 you
| will overall make more money from that thing vs someone who
| sells out at 35. There are some catches though. The person
| who sells out can go on to the next thing which in sum total
| may be more sell out enough to make far more over their
| lifetime, while the slow growth plan you are stuck. The slow
| growth is over very slow at first, you often spend 10 years
| making far less than someone who is "working for the man",
| then 15 more years more or less even, and only then start
| making good money. There is no guarantee that you will be
| successful, some people spend their entire life making less
| than they could "working for the man"; others go bankrupt
| when a new VC competitor suddenly gets better by enough to
| take your customers.
|
| There is no right answer. VC money sometimes is the best
| answer - but many people who reaching for VC money when their
| better long term answer would be to grow slow.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| See, this is the thing that I, as a non-founder, have
| trouble understanding. Presumably the product is started by
| an enthusiast, an enthusiast _for the product_. Is it just
| hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm over time? Is the
| sum of possible money just too desirable? If feels like
| we're on this unending treadmill towards constant
| enshittification of literally every single thing that I
| interact with on a daily basis. All of the apps on my phone
| eventually turn into shit piles, all of the business/work
| software I use is constantly moving towards bullshit, even
| the houses that I rent, the newer construction is
| noticeably shittier than the old houses. Wifi got better
| for a while but now appears to be backsliding to the point
| of maximum frustration that the user will take (while given
| no viable second choice).
|
| Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but
| they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just
| not possible for a typical human to turn down excess
| profits and take pride in a project rather than a money
| machine? People seem to think these things used to be
| better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore",
| "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?
| bluGill wrote:
| IF you are running a successful business you are probably
| spending the majority of your time not on the thing you
| are enthusiastic about, but instead just business work.
| Many businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend
| enough time in the office - many businesses owners
| suddenly became a lot more successful when they spent
| more time in the office. They likely are good and and
| like doing what the business is about (running a backhoe,
| pulling wires, or whatever), but all the office work
| means they never get to do it. To the employees it looks
| like they sold out and don't get it anymore - but the
| employees don't realize it is because of that office work
| they get their paycheck on time.
|
| As such it is not surprise things change. You can't go
| from making less money than you could elsewhere to making
| a nice income without a lot of office time.
|
| Of course it is common to take the above too far. There
| is need for office work, but often those office employees
| forget that it is about the real world.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > Many businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend
| enough time in the office - many businesses owners
| suddenly became a lot more successful when they spent
| more time in the office. They likely are good and and
| like doing what the business is about (running a backhoe,
| pulling wires, or whatever), but all the office work
| means they never get to do it.
|
| The alternative here is to hire and train people to spend
| time in the office, rather than selling the company to
| someone who will do so. That has its own potential
| problems, for sure, but getting your soul eaten by VC is
| not one of them.
| n_ary wrote:
| > Is it just hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm
| over time? Is the sum of possible money just too
| desirable?
|
| I do not recall the book/essay or the original author,
| but I recall the quote that "everybody has a price they
| can't resist, find out that price...".
|
| If your enthusiasm product is successful and has
| potential to be milked, someone somewhere will figure out
| your price and eventually buy you out.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone
| builds because they believe in their product and its value
| or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
|
| I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these
| founders are five year founders, they are using the company
| as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short
| sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why
| I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity
| means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your
| company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want
| immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And
| many of the founders are the same people wearing a
| different hat.
| ragnese wrote:
| > The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone
| builds because they believe in their product and its
| value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
|
| I do agree with your overall criticism of short-
| sightedness and the short term incentives of VC and the
| stock market, etc.
|
| But the people involved are not quite as binary as you
| lay out in the quote above. You can't discount the group
| of people who really do start out as true believers and
| who become seduced/deceived by VCs. Some of these VC
| types are real vultures. They'll convince the founder
| that the best way to share their vision or product with
| the most people and do the most good for the world is to
| let the VC guys use their capital to scale up and expand
| the reach of the product, etc. The money surely helps to
| lower one's skepticism/cynicism, but I can imagine that
| it must be very hard to say no to getting your dream
| project out to millions of people.
| djeastm wrote:
| >The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands
| of people who view your company as a roulette wheel
| amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no
| stomach for any losses.
|
| This sounds a lot like Warren Buffett's opinion of
| stocks. The Berkshire Hathaway Class A stocks are 780k
| each because he wanted people to act like investors, not
| speculators.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I see the problem not as VC money, but the ridiculous idea
| of the optimised one-size mass-marketable product. The myth
| of "what people want" (which is art entirely pulled out of
| the air of marketing, public opinion, focus groups in the
| 1980s) goes against the impetus that consumer digital
| technology originally emerged from... namely that the
| microprocessor revolution replaced giant fixed-function
| pieces of iron with agile, modular, user-definable,
| technology. We've gone full circle on that. We're back to a
| world where 5 giant monopolies make stuff offering two
| choices; take it or leave it. Life happens at the margins,
| and the only thing in the middle of the road, is roadkill.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I'm hard-pressed to believe that there is any situation
| where VC money is the best answer. It may be the best
| answer for the person taking the VC cashout, but not the
| best answer for our world as a whole.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Some very important things get better because of the mass
| market and investor dollars. iPhone/Macbook are the canonical
| example.
|
| The hard bit is to keep taste and discipline at the forefront
| of design. To not let short-term thinking pollute long-term
| ambitions. Easier said than done.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think there is a split here because the enthusiast for
| iPhone/Macbook is a distinctly different breed than the
| enthusiast for cell phones/laptop computers.
|
| I think Apple (very intelligently) made products where the
| average consumer is the enthusiast. Which is very hard to
| do when your company is a bunch of engineers.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If I remember clearly, Apple's hiring process low-key
| also looked for "good taste" and "product sense" even for
| pure engineers. Subtly different than anywhere else I
| interviewed. It's really hard to measure and quantify
| good taste and an intuitive feel for what's great, which
| is why most companies don't bother trying. "Just make
| number go up" is the norm.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Doesn't even have to involve VC funding coming in. Just need
| a clueless product manager.
| conradev wrote:
| Doesn't even have to involve project managers. Just someone
| who isn't an enthusiast and/or doesn't care at the helm.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| This is the kind of thing David Chapman described with his
| post _Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution_
| [1]
|
| [1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
| beloch wrote:
| To simplify:
|
| 1. Innovate.
|
| 2. Exploit.
|
| You start by innovating a "fast horse". This gains you early
| adopters who pull in a larger audience. A horse can only be
| so fast, so continued innovation might lead to something more
| like a car. This will only cause you to bleed users. Stick to
| the horse.
|
| Instead of continuing to innovate endlessly, you switch to
| exploitation. Fire the visionaries. They're just a waste of
| payroll. Bring in people who can squeeze every last dime out
| of your user base.
|
| -----------------------
|
| The above isn't anything new. However, it's clear that some
| companies are better at maintaining quality while exploiting.
| Are they doing something different, or is it just that their
| customers have to choose them _repeatedly_? e.g. Most people
| don 't sign up with one car company for life. They'll buy
| several cars over their life and that's a choice that the car
| company must win each time. Meanwhile, people sign up for
| Netflix or Spotify and stay subbed. They don't look at the
| alternatives every few years. Porsche needs to keep up with
| the latest and fastest horses to continue exploiting their
| reputation, while Netflix can focus purely on making more
| money from their users. A faster horse may come along, but
| Netflix doesn't break down and need to be replaced.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Are you ignoring the benefits of network effects? Network
| effects should ideally improve recommendations for all
| subgenres of people.
| _kush wrote:
| Porsche is easy to replace only if you bought it as just
| another fast car. If you bought it for the design, the
| legacy, or what the brand means to you, it's not so easy.
|
| Netflix has their content as their moat. Even if someone
| today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be,
| it wouldn't matter. They won't have the rights and licenses
| to the shows and movies. That's what keeps people from
| switching.
|
| Porsche has to keep earning you as a customer with every
| new model. Netflix just needs to keep you watching.
| echelon wrote:
| > Even if someone today builds a better version of what
| Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won't have
| the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That's
| what keeps people from switching.
|
| What, apart from Stranger Things and Squid Game, has been
| enough of a cultural touchstone that it keeps people on
| Netflix? Those aren't things you keep coming back to
| again and again.
|
| Netflix doesn't own Friends, Seinfeld, The Office,
| Community, Parks and Rec, etc.
|
| I'd argue Max (nee HBO) has better legacy titles and
| franchises. They have both enduring IP as well as the
| reputation of being "destination television".
|
| The thing that keeps people from cancelling Netflix is
| that they have a better content slate of licensed
| classics paired with new originals. And they do it in the
| greatest volume of all the streamers, so there will be
| "something" on, even if it isn't particularly good.
| cestith wrote:
| Nobody Wants This; Bridgerton; Wednesday; Man on the
| Inside; 3 Body Problem; Emily in Paris; the live-action
| Avatar: The Last Airbender; Love, Death, and Robots; How
| to Sell Drugs Online (Fast); Is It Cake?; Everybody's
| Live with John Mulaney; and some others I've definitely
| had conversations about outside my own household.
|
| Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on
| Netflix and TenCent.
|
| They also have continued series that originated on other
| networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
|
| I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
| on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and
| Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
|
| I've had recommended to me and have recommended to others
| quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6
| Undergound if you're looking for an action movie.
| BigGreenJorts wrote:
| Love How to sell drug online (fast), surprised to see it
| listed here tho 'cause I've never heard anyone talk about
| it. Considering it got 4 seasons, it must be popular tho.
|
| And yeah, Bridgerton, Wednesday, Emily in Paris, and 3
| Body Problem each certainly take their _moment_ at least
| in my circles.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Also, Netflix kicked off the streaming premium shows with
| House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| There was the original Netflix-produced hit, House of
| Cards. Making a Murderer was also huge (although I didn't
| watch it). And then Tiger King blew up during the
| pandemic (although again, I never saw it myself).
|
| I think the Jeffrey Dahmer one was also big, because
| there have been so many stupid memes about him since
| then, from people who weren't around to hear about him on
| the news.
| Arainach wrote:
| >Netflix has their content as their moat.
|
| Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix
| started producing content they had *no moat*.
|
| That's the big problem with media streaming - the content
| _owners_ have all the leverage. Any profit you make they
| can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer
| to them. If you don 't want to pay they can (and will,
| and have done) start their own competitor since the
| technology isn't a moat - content ownership is.
| TimPC wrote:
| Large aggregation is also to a certain degree a moat.
| Most creators have quickly found that people won't pay
| for one creator's content unless that creator is a huge
| volume creator (at the scale of maybe Disney). No one
| subscribes to a platform with 20 movies and 5 TV shows.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Dropout.tv is a counterexample. They're not 20 movies and
| 5 TV shows, but they're closer to that than they are
| Disney. There are also all the people who make a living
| on Patreon.
| immibis wrote:
| Which is also how rent works for physical locations, by
| the way.
| lgeorget wrote:
| > Are they doing something different, or is it just that
| their customers have to choose them repeatedly?
|
| I guess it's market-related. Your remarks remind me of
| Behringer. They make products for the music and audio
| enthusiasts. They have decent quality products at a very
| fair price that have been around for 10+ years now (like
| the X32 mixer) and apart from that, they churn out new
| products all the time (especially remakes of vintage
| synthesisers) to keep their users coming back and check out
| what's new.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to
| a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics
| rule decisions._
|
| > _Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The
| product's no longer for them._
|
| I am _immediately_ reminded of when Slack got rid of
| markdown-style inline formatting, in favor of a WYSIWYG
| interface, and the internet (or at least, the corner I live
| in) collectively (and, imo, correctly) lost its shit at them.
| metalman wrote:
| right, all that and increasing regulation and enforcement, (
| SAFTEY SaFTEY SaFETy, agggghhhhh) marginalises, and
| criminalises anyone looking for something out on the edge and
| the edge gets crazyer.....think , the street raceing/drifting
| sceen, where, somebody gona die and nobody much cares, it's
| way too fucked up too even make a movie on the real mofo's
| and mofo'ets, are working as "contractors", anything goes,
| again...no movie's or branding possible at the other end are
| hard core solder iron in hand hackers, ocd'ing on PWNE'ing
| everything in sight And with my own fucking eyes, I have seen
| amish boys in town, whipping there horses into a frenzy as
| they drag race there buggys down main street, not making a
| movie on that either, cant brand it, it's all thats left. The
| market is starving for something authentic, but, every single
| thing is stolen, branded, comodified, and wrung dry as fast
| as you can spit so we get small legions of people who have
| fetishised things like listening to white noise
| 20after4 wrote:
| Amish street racing sounds like an awesome movie / series /
| video game / pass-time / sport for gamblers to lose their
| money on.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| maybe just maybe that's just how things life do, like I mean
| we seeing it on every single thing and not just tech industry
| artimaeis wrote:
| Seems like a variant of the cycle of geeks, mops, and
| sociopaths: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths.
|
| Since more of our culture is in online, advertising-dominated
| spaces -- the forces of capital have a lot of incentive to
| ensure smooth growth straight to the sociopath phase.
|
| Maybe the key is just accepting the cycle of it all and
| ensuring there's always cool new places for
| creative/enthusiastic people to do their thing.
| tehjoker wrote:
| This is far too generous a story. While true in certain basic
| respects, it is a process of capitalists changing products to
| favor their own interests over users in a mature market. It
| is a process that begins with the promise of individual
| empowerment (in a new and growing market where companies are
| forced to appeal to customers) that ends in a kind of silken
| chains (when the market is well understood and companies are
| optimizing their financials).
|
| Notably, this process usually involves not creating a
| simplified interface that can be turned into expert mode but
| actively removing features, adding cues, and steering user
| behavior though a psychological maze to achieve desired
| effects.
|
| Basically, people should understand this corporate lifecycle
| and stop being deluded by the opening moves in a new market
| that superficially appear to favor customers, individual
| empowerment, etc. It is a process that always ends in
| heartbreak because it serves investors, not the public.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Thank you, that makes so much sense to me. Spotify has, for
| quite a long time, seemed like a product for people who want
| to hear music, but don't really _like_ music.
|
| It hadn't occurred to me that that might actually be exactly
| what's happening.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > if you develop your product by following your analytics,
| you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves
| content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because
| that's what the median user of any given service wants
|
| Except you're making the mistake of thinking these services are
| optimizing for their userbase. They are not. They are
| optimizing for revenue and profit growth, a very different
| target. More ads, cheaper and easier-to-product content, lower
| opex.
|
| They are converging to churning out the least offensive slop at
| the cheapest cost with the maximum revenue.
|
| None of the analytics are about what people using the product
| want, they are about making the most money and growing the
| fastest. Nothing would look like the services mentioned in the
| article if they listened to what the users really preferred.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| That is exactly what is happening to Reddit. Made famous by its
| submitters and moderators. Business decision driven by metrics
| based on view counts because that sells ads. Let this be a
| lesson: metrics are not the only way to measure success. I
| worked at a company where metrics were viewed as a way to cut
| through dissonance and bias. Newflash: leaders should be
| opinionated and have visions that do not yet exist. They should
| be investors in their product and its culture. Metrics should
| play a role in that decision, but perhaps a tiny one. Because
| what metrics you choose, how you measure it, and most
| importantly, what is even measurable, have a tremendous impact
| on the effect of those metrics.
|
| You cannot paint by numbers.
| feoren wrote:
| You keep using the word "should", but what makes you think
| these business parasites aren't getting exactly what they
| want by making their products complete garbage? The CEO caste
| doesn't care about making good or unique products; they don't
| care about their users; they don't care about company
| culture; they don't care about their effects on society or
| the environment; they don't even care about the long-term
| financial success of their company. They only care about the
| immediate short-term gains that directly benefit them, and
| clearly paint-by-metric is a tried and true way of optimizing
| for that at the expense of everything else. If it rots the
| company from the inside out (or even society as a whole), who
| gives a shit? They just fly off and find a different company
| to parasitize.
|
| By the time our society is collapsing and our rivers are
| catching fire and our government is being overthrown and our
| oceans are boiling and our bodies are full of plastic and we
| can't even escape to another planet because of Kessler
| syndrome -- all due to their actions -- they'll be old. That
| will be their kids' problems, and we know the CEO caste
| fucking _hates_ their own kids.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Honestly, I think it's just simple imitation.
|
| Something is popular, folks are envious of it, they end up
| building something much like it. Doesn't matter if it's houses,
| logos, or user experiences - seems to be how things work.
| heisenbit wrote:
| The short term data driven optimizations somehow erode the
| original product architecture and some of its value. I also
| think treating the consumer as static. Trick me one shame on
| you, trick me twice (admittedly I get tricked even more often
| to click on stuff) shame on me but eventually I learn and what
| worked turn into a constant irritating torn-off. These
| irritations accumulate. Good product management should strive
| to minimize such irritations but I guess we lost that with
| Jobs.
| setgree wrote:
| "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating
| userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars.
| Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's
| the key driver of the carcinisation story here, the thing for
| which "what the median user wants" is ultimately a proxy.
|
| Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava,
| which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is
| now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0]
|
| I do however think that this is an important insight:
|
| > This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I
| think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that
| for any given individual, that something probably isn't your
| product.
|
| A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who
| wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the
| financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing
| format a kind of destiny.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-
| messaging.ht...
| donatj wrote:
| > "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating
| userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars
|
| I mean that's not really the case for paid services without
| ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally
| you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch
| anything.
| mattnewton wrote:
| The marginal cost to serve you more videos is real, but
| it's negligible compared to the fixed costs or cost of
| people not re-subscribing. So I assume that people at
| Netflix were optimizing for usage/engagement just like the
| ad driven services as a proxy for subscribe rate.
| agent281 wrote:
| I wonder how much the workforce plays into it.
|
| If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that
| are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around
| to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals
| of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and
| skills going to shape the new company?
|
| I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and
| Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech
| companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more
| heavily into the attention economy than they might
| otherwise need to.
|
| Also, attention is just easier to measure than
| satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Also, attention is just easier to measure than
| satisfaction
|
| This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone
| stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a
| reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly
| only care about the user as a source of revenue.
|
| The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely
| that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's
| wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are
| hardly incentivised to fix that now.
| lovich wrote:
| I wouldn't say they are hardly incentivized now. They
| were never incentivized.
|
| What company cares about a users well being? The only
| companies that might care are ones where the population
| growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new
| user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing
| into sovereign nations already
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I used to own a part of the Facebook homepage and
| maximizing its metrics was my job.
|
| They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature
| that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of
| data and surveys etc to prove it.
|
| But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to
| call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete
| it. That started my disillusionment process that
| eventually made me quit.
|
| Money is the only thing that matters to them.
| econ wrote:
| While it initially makes a reasonable proxy you end up
| polluting the measurements gradually by engineering for
| maximum screen time. The Artificialy created screentime
| is increasingly unrelated to satisfaction and ultimately
| not at all.
|
| Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is
| also the main source of "popularity".
|
| The word means something different now.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is the correct answer.
|
| The more you watch, the less likely you are to
| unsubscribe.
|
| If you haven't watched a streamer in a couple of months,
| that's the first thing you'll cancel when you glance at
| your credit card statement.
| bluGill wrote:
| Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just
| automatically not charging people who didn't use their
| service at all as to be worth it. No hassle, we just keep
| rolling your subscription over until you watch something
| again (of course they make interest in the month you paid
| but didn't use services - that $0.05 should pay for the
| email and other infrastructure costs needed for a
| customer that doesn't even use the service). The real
| benefit of this is when someone does watch something
| there is no hassle - they are already subscribed and so
| they don't even think about should the re subscribe.
|
| Of course with their ad supported tier they probably
| don't agree.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I think they already remind you after a year of
| inactivity, and automatically cancel your plan after 2
| years of inactivity.
|
| But they're a business, so obviously they want you to use
| it and pay for it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just
| automatically not charging people who didn't use their
| service at all as to be worth it.
|
| Is there a circumstance that could cause their stock
| price to drop to $0 more quickly?
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| This is the correct mental model. Minor COGS increase <
| Churn.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Ads are embedded into the media Netflix sells. See almost
| any car chase scene, either wholly unnecessary or
| unnecessarily long to advertise the car brand, many times
| with the actors' speaking lines solely to advertise the
| car.
|
| Even critically acclaimed shows like Slow Horses from a
| supposedly prestige media seller like Apple has scenes
| where you watch actors put on AirPods Max headphones
| (obviously with no relevance to the plot).
|
| More accurate is "streaming without discrete ad breaks."
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > More accurate is "streaming without discrete ad
| breaks."
|
| Yes, or as people call it: "ad-free". We all know what is
| meant by that phrase, being pedantic about "well actually
| there are ads regardless" doesn't make communication
| clearer.
| cess11 wrote:
| What would you call actually ad-free broadcasts then?
| 20after4 wrote:
| Propaganda?
| cess11 wrote:
| How did you arrive at this proposal? Is the Mona Lisa
| propaganda because she isn't holding a branded flask with
| snake oil?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The point is to bring the knowledge to people that the
| advertising is incorporated into the product. Lots of
| people don't know the extra long car chase scene isn't
| due to the director's artistic preference, but rather
| economic preference, at the viewer's expense.
|
| There is a clear conflict of interest that can only be
| addressed by buyers being knowledgeable.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| This is an important point. Readers should remember that
| what's obvious to them is not necessarily something
| "everyone knows" until it's pointed out. Personally I
| will say that when I first starting consuming movies at
| around age 20 I was not conscious of this dynamic, until
| I read about product placement in movies and then
| suddenly I started noticing it. Especially when a car
| chase scene goes into slow motion at just the moment that
| the camera gets a closeup of the tires and you can read
| the brand name...
| skydhash wrote:
| I don't really care for these type of ads as I see them
| everyday. They're already plastered on products I use. I
| would be grateful if ads on website were that static.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Ads are embedded into the media Netflix sells.
|
| That money goes to the people who made the film though,
| which in some cases actually is Netflix but not usually.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| product placement is the very foundation of TV, it's just
| a little more subtle now. Originally shows were brought
| to you by XYZ and had an intermission to advertise their
| products. Radio did this as well.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is not product placement, per my working definition.
| Product placement is inserting the advertising into the
| art, where it is not clearly labeled or discernible as
| advertising.
|
| On the TV show White Collar, the main character is never,
| shown driving a car, or talking about them, or having any
| interest in cars whatsoever. He walks around New York
| City, or is driven in a government employee's car. Yet,
| in one of the later seasons, he compliments on specific
| features of a car he is being driven, and has a dialogue
| about it with another character.
|
| Extremely jarring for anyone paying attention, and
| obviously advertising. Product placement is sacrificing
| some portion of the art in exchange for money (or
| products/services which otherwise reduces production
| cost).
| eadmund wrote:
| > Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but
| never watch anything.
|
| I think that's Netflix's actual goal: deliver nothing
| anyone wants to watch, but keep on promising the
| possibility of something one might want to watch in the
| future.
|
| Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our
| subscriptions.
| echelon wrote:
| > Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our
| subscriptions.
|
| A subscription service to cancel and renew your
| subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate
| your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter
| (for those that live in states that can do that).
| abustamam wrote:
| That's pretty much Rocket Money
|
| https://www.rocketmoney.com/
| Suppafly wrote:
| Does it actually work?
| derefr wrote:
| In a limited sense, yes.
|
| But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as
| truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its
| claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to
| suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which
| it doesn't. So no.
|
| Same as a dating site/app -- a dating system truly
| designed _in spirit_ to accomplish its claimed purpose,
| would seek to _minimize_ the time anyone spends using the
| app before uninstalling it. And no such site /app exists.
| (Although it _could_ -- as this is basically the business
| model of a professional matchmaker, where you pay a large
| lump sum up-front and then they 're beholden to do
| unbounded work to find you a happy relationship. So they
| seek to minimize how much of their time you spend, by
| finding you that happy relationship ASAP.)
| BwackNinja wrote:
| The professional matchmaker angle as a contrast is
| fascinating. The subscription model not only removes the
| incentive to provide quality quickly -- it reverses it.
| Doing a worse job is encouraged if you can leverage that
| to convince people that the future (which is only
| available by continuing your subscription) is worth
| waiting for. It's also more attractive because it has
| smaller up-front costs for the consumer.
|
| It would be an interesting world if we outlawed auto-
| renewal for services that you need to actively use in
| order to get any value from them. When you're paying for
| Netflix, you aren't paying to watch movies, you're paying
| for /access/ to movies you can watch. The flip side is
| that the maximum potential service quality would decrease
| if revenue decreases -- which is also why ad-supported
| services prevail. If all players are subject to the same
| rules, that would either end up as a decrease in
| licensing costs or a focus on quality content over
| quantity. If they aren't producing exclusive content,
| they are beholden to the quality of the market. Either
| way, that should encourage quality content to be made
| over saturating the market with content.
|
| Unfortunately, pipe dreams will remain pipe dreams.
| frereubu wrote:
| We immediately cancel our subscription as soon as we
| subscribe for services like Netflix, Disney+ etc, where
| you keep the service for the month. It's thankfully
| really easy to susbcribe and unsubscribe these days, so
| doing it this way means we never unknowingly renew. Must
| have saved us hundreds of pounds by now.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| Same here. I never subscribed to Netflix or Disney+ for
| the intended purpose of continually paying for it in
| perpetuity - it was always to watch the one show I want
| (in <1mo) and then immediately kill it.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| This doesn't really mesh with SaaS economics, or in this
| case how Netflix spends billions on producing their own
| content. A set of subscribers that don't use the service
| is locally maximized but has a lower lifetime total
| value. It is much easier to model & optimize your LTV
| with given costs (ex: assume the user watches 24/7) and
| then figure out "how do I make a user watch Netflix 24
| hours a day?" than it is to solve "how do I grow my
| constantly churning user base?". Keeping customers is
| much less expensive than winning new ones.
| freedomben wrote:
| Netflix is big and surely not monolithic so there may
| indeed be some people or even departments that think that
| way, but the content production is _not_ thinking that
| way. They genuinely want to create amazing content that
| is compelling. There is also the very real need to have
| their own content as well now that the networks are
| selling streaming services themselves and damn near
| everything is now exclusive to whatever streaming service
| dcrazy wrote:
| Netflix's ad-supported tier makes so much more money per
| user than their ad-free tier that they had to raise the
| price of the ad-free tier to make it competitive on ARPU.
| feoren wrote:
| But those two tiers are not really competing with each
| other, are they? I'd wager that most people are fixed in
| one group: either they will _never_ watch anything with
| ads (e.g. me), or they just don 't care about seeing ads.
| The former group will never switch to the ad-supported
| tier -- they'll just cancel if the price gets too high --
| so the only calculation is price vs. retention among that
| group. Similarly, the latter group will never pay extra
| for ad-free, so it's a completely different calculation.
| Why are the two prices in competition?
| abustamam wrote:
| I guess I'm weird because I pay for Netflix/HBO for no
| ads, but I'm on the ad supported tier for Peacock and
| Hulu. I guess it's just what I'm used to (I don't expect
| to see ads on Netflix, but I do expect to see them on
| Hulu)
| feoren wrote:
| Is there a price point where you'd switch between the two
| tiers for those services? I mean, I guess if they were
| literally the same cost.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm on the ad-free tier for Peacock and have honestly
| considered downgrading because most of what I watch there
| is live sports, and they have natural breaks in play that
| the linear broadcast fills with ads, whereas Peacock on
| the ad-free tier fills with extremely irritating
| repeating elevator music. It's bad enough that I'd rather
| see the ads.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock
| Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too. We don't
| often watch that service on anything other than our
| "smart" TV, but was watching one episode on a laptop with
| firefox while travelling and realized afterwards the very
| brief black screens were where ads would have been.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Side note: I discovered by accident last week that
| uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too.
|
| It works on Hulu too. You get a box at the beginning of
| the show saying "please turn off your ad blocker" but
| once you click OK it never comes up again.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| Spotify is doing this as well. If they can "downgrade"
| users from paid all-you-can-eat plans to cheaper plans
| that also serve ads they're overall way more lucrative.
| lovich wrote:
| > had to
|
| And that's why you can't get a faster horse
| hennell wrote:
| >Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but
| never watch anything.
|
| There's a good planet money episode about the economy of
| gyms. Many really want _members_ , not users. But members
| who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had
| massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to
| keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like
| they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for a
| slice of pizza...
|
| If there's nothing on netflix people will cancel netflix.
| So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so
| they feel like they got their money's worth, while not
| actually costing netflix much.
| hinkley wrote:
| There were people who only had HBO subscriptions to watch
| the new season of Westworld. Given they merged with
| Cinemax I'm not sure if that worked out for them. But
| there were also Apple+ subscriptions just to watch Ted
| Lasso. And I begrudgingly got Prime to watch the Expanse.
|
| But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I'm
| sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at
| least some of it went to Apple instead.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| > So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year
| so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not
| actually costing netflix much.
|
| No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite
| open about it - the strategy is to maximize user
| consumption for every user, because that keeps them
| subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use
| sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to
| decide what to greenlight, but they don't. They use the
| judgment (and politics, and egos) of Hollywood studio
| executives (and often the same Hollywood execs that a few
| years ago were employed in "legacy" media). Although I
| will grant that they've been innovative in
| producing/distributing international content, this is
| really just globalization and labor arbitrage (it is
| cheaper produce content not in Hollywood, that's not news
| - they just spend the extra $$$ localizing international
| content to different global target distribution markets
| but again, this flow has happened forever, it's just
| typically been Hollywood -> localization -> foreign
| market rather than foreign production -> localization ->
| Anglophone market).
|
| Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding
| which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to
| individual users at any one time - that process is highly
| reactive, individualized, dynamic - that's why strange
| and seemingly random media become big hits on Netflix
| while being largely ignored by the commentariat, and vice
| versa, why series with dedicated fanbases don't get
| renewed (the analytics tell you that, despite the
| apparent success, further investment will not improve
| user engagement with the platform by enough to be worth
| the spend).
| hinkley wrote:
| I can't believe I'm saying this, but Netflix would probably
| be better if it learned a few lessons from gyms.
|
| I have to go wash my mouth out now. Brb.
|
| Some of these companies are trying to go for status now as
| well. They're trying to strengthen their brands by picking
| up epic storylines and making them into the show everyone
| is watching. Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven't
| figured out that nobody watches the first season of a
| Netflix show until the second is announced because they
| know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time. Which
| means Netflix cancels more shows because the numbers are
| terrible.
|
| What they should be doing is test audiences. If those
| people hate it, then yes cancel. And be patient with
| everything else.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven't figured out
| that nobody watches the first season of a Netflix show
| until the second is announced because they know Netflix
| cancels shows all the fucking time.
|
| What's funny is that HBO is worse about that, but
| everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big
| budget and look really appealing.
|
| Netflix is also really bad about taking way too long to
| make additional seasons even if they announce them it's
| still forever before they come out.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| >> but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they
| are big budget and look really appealing.
|
| This doesn't feel as true anymore. There's still the odd
| HBO blockbuster but they're producing a lot more garbage
| as they search for the next hit. And they're not immune
| to the Marvel approach of strip mining a profitable
| franchise well past there being any gold left.
| hinkley wrote:
| Maybe it's confirmation bias, in that I'm interested in
| the pitch for fewer HBO shows and so I don't feel it when
| they get cancelled after a half-assed attempt.
|
| Netflix shouldn't bother signing shows without a 2 year
| contract at this point.
| yibg wrote:
| Not directly, the there is a strong correlation between use
| of the product and retention. Ideally yes users that pay
| but don't use are the best, but those are rare. The cost of
| delivering the service on an incremental basis is also low.
| So all in all, they want users to be using the product as
| much as possible.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I think your link is broken (missing the l in html) and
| should point here:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-
| messaging.ht...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >"Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating
| userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars.
| Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's
| the key driver of the carcinisation story here,
|
| Non sequitur. For the longest time, Netflix had no
| advertisements. Do they even now? (I don't subscribe... all
| their shows end up on my Plex anyway.)
| red_admiral wrote:
| I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong.
|
| IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because
| it was bundled with the OS and cost $0.
|
| Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google
| to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on
| their home page or together with their search results. They
| also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in
| newspapers and even in cinemas.
|
| I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small
| effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?),
| but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to
| advertise chrome on their search page.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default
| browser on the most common networked computing devices in the
| world (android phones).
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using
| google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their
| browser on their home page or together with their search
| results.
|
| That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox
| was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are
| feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was
| significantly better.
| tristor wrote:
| > That and it was such a better browsing experience.
| Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure
| they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome
| experience was significantly better.
|
| As someone who lived through those days, that is just
| straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that
| Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance,
| because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko
| before the SpiderMonkey project started.
|
| Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority.
| Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's
| Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could
| count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web
| standards", because most of those standards were invented
| at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards
| standardized so that others could make use of them. While
| the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense
| amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a
| derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork
| until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it
| was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team
| as a community project).
|
| The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend,
| extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even
| more powerful and influential technology giant being played
| out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor
| was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't
| have contributed their work into the open without creating
| their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the
| development of V8, they contributed all of their work back
| to WebKit until 2013 when they forked.
|
| No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its
| applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing
| browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of
| google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists
| anywhere.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >As someone who lived through those days, that is just
| straight up not true.
|
| As someone else who lived through those days, you're
| either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end
| user, chrome was just better by any metric end users
| cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of
| stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads
| me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively
| about that.
| tristor wrote:
| Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we
| talk about metrics, these are measurable data points.
| Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a
| measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically
| win here. That was essentially the only metric that they
| won on.
|
| If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or
| anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the
| end result of Marketing. That's what Marketing does. They
| had front-and-center advertising on the most visited
| website in the world, with branding from the (at the
| time) most valuable tech company in the world.
|
| FWIW, these are moving targets, browser teams across the
| board are constantly working on engine-side performance
| to make up for the complete lack of care from front-end
| developers as the JS community continues to churn through
| hype cycles, so that we aren't destroying batteries on
| dominant web devices (mobile phones and laptops). Mozilla
| has been maintaining public repeatable benchmarks for a
| very long time and continues to do so, although there
| isn't enough data available to go back in time ~10 years:
| https://arewefastyet.com/
| zerd wrote:
| It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched.
| It could handle more tabs. It isolated tabs so if one
| crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. Memory usage
| was lower. I wouldn't call any of those "marketing" and
| "mindshare".
| tristor wrote:
| > It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched.
|
| This was pretty much entirely because of the JS
| performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
|
| > It could handle more tabs.
|
| This was pretty much entirely because of the JS
| performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
|
| > It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the
| whole browser.
|
| This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we
| eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later.
|
| > Memory usage was lower.
|
| This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to
| the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was
| also that XUL was a pig.
|
| Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while
| they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers
| most of this had to do with the combination of improved
| JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for
| web.
| int_19h wrote:
| The point is that "the Chrome experience was
| significantly better" was obviously true for a great many
| users. It doesn't matter what exact optimizations it
| boils down to.
| sixo wrote:
| The ability to have 20-50 tabs open without slowing the
| computer to a crawl was the reason I switched, and was
| highly publicized at the time.
|
| You don't need a "set of metrics", you need to do a good
| job on the _one thing people actually care about enough
| to switch_.
| Suppafly wrote:
| It was such a better end user experience, I can't believe
| you're arguing otherwise. I appreciate what Mozilla does,
| but their history includes multiple periods of being a
| worse browsing experience than their competitors. You
| don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better
| experience when you could run them side by side and
| notice that one would crash far more often than the
| other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the
| other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more
| accurately than the other.
|
| Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk
| about end user experience for some reason and need to be
| honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM
| with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize
| yourself with the time period you claim to have lived
| through.
| tristor wrote:
| I'm arguing because I have used /both/ Chrome and Firefox
| in parallel since the initial release of both pieces of
| software, including regularly benchmarking them. In the
| sum totality of the data I have seen, there have been
| many moments of back and forth where one was "better"
| than the other, but in the end they are roughly
| equivalent. When Chrome /first/ released, it had a huge
| performance advantage explicitly due to V8 and how heavy
| JS usage was on the web (which has only gotten heavier
| over time). After that advantage was mostly nullified by
| the rewrite of the JS engine in Firefox, the performance
| differential was around a maximum of 5-10% at any given
| time in one direction or another as both teams worked on
| improving performance.
|
| > You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better
| experience when you could run them side by side and
| notice that one would crash far more often than the
| other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the
| other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more
| accurately than the other.
|
| As mentioned, I have run them side by side daily for a
| decade+, including for many long stretches of times both
| the stable and nightly builds of both. I /still/ to this
| day, use both browsers every single day. I have not seen
| anything which would make me believe that one is more
| stable than the other, or that absent the performance
| gains on heavy JS sites (early SPAs), that one had a
| particular advantage in tab-count/memory footprint
| compared to the other.
|
| Almost all the performance differences were deeply tied
| to the JS engine, and actually still are (but now wasm
| too).
|
| > Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk
| about end user experience for some reason and need to be
| honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM
| with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize
| yourself with the time period you claim to have lived
| through.
|
| I might do that over the weekend for kicks and grins. I
| assure you, I am being honest and fairly objective.
|
| It's funny how everyone is so certain I'm wrong, but
| provided no evidence, other than to point out things that
| are based /exactly/ on the one major technical win I
| acknowledged in my original comment and have completely
| ignored the very public benchmarking efforts that have
| gone on the entire lifecycle of Chrome.
| btilly wrote:
| As someone else who lived through those days, I have to
| disagree.
|
| First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it
| was a big deal.
|
| Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a
| security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that
| was a big deal.
|
| I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I
| did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their
| virus problems. But what I sold them on was the speed.
| tristor wrote:
| > First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought,
| it was a big deal.
|
| It's a /very/ big deal. It's not a mistake that V8 was
| chosen to build Node.JS on top of. Javascript performance
| continues to dominate the overall performance of browsers
| on the modern web as front-end developers utilize more
| and more JS weight in their pages and SPAs become even
| more commonplace.
|
| Don't mistake my comment as saying that the win for
| Javascript performance wasn't a big win. V8 completely
| upended the expectations of both web developers and
| engine teams about what was not only expected but was
| what feasible when it came to JS performance. V8 is
| great, but it didn't need a new browser to ship it, which
| was my larger point.
|
| > Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a
| security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that
| was a big deal.
|
| Chrome's sandbox is not particularly better than
| Firefox's sandbox today. Both browsers invented new
| security concepts over the last decade+ as browsers have
| become larger, more integral to people's day to day
| workflows, and more security-sensitive. A modern browser
| in 2025 is easily as complex as a modern OS in 2025 with
| similar security implications.
|
| When Chrome first came out, it had one major improvement
| over Firefox (and both were better than any alternatives
| for security) which was to run tab contexts in separate
| processes rather than separate threads. This opened up
| all sorts of opportunities and benefits, which Chrome
| capitalized on, proving this approach to be correct, and
| later Mozilla adopted it in Firefox as well. From a
| security perspective, the main benefit was to prevent
| different sites from sharing process memory context, in
| the event that the site was malicious and exploiting a
| browser bug to access process memory.
|
| The modern Chrome sandbox (and Firefox sandbox) is
| magnitudes more advanced and complex than the sandboxing
| that Chrome initially shipped with, and at least to my
| recollection there was not a significant difference in
| security surface area between the two other than tab
| isolation at Chrome launch, which I don't really count as
| a "sandbox".
| btilly wrote:
| On performance, you're acknowledging my point without
| recognizing how important it was for switching back in
| 2008. Using the web, particularly JavaScript heavy parts
| of the web like Google's business suite, Chrome was a
| significantly better experience than Firefox. It was a
| real reason to switch. (I'll return to V8 shortly.)
|
| On the sandbox, I think that you are confusing the Chrome
| Sandbox (released in 2008) with the Privacy Sandbox
| (released in 2019). At the release of Chrome, it was a
| significant security improvement over existing browsers.
| You might not call their process isolation a sandbox, but
| they certainly did. See
| https://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-
| browser-se... to verify.
|
| True, security and sandboxing have improved greatly in
| the decades since. But the current quality of Firefox is
| irrelevant to people's reasons to switch back then.
|
| Now let's go back to why Chrome was developed. As
| articles like
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/1501244/the-real-
| reaso... demonstrate, Google's reasoning was widely
| understood at the time. Google wanted complex web
| applications to run better. And Google also wanted people
| to not fear for the security of their web applications.
| So they focused on performance and security.
|
| What Google didn't care about was creating a monopoly.
| Sure, they could have released V8 without a browser
| attached. But that wouldn't have changed the consumer
| experience in the way that Google cared about. That said,
| they had every reason to pull V8 out of Chrome and
| release it independently. They were as surprised as
| anyone when someone chose to create node.js out of it.
| Their actual goal was to hope that other browsers would
| use a better JS engine after one was shown to them. Or,
| if they failed to use it directly, they'd study it and
| copy its good tricks.
|
| Now you claim that the fact that V8 could have been
| shipped on its own was part of some larger point. I have
| absolutely no idea what larger point that might be. But
| there was a significant period of time where Chrome had
| V8 and everything else was comparatively slow. Which
| speaks directly to my point that consumers had very good
| technical reasons to switch to Chrome.
| parpfish wrote:
| "Tyranny of the the marginal user"
|
| https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| What you are describing is explained beautifully in "The
| Tyranny of the Marginal User" essay that got a lot of
| commentary on HN previously,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507.
|
| My favorite quote ("Marl" is the hypothetical name for the
| marginal user):
|
| > Marl's tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As
| far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only
| thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive,
| zombielike scrolling motion.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| a mouse could easily do that with just it's nose
| mrandish wrote:
| I missed that post the first time around... and it's great.
| Thanks for re-posting it.
| whiddershins wrote:
| this is such a fantastic comment because it makes a charitable
| attempt to explain how data driven decisions go off the rails.
|
| and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent
| phenomenon.
|
| everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with
| decision making power is executing a specific and conscious
| strategy that pushes back against it.
| toss1 wrote:
| Nice example, but not everything is like automobiles where
| probably not even one in 1000 people has ever been to a track
| day let alone actually raced a car, but sporty marques are
| desired.
|
| A very large portion of people actually cares about what they
| are searching for, and want the ability to _ACTUALLY_ search
| and find that, with real parameters, not merely get some not-
| even-close stuff shoved onto their screen instead. That is NOT
| the serendipity of browsing the stacks in a great library.
|
| A great example of failure is Amazon. I run a small design &
| manufacturing business, and years ago started getting pestered
| by Amazon about "Amazon Business" trying to supply both office
| staples and parts to businesses. This was an area that had
| enormous potential. Yet, they have _entirely_ failed. I 've
| never bought a single item, and it has faded.
|
| Their primary competitor is McMaster-Carr [0] who does it
| right. Well-defined categories of everything, and highly
| specific search capabilities, at reasonable but not bargain
| prices. EVERYTHING you might search for is fully parameterized
| in every dimension and feature. Min/max/exact, width/depth/heig
| ht/thread/diameter/material/containerType/etc./etc./etc.
| appropriate for each type of product. The key is McMaster _DOES
| NOT WASTE MY TIME_. I can go there, quickly find what I want or
| determine that they don 't have it, and get on with my day.
|
| The smaller company that does it right is still beating the
| tech giant a decade later. Same for other similar suppliers who
| actually have a clue about what their customers really want.
|
| They continue to prevail over tech giants and VC-funded sites
| _BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT STUPID_.
|
| It would be nice if the tech/vc crowd would also stop being
| stupid. They started out not stupid, but they really lose the
| plot when they think a few extra eyeballs this week will really
| win in the long run. At least provide two modes, a strict and
| serious search and their new messy UI. But they are stupid and
| this will not happen. Enshittification rules the day.
|
| [0] https://www.mcmaster.com/
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| [rant]
|
| The thing that really pissed me off about Amazon Business is
| that they bought Small Parts and killed it off. Small Parts
| was a tiny version of McMaster-Carr that specialized in
| fasteners, small diameter fluid handling, short sections of
| specialty materials, and in general, quality "small parts."
|
| If I bought directly from Small Parts, I knew I'd get exactly
| what I wanted. Ordering from Amazon Business? A complete
| crapshoot. Going to www.smallparts.com now just redirects to
| an Amazon 404 page!
|
| [/rant]
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I've long wondered why Amazon made it harder to buy products
| from them, why they've decreased the [customer] value of
| their search, decreased the value of the filters, decreased
| the value of the reviews...
|
| I mean the answer has to be "they make more money this way"
| but for me it's means I groan internally before going to
| Amazon because finding the product I want will be almost
| impossible - it's even hard if I already visited and already
| found what I wanted to buy, finding it again, near
| impossible. Not even basics like search by product
| manufacturer actually work.
|
| Sites with usable search are a relative joy.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I've worked for a large e-commerce company, and you're
| right, search is very important - to the point where
| effective search was one of the main focuses of the
| company's development. They had a clear correlation between
| revenue and how good/relevant the search results were, so
| they focused on that. Doing what seems like the complete
| opposite is a... choice.
|
| I don't use amazon, but I use AWS every day of my life and
| I see similar-ish decisions made there in the console UI
| (although admittedly it has gotten a little better) - like,
| why are you seemingly making this purposely difficult?
| There's no way this benefits you.
| toss1 wrote:
| >> search is very important - to the point where
| effective search was one of the main focuses of the
| company's development.
|
| THIS is what I really do not get.
|
| Of course N=[small_numbers_somewhat_selective], but I
| have never encountered _anyone_ who wanted anything other
| than good search. I have only ever heard complaints about
| the messy Amazon-style searches. In decades I have
| _NEVER_ heard or seen a written comment about someone
| finding something great that 'just popped up' in an
| otherwise failed search. No one likes sloppy search or
| finds it anything but a waste of time and actually drives
| them away from the site.
|
| Yet, clearly the search-enshittifiers have some data or
| usage pattern information indicating it works for them,
| or they wouldn't keep doing it. Does anyone know what
| this data might be?
|
| I also don't know why they couldn't do both. Present the
| sloppy-search but have a small button to switch over to
| strict search (or even better, a McMaster-style search).
| I fail to see how that wouldn't be better, since I and
| everyone I know now actively work avoid Amazon and the
| like rather than work to try to find stuff in their
| shitty search. I came originally because it was easy to
| find stuff. Now, it is hard so I'm elsewhere
| karn97 wrote:
| Perhaps there is a trend in letting an algo decide instead
| of the user.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| The irony is that he argued for a faster horse and that's what
| all his providers are doing. TikTok is the faster horse. What
| he really is asking for is a step out of the paradigm, although
| he argues for a romantic conservative product instead of an
| innovative product like Ford.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| You're _way_ overestimating the effect an enthusiast has.
| Evangelism only goes far enough to _introduce_ people to _the
| thing_. How often someone uses _the thing_ depends entirely on
| its utility (usefulness).
|
| As long as Netflix was successfully reading the author's mind,
| they were satisfied with the experience. However, Netflix
| assumed that they want to keep watching the same content,
| oblivious to the author's desire to discover something entirely
| new. Netflix failed to meet the expectations of those seeking
| something entirely different.
|
| I can understand why Netflix made this change. They've replaced
| many shows with their own in-house productions. By doing so,
| they prevent users from searching for specific shows and then
| realizing that Netflix doesn't have them. If this happens
| frequently, they risk losing customers.
|
| On the other hand, Spotify doesn't face this issue. Therefore,
| I'm puzzled by why they've made it more challenging to explore
| content by categories. (Disclaimer: I don't use Spotify, so my
| experience is based solely on author's observations.)
| rightbyte wrote:
| > This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I
| think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that
| for any given individual, that something probably isn't your
| product.
|
| I think this is a great nuance that is often overlooked when
| discussing this.
| raincole wrote:
| > Ferraris, Lamborghini
|
| I think the big difference is that nobody is going to pay $10m
| for a web service or browser.
| hinkley wrote:
| Some people have claimed that pure A/B testing is an agent for
| enshittification, both on a quality and ethical dimension. And
| I can't see how those people are particularly wrong.
|
| There are systems out there that can do AB/CD testing and those
| do a better job of finding pairs of changed that have
| compounding effects.
|
| You cannot A/B test your way from chocolate and peanut butter
| to cherry and vanilla. So we get to deal with tone deaf
| companies who feel their analytics are proving that customers
| either don't know what they want or are lying about what they
| want. But that's not something A/B testing can prove. It takes
| more sophisticated experiments than that.
| dpc_01234 wrote:
| Worth giving a read: The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z.
| Muller.
| safety1st wrote:
| I think when you're a startup, you have to invest in all of
| these things - you want to hire some experts early on because
| they'll have insights that help you design a better product,
| and if your product appeals to experts it will be a PR win. But
| of course your goal is scale and distribution so you have to
| respect a certain lowest common denominator as well lest you
| become too niche.
|
| Once you become a bloated monopolist like the three companies
| you just mentioned, your distribution strategy is solved in
| other ways (like, you've done some bundling and some
| acquisitions, maybe pressured a few companies into exclusivity
| agreements and are probably breaking some anti-trust law or
| other but you have lawyers). Then you don't care about the
| experts, PR or niches anymore, and you serve up slop. When the
| analytics recommend slop you go with the analytics, when they
| don't you ignore them.
|
| None of this is to discount your insightful comment, just
| saying once you're big enough, your strategy is just doing
| tricky distribution deals, really (a fact no record executive
| would dispute).
| cs702 wrote:
| My takeaway:
|
| The Nash Equilibrium of streaming UIs is a TikTok experience.
|
| :-(
| Suppafly wrote:
| >maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech
| business.
|
| That's the issue, it seems like it really is the most
| profitable way to do things. Everything sucks now because
| shooting brainrot and advertisements at our eyes and ears is
| more profitable than actually giving us what we want.
| ookblah wrote:
| yeah except a lot of those companies almost went bankrupt
| trying to make those cars for enthusiasts and only for them.
|
| porsche and lambo didn't see the outsized success they have now
| (financially) until they started pumping out SUVs. hell, the
| purosangue was made precisely to capitalize on that boring
| market segment.
|
| i feel there's a little suvivorship bias at play here. i think
| the important thing is to not forget your enthusiasts perhaps,
| but a lot of these "successes" wouldn't even be around were it
| not for appealing to the greater masses. ofc some market
| segments fare better and you can build a business around
| enthusiasts.
| amarant wrote:
| That's a very keen observation!
|
| It's probably profitable in a lot of cases to follow those
| metrics, shovelware content is cheaper to produce, and since
| the median user pays the same subscription fee as the
| enthusiast, you get better margins producing slop for the
| uncaring masses.
|
| You need enthusiast businesses owners to produce quality
| product.
|
| Damn, I never thought of this before, but it explains so much!
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Chrome leveraged Google's near monopoly on search to gain users
| synergy7 wrote:
| I think the second paragraph in the parent comment fits really
| well with mimetic theory and this Rene Girard quote: "Man is
| the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to
| others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others
| desire because we imitate their desires." This, however,
| doesn't mean that the current Netflix solution is the only one
| possible.
| mrandish wrote:
| > you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use
| the insights from that analysis to inform future development.
| However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your
| users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape
| discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently,
| your results will be dominated by people who don't really have
| an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
|
| This is so spot on. I was a long-time serial entrepreneur who
| spent a couple decades across three successful startups
| discovering, shipping and growing new categories of tech
| products primarily for consumer, prosumer and hobbyists. Then I
| sold my last startup to a very large F500 silicon valley tech
| leader and ended up a senior product exec there. While there
| were a lot of positives like more mature engineering processes,
| testing and devops as a discipline, the exact issue you
| describe was a nightmare of product-damaging mistakes I called
| "analytics abuse." In my startups I valued having increasingly
| robust analytics over the years. In part because they helped
| increase my overall understanding of usage but mostly because
| they provoked good questions to explore. That exploration
| happened naturally because as the "product guy / founder" I
| never stopped spending a lot of time with our most passionate,
| opinionated, thought-leading customers. Over years of iteration
| I'd learned how to engage deeply and listen carefully to input
| from these customers. This involved interpreting, filtering and
| curating the mess of divergent personal preferences and pet
| feature ideas to tease out the more actionable product signals
| that could increase broad usage, adoption and passion around
| our products. I'd then bring those curated signals back to the
| product teams for evaluation and prioritization.
|
| At BigCo they were diligent about meeting with customers, in
| fact they had entire processes around it, but their rigorous
| structures and meeting agendas often got in the way of just
| directly engaging and actively listening. Worse, the customer
| meetings the more senior product decision makers actually
| attended in person were mostly with the highest revenue
| customers. Junior PMs (and sometimes new grads) were delegated
| to meeting with the broader base of customers and filing
| reports. Those reports were then aggregated by ever-helpful
| program managers into tables of data and, eventually, slides -
| losing all nuance and any ability to spot an emerging outlier
| signal and tug on that thread to see where it goes.
|
| I tried to convince everyone that we were missing important
| customer signals, especially from our smartest, most committed
| users. Being only one level removed from the CEO and quite
| credible based on prior success, I was definitely heard and
| most people agreed there was something being lost but no one
| could suggest a way to modify what we were doing that could
| scale across dozens of major products and hundreds of product
| managers, designers, execs and other stakeholders. In my
| experience, this general problem is why large companies, even
| the most well-run, successful ones full of smart people trying
| their best, end up gradually nerfing the deeper appeal in their
| own products. Frustratingly, almost every small, single step in
| that long slide pushes some short-term metric upward but the
| cumulative effect is the product loses another tiny piece of
| the soul that made our most evangelistic, thought-leading
| customers love the product and promote it widely. Ultimately, I
| ended up constantly arguing we should forego the uplift from
| some small, easy-to-prove, metric-chasing change to preserve
| some cumulative whole most people in the org weren't fully
| convinced even existed. It was exhausting. And there's no
| fighting the tide of people incentivized on narrow KPIs come
| bonus season.
|
| I'm sorry to report I never found a solution to this problem,
| despite my best efforts over several years. I think it's just
| fundamental. Eventually I just told friends, "It's a genetic
| problem that's, sadly, endemic to the breed" (the 'breed' being
| well-run, very large tech companies with the smartest product
| people HR can hire at sufficient scale). Even if I was anointed
| CEO, given the size of the product matrix, I could only have
| personally driven a handful of products. I do think codifying
| premises and principles from the CEO level can help but it
| still gets diluted as the number of products, people and
| processes scales.
| mncharity wrote:
| Given several mrandish-equivalents, gathered into a side-
| channel Customer Advocacy org, is there some way to integrate
| their output without this problematic constantly arguing
| against metric-chasing?
|
| I'm groping towards something vaguely ombudsman-y, or WW2
| production/logistics trouble shooters. Or maybe even pre-
| Bush41 ARPA Project Managers - term-limited person-with-a-
| checkbook and few accountability constraints.
|
| If one accepts this role has to be out-of-band, vs poking big
| hairy blob in hope of creating and maintaining signal
| channels with particular properties, and grants CEO-adjacent
| leverage, then it seems a remaining unresolved challenge is
| integrating the output signals at scale? If so, maybe (jest)
| CA granted KPI offsets?
| mrandish wrote:
| As I said, it's an extremely difficult problem. To be
| honest, I doubt it's _really_ solvable in a scalable way
| across an entire org. The best you can probably do is a
| combination of implementing a few top down directives and,
| on the other end, fire fighting flare-ups around specific
| hot points. But I also hope (desperately) that I 'm wrong
| and that you'll build that shining Camelot on the hill in
| your org.
|
| Top Down
|
| * Start with clear CEO buy-in supporting a clear manifesto.
| Include some case study-ish examples of how short-term
| metric-chasing can go wrong. Do education sessions around
| this across the product and design orgs. Socialize the
| concept of "Enshittification." Get people sharing their own
| examples, whether how Google Search used to be good or how
| they used to be able to find stuff on Amazon but now the
| fucking search doesn't even work with quotes or exclusion
| like it used to. Actually show how you can't find a
| specifically narrow type of product by excluding features.
| Ask "How did smart, good people slowly slide down a
| slippery slope to a pretty evil place?" Discuss how your
| org can avoid the same fate (or if it even should). Goal:
| Create awareness. Win (some) hearts and minds.
|
| * Radical idea: seize control of all granular analytics
| data. Yes, I'm suggesting that product teams cannot
| directly access their own raw analytics data anymore until
| it's been corrected for short-term bias and to re-weight by
| user type. Nor can they unilaterally add new analytics to
| their product until your CA org has vetted that even
| gathering that new data won't inappropriately bias internal
| perception. Before distribution to product teams, granular
| usage data is first recast and contextualized into new
| user-type and time horizon buckets that make it hard to
| chase (or even see) lowest-common denominator "bad" product
| changes.
|
| I think this is hugely important. I saw certain savvy PMs
| cleverly manipulate how analytics were tallied and also
| suggest new measures in a veiled effort to boost short-term
| incremental metric gains, almost always in the quarter
| before bonus season. I also saw designers who were heavily
| bought into the "less density, less choices" zen ethos I
| called "The Church of Saint Johnny Ive" (which seems to
| pathologically despise advanced and power users), actively
| weaponize analytics to generate data supporting their
| religiously-held worldview and force killing significant
| functionality beloved by smaller advanced user segments. If
| those designers ran Burger King the slogan would have to
| change to "Have it MY way (because _I_ graduated from
| Stanford D-School and know what you _should_ want) ". If
| you don't seize control of the raw usage data so it can't
| be weaponized for KPIs (or religious agendas), you'll never
| be able to make serious traction. Also, doing this will
| trigger World War III and you'll find out right away if
| senior leadership is _really_ committed to supporting you.
| :-)
|
| * Create new segmentation categories of user types. For
| example, use in-product behavior to identify power users
| who are passionate and engaged (discount daily frequency
| and session time / amplify usage depth of specific advanced
| features), Identify long-time users who were early adopters
| and dramatically amplify their analytics signal. Every
| click they make should be worth hundreds of drive-by,
| newbie users who barely understand the entire product yet.
|
| * Create KPI demerits for teams who make changes that annoy
| or dismay long-term users as measured by posts on user
| forums, social media and in deep interviews of unhappy or
| exiting customers. A handful of such posts should be able
| to wipe out the gains of a hundred incremental pixel-moving
| tweaks. Causing strong negative feedback from thoughtful
| users who care should be feared like touching the third-
| rail.
|
| * On that topic, once you have control of the granular
| usage data, simply aggregate all small increases or
| decreases into one big bucket that's only released into the
| overall number on a time-delay, maybe even once a year
| right after KPI/bonus season. Make it so no one thinks they
| can get "get there" by optimizing 0.1% at a time. All the
| tweaking of shades of color or moving shit 4 pixels is a
| distraction at best and at worst ends up losing the beating
| heart that engages users who really give a shit about the
| overall experience.
|
| * Assign a tangible economic cost to teams removing a long-
| time feature. Of course they always have analytics which
| say "not enough users use it." Institutionalize an
| organizational default position that's extremely skeptical
| of removing or moving (aka burying) stuff that's been there
| since the product's "boost" growth that made it what it is.
| That shit's grandfathered in and is "don't touch" unless
| they've got an overwhelming case and a senior product owner
| ready to make a career-betting stand over it.
|
| * Overall, adjust the KPI/metrics economy through targeted
| inflation and devaluation of the currency to focus on
| longer-term objectives.
|
| Bottom Up
|
| * I like your KPI offsets idea.
|
| * Also create a way of rewarding doing more of the right
| stuff. Special awards not based on specific metrics but on
| overall "getting it" and making sincere creative efforts to
| try stuff that's not likely to pay-off near-term.
|
| * Feature user feedback forums more so they get more use.
| Spiff teams that get more feedback as measured both by
| quantity and degree of depth. Add specific categories like
| "Hey, Put That Back!" to encourage that sort of feedback.
| Don't just count posts and up votes. Inflate the weight of
| long, passionate or angry posts and posts that elicit more
| written replies in addition to up votes. Apply appropriate
| discounts to frequent feedbackers and amplify feedback from
| people who signed up just to bitch about this one thing.
| Teams should fear making changes that cause long-time users
| who rarely post feedback to post emotional rants.
|
| * Find those individuals in the product, design and
| engineering orgs who believe in valuing the depth of long-
| term user commitment as much as you do. Make common cause
| with them. Have a secret club and handshake if you have to
| but support them and elicit their 'outside-channels'
| feedback. They're your best source of warning when the
| forces of short-term darkness are coming in the night with
| pitchforks (and they will).
|
| Good luck, friend. We're all counting on you!
| SergeAx wrote:
| > Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as
| desirable cars
|
| ... primarily for their price tag. There are a lot of
| enthusiasts for money in the world, much more than for driving
| at 200 mph.
|
| > the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest
| and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and
| family
|
| It was never about recommendations. MSIE and Chrome were (and
| are, but with Edge Browser instead of MSIE) shoved into
| consumers' throats by ads, marketing, bundled distribution and
| outrageous lies.
| krisoft wrote:
| > very few people have any real interest in driving a car at
| 200 MPH
|
| I agree with that.
|
| > but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood
| as desirable cars
|
| I agree with that too.
|
| > because the people who are into cars like those marques.
|
| I think that is not true. I don't care about cars. Never had
| one. Don't even have a driving licence.
|
| The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are
| desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool.
| They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street
| i notice it. I couldn't care less about the opinion of
| gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa's
| skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn't even
| hear about it.
|
| It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity
| of course.
| montagg wrote:
| You're talking both about tastemakers and the silent majority
| vs loud minority.
|
| I promise it is NOT always a good idea to follow the
| enthusiasts, because they are not at all like everyone else who
| uses your thing. Following them will skew your decisions--
| unless they are your entire customer base, so, have at it.
|
| This article imo is complaining about the effect of middle
| management product owners at large companies. There are two
| dynamics that both converge on enshittification:
|
| 1. These product managers (or product designers) are early in
| their careers and want to make a splash. They are given lower
| priority projects but try to break out by making them bigger,
| better, more non-horse-like. They over-design and over-
| complicate the solutions as a result, because they don't yet
| know when the right solution is just a refinement of what's
| tried and true. They are incentivized to do this because they
| want to break out of the mold.
|
| 2. The managers above them, or a layer or two above depending
| on company size, are risk AVERSE. They are tasked with
| delivering results regularly and consistently. If you have the
| innovation bug or are creative at this layer, you get moved
| onto projects where this is required, which is not most of
| them. Overcomplicated is fine sometimes with you but WEIRD is
| absolutely not okay (the stuff that actually could be
| innovative), and no one gets fired for following The Metrics.
|
| These two incentives clash to create overcomplicated but
| functionally poor products that aren't helping anybody out. A
| healthy skepticism of complication and a healthy skepticism of
| engagement as the sole metric (or metrics in general) is
| necessary to make good shit. Sometimes it is actually
| understanding and using things as an enthusiast would, but you
| need to bring in an understanding of how the rest of your users
| are distinctly different from the enthusiasts, too. Using your
| thing yourself and actually following your own subtler feelings
| is what produces really useful innovation, slowly and surely
| over time.
| dijit wrote:
| I don't really know how to form this into words on a short-form
| text medium like this. So please read charitably.
|
| I'm by no means a conspiracy theorist, however as I've risen the
| ranks of my chosen technical field I see more and more that what
| George Carlin said was really poignant. "You don't need a formal
| conspiracy when incentives align"[0].
|
| And incentives align really easily.
|
| Every company has some form of market analysis going on. CEO's
| will be invited to rub shoulders with the same groups of people.
| Conglomerates will have information sharing of some kind across
| all subsidiaries.
|
| Everyone is acting _independently_ , but towards the same goal.
| It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing
| about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK
| (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all
| onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the
| same "information" at the same time, and thus the _entire_ market
| moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they
| were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
|
| I'm a bit counter-culture in my missive, so take what I'm saying
| with a grain of salt, but a little nudge across a limited
| population seems to be enough - and it exists.
|
| Controversially: Blackrocks DEI initiatives are perfect public
| example of what I mean, no matter if you are pro or con, you
| can't deny the impact.
|
| [0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE3sYUJASLY
| miltonlost wrote:
| All the shitty CEOs start doing the same shit at the same time,
| because most CEOs are not exceptional workers or thinkers or
| innovators. They are simply the (in)human conduits doing as
| much as possible to siphon money from their users to the
| shareholders and Board Member class. They follow the trends
| that their consulting firms tell them to follow (the same
| consultants that work at multiple companies within the
| industry), which is why we get massive hiring at the same time,
| massive layoffs at the same time, RTO at the same time. The US
| has allowed collusion and market coordination via 3rd parties
| (so we have, e.g., landlords sharing rental prices with a 3rd
| party consultant, who then combines this data and illegally
| collude to set prices but with a Computer instead of Bob).
| Modern-day capitalism has said "monopolies and huge
| conglomerates are good because they're EfFiCiEnT!!!" (though
| what kind of efficiency and to whom the efficiency gain are
| given is entirely ignored -- the efficiency to max profit is
| the only one that matters).
|
| > It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and
| hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information
| from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev
| teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone
| gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the
| entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed
| horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from
| their uncle...
|
| The same thing too when companies hire consultants to look at
| the "market wage" and then set salaries based on what the
| consultant said. Every worker at the same "market wage" with no
| incentives to be above that.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| > And incentives align really easily.
|
| Today incentives align more easily. All these CEOs are in the
| same whatsapp group. That's how we got the RTO mandates from
| all CEOs at the same time. There was story here a year or two
| ago.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil.
| They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and
| allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They
| grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and
| generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for
| like a decade.
|
| Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This
| goddamn super app has a Twitter-like thing inside of it,
| shopping, and literally dozens of other products. Some core
| banking features are now hard to find but more importantly I had
| quite a few issues with investments as well. People who work
| there also tell me about messy problems on the financial services
| bits. It's very clear to me that in trying to become everything,
| they've deprioritized the fundamental products they offer, which
| are those related to banking. I want to store money, send and
| receive it, invest it, and have access to credit. But the
| experience of using those features has become significantly worse
| as new verticals sprouted up.
| jgilias wrote:
| That's because WeChat has really taken off in China. So there
| are companies in different markets trying to replicate that.
| And, well, from business perspective it does make sense. If you
| manage to pull it off, the reward is massive.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| Yeah definitely. I'm not oblivious to the potential gain to
| the business. I'm just frustrated with the user experience of
| the core banking products. And it seems like this is the
| direction other banks might like to follow.
| jgilias wrote:
| I feel you. Having a chat function is the last thing I want
| in my banking app lol.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I believe the "Peter principle" [1] also holds for companies. A
| company grows until it eventually outlives its mission and
| loses focus.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| Did a quick stalk based on your Brazilian name... I am
| talking about your competitor ofc!
|
| I have an account with you guys too but haven't kept up with
| the developments at all. I do wonder what direction you're
| going in - particularly given the tech company valuation the
| US market has given ya.
|
| (I don't expect you to reply to this)
| rambambram wrote:
| I have the same with my banking app here in The Netherlands. I
| don't know if they try to be a super app, but since a year or
| two they put all kinds of annoying ads inside their app and
| unnecessary notifications on top of my account overview. Just
| show me the numbers, I pay for your service.
| crote wrote:
| It's the same with mobile payment. AFAIK there isn't a
| _single_ bank left in The Netherlands which has its _own_
| mobile tap-to-pay app, everyone has switched to Google
| Wallet.
|
| Good for them that they want to save a few bucks on
| developers, but why do I have to give my payment info to the
| devil? It's a third party which has nothing to do with the
| payment itself, and the fact that some banks used to have
| their own tap-to-pay apps shows that it clearly isn't a
| technical requirement.
| gmuslera wrote:
| Doesn't matter what you want anymore. You are not the client, but
| the product. They are the ones getting faster horses.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > They are the ones getting faster horses.
|
| To a point, until stage 3 enshittification hits, and the
| business claws back _all_ the value.
| bluGill wrote:
| Until I finally get fed up and leave. There is value in my
| sharing pictures of my kids with distance friends and seeing
| pictures of their kids - but Facebook has got so bad at that I
| finally gave up logging in and not I'm not a product that
| exists for them. And in turn because I'm not there facebook is
| less valueable for my friends and so they are more likely to
| leave in the future.
|
| The only question are people like me outliers that can be
| ignored - there will always be a few people you can't get.
| However I could be a sign of the end.
| api wrote:
| What this is describing is not what the Ford quote is talking
| about. Netflix and all the rest didn't TikTokify because they
| were trying to create some massive visionary innovation, but the
| opposite.
|
| They did it because it's more profitable to shovel slop than to
| distribute quality. Quality content is expensive to make. Slop
| isn't. The way you do that is by hypnotizing people with
| addiction. To do that you have to have control over what people
| see and use algorithms to optimize that to "maximize engagement."
| You need your users mindlessly scrolling, not searching and
| categorizing and exploring. You need to disengage the neocortex
| and engage the brain stem.
|
| TikTok is being copied by everyone because they nailed this
| formula better than anyone. They didn't invent it, just perfected
| it. I'd say Meta/Facebook invented it, which is why Zuckerberg
| should be known as the man who destroyed the Internet.
|
| The next step beyond TikTok is a 100% AI generated algorithmic
| feed. Drop the human creators entirely. Everyone gets a
| personalized feed of low-quality AI slop tuned for maximum
| engagement.
|
| Addiction is the best business model.
| kelnos wrote:
| Part of the problem specifically with Netflix is that they lost
| the rights to most of the good stuff, or at least the stuff
| that everyone wants to see, because the Disneys of the world
| set up their own streaming services and pulled their content
| from Netflix.
|
| So in a way Netflix _had_ to learn how to push slop. Because
| they can 't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or
| whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-
| profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises
| were born decades before Netflix even existed.
|
| Even the good stuff Netflix has (like say Black Mirror) isn't
| going to be enough to keep customers unless they get people
| watching some slop.
| bru wrote:
| Related: enshittification.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| Taek wrote:
| The root problem seems to be monopoly and fragmentation.
|
| When Ford was working on a car, people who wanted a faster horse
| could go to the horse store. There were reasonable alternatives
| to Ford's new method of transportation.
|
| But here, you can't recreate Spotify from 2015. You'll never get
| the rights to play the music for users. Same with Netflix, you'll
| never get the rights to show the movies.
|
| Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even if you know exactly
| what content your user wants, you can't fetch it for them because
| it was posted in some other walled garden, and that wall stops
| you from competing.
|
| If you want a faster horse, change the laws so that people can
| build faster horses and compete.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Maybe it depends on your listening habits, but for me, Spotify
| and Netflix are very different experiences.
|
| Spotify has almost anything I look for. Netflix I struggle to
| find anything of interest.
| kmacdough wrote:
| Sure, spotify has maintained a near-complete catalogue where
| Netflix hasnt.
|
| But I no longer find Spotify any good at finding new music,
| beyond manually looking through artist catalogues.
|
| For context, try out Pandora's recommendations. They haven't
| improved, yet they're orders of magnitude better than
| Spotify. The songs are hand annotated for style, content,
| etc. As a result, they recommend truly new songs with
| regularity that truly match the vibe.
|
| Compare with Spotify, where everything is based on
| statistical "people also listened to X". Everything converges
| on some pop form of whatever genre and songs you've listened
| to a lot. It'll play odd, out-of context songs from the same
| artist before it'll find you new artists. Sure they have a
| few manicured playlists, but its nothing compared to the
| value Pandora has provided for years.
| Taek wrote:
| Spotify only has about half of the music that I like. A lot
| of it is remixes and jams from Japan that can only be found
| on youtube, soundcloud, or in some cases it's actually only
| available on private trackers.
| gampleman wrote:
| Good luck riding your fast horse through most urban areas (and
| parking it... er stabling it). All of those things were routine
| in urban areas before car adoption (I believe Manhattan for
| instance often had stables in upper floors, leading to some
| interesting design to get horses up and down).
| Freak_NL wrote:
| One upside: by degrading the experience1 Netflix did make it a
| lot easier to simply stop your subscription and hop over to
| another streaming service for a few months.
|
| A very interesting development: in the Netherlands KPN, one of
| the largest telcos, introduced a feature where any household with
| several of their products in use (e.g., two cellphones and fiber
| internet) could choose a free 'gift'2. The gift is a choice from
| a bunch of subscriptions, including Netflix, Disney+, and HBO
| Max. _And you get to switch monthly if you want to._ So we
| ditched our own Netflix subscription and started watching Disney+
| for now. Perhaps we 'll switch in a few months.
|
| These services probably realise that their customers are made up
| of 'hoppers', and 'stackers' (people who take out multiple
| subscriptions to streaming services at once). I wonder what the
| distribution for each service is.
|
| 1: In part forced upon them by the content owners waking up and
| wanting to set up their own exclusive shops of course, and in
| part because of, well, greed (the UI suckiness).
|
| 2: The trade-off is obviously that this stimulates consumers to
| consolidate their telco products with them. In my case this was
| already so, so for me this is just a small incentive to stay with
| them (i.e., it saves me EUR9 a month).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm surprised that the services don't seem to have updated for
| that reality yet; it feels like there's only one or two "hits"
| on each service per year. They did already adapt a bit by no
| longer releasing a whole season in one go, so you need at least
| three months of subscription for a 10 episode weekly series.
|
| But what they need is rolling releases across the whole year,
| so that once one production is "done", the next one rolls
| around.
|
| (maybe they already do, I don't know, I'm just thinking of
| Stranger Things which seems to be Netflix' main seller at the
| moment)
| vanschelven wrote:
| The title is a great hook, but it doesn't really cover what's
| being described... which is the TikTokification of everything and
| (implicitly) that there's some bait & switch going on.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Earlier people used to spend 2-3 hrs watching and absorbing a
| single movie. Now people spend 5 hrs scrolling tiktok. So in a
| sense time spent on content has actually increased. People
| don't need filler and lengthy buildups. People have been
| exposed to so much culture they can almost predict the general
| plotline so no need to spend time on that. Give me the plot
| twist or the drop (in case of spotify) with short relevant
| context. I remember Balaji saying something to this effect. He
| said don't give me filler content, just give me "fixed point"
| content which doesn't change after successively summarization
| and pruning.
| thih9 wrote:
| I wouldn't give TikTok too much credit or blame. The process
| started earlier, with snapchat stories UX dominating platforms,
| and feeds UX becoming popular before that, etc...
|
| There is an aphorism that with enough A/B testing every website
| turns into a porn app or a gambling app. I guess we're observing
| something similar.
| bloak wrote:
| This sounds like an economic problem with no obvious solution:
| network effects => monopoly => "optimising" for typical user.
| Where there isn't a monopoly (or anything close to a monopoly)
| you find different firms specialising in different ways. For
| example, small independent restaurants survive by being
| distinctive, not by trying to imitate McDonald's.
|
| YouTube and LinkedIn are practically monopolies. Netflix isn't a
| monopoly in the same way but you usually don't have a choice of
| streaming services for watching a particular film or series so
| it's different from being able to buy the same cheese or the same
| wine from any of several different supermarkets.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, more like Netflix (and we might as well add Amazon here)
| became popular because of "the long tail". Once, I could easily
| find 1930's classics like "Stella Dallas" on Netflix (and early
| Ultravox! on Amazon when they would have to be ordered from
| brick and mortar music stores at the time).
|
| For some reason (perhaps because it costs money to keep a large
| catalog?) Netflix retracted the long tail while Amazon at least
| kept theirs unfurled.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| My guess is that Netflix is tried to cultivate a semi-premium
| brand (but not premium in an Apple TV+ way), which means
| getting rid of the long tail in favor of what's hip, sexy,
| exciting, etc. Whereas while Amazon is making expensive
| boondoggles like _Ring of Power_ , they are also comfortable
| with keeping dozens of conspiracy theory documentaries on. I
| guess that's in line with the identity of their main store,
| and the concept of Amazon being a series of warehouses.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > no obvious solution: network effects => monopoly =>
| "optimising" for typical user.
|
| ahem. We have a solution for the monopoly part. We've had it
| since the 19th century. We just stopped enforcing it in the 70s
| and 80s when the Chicago School convinced everyone that as long
| as judge Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" can be trotted out to
| prove that the "free market" is working and prices are low.
| est wrote:
| I to miss old internet where everything is placed under a
| catalog, instead of endless stream of crap I dont like.
| ozim wrote:
| I hate algo feeds that change each time I refresh.
|
| On LI I lost already like 3 articles that I really wanted to read
| but I clicked notification and I can never get that articles
| back.
| robofanatic wrote:
| Its like when I go bird watching and finally see that elusive
| bird. but if I lose my focus for a split second, its gone,
| never to be seen again.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| Honestly that last sentence about Substack hit me hard.
|
| I just want them to import a syntax highlighting library but
| instead they are pushing video content into my face
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Why don't companies have multiple recommendation strategies.
| One for power-users. One for casual users etc. Have the router
| infront of these models to intelligent switch between the
| different styles. In fact, there are times when I want indepth
| analysis. But after understanding the topic, I need short form
| content or memes which "update" or "entertain" the same topic
| in ongoing manner.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Doing all that would hugely increase opex, a non-starter for
| companies, especially the ones prioritizing growth over
| everything else.
| totetsu wrote:
| I was just thinking today about how much better my media
| experience had been in 2010s with XBMC on a spare e-waste even
| then pc plugged into the TV than anything available today, and
| how much I enjoyed listening to the music of my music neighbors
| last.fm from my listen history I scrobbled from foobar2000..
| andai wrote:
| I think Spotify was perfect in 2008. I think people's need to
| justify their existence by constantly doing things creates an
| unfortunate incentive where perfect products are mutated beyond
| recognizability.
|
| (This coupled with the tendency to hire more people as you get
| more popular, you have more people mutating the thing. Also
| novelty bias...)
| madmountaingoat wrote:
| In those early days the Spotify user experience needed to try
| and differentiate and put up barriers to being copied. Later it
| suffered from being purely metric driven and tracking things
| like user-engagement thinking it's a proxy for happiness with
| the platform. And then later still they start to mostly care
| about the cost of delivery.
| drcongo wrote:
| I just stop paying for things when they do this.
| cratermoon wrote:
| They don't care. They now make more money selling ads and the
| user data they've collected.
| andai wrote:
| Ironically the old horses were faster! Run XP on modern hardware
| (if you can get it running at all) and you'll see what I mean.
| Explorer opens fully rendered in the span of a single frame
| (0.016 seconds). And XP was very slow and bloated for its time!
|
| It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than
| the native host, which boggles my mind.
| svachalek wrote:
| It's amazing how fast we can eat up new hardware capabilities.
| The old 6502 1-MHz CPUs were capable of running much more
| sophisticated software than most people today imagine, with
| 1/1000 or 1/millionth the hardware. And now we're asking LLMs
| to answer math questions, using billions of operations to
| perform something a single CPU instruction can handle.
| TuringTest wrote:
| The classical answer of why more hardware resources are
| needed for the same tasks is that the new system allows for
| way much more flexibility. A problem domain can be thoroughly
| optimized for a single purpose, but then it can only be used
| for that purpose alone.
|
| This is quite true for LLMs. They can do basic arithmetic,
| but they can also read problem statements in many diverse
| mathematical areas and describe what they're about, or make
| (right or wrong) suggestions on how they can be solved.
|
| Classic AIs suffered the Frame problem, where some common-
| sense reasoning depended on facts not stated in the system
| logic.
|
| Now, LLMs have largely solved the Frame problem. It turns out
| the solution was to compress large swathes of human knowledge
| in a way that can be accessed fast, so that the relevant
| parts of all that knowledge are activated when needed. Of
| course, this approach to flexibility will need lots of
| resources.
| IshKebab wrote:
| To be fair even with modern software bloat the overall
| experience is a lot better now than it was in the XP days. I
| think it's mainly due to SSDs. They were a huge step change in
| performance and we fortunately haven't regressed back to the
| slowness of the HDD era.
|
| At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work
| that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(
| hedora wrote:
| Are you running Linux or something? I installed Win 11 in a
| VM, and no one that's seen its first boot screen would claim
| the experience has improved since the day of shovelware-
| bloated XP desktops. It only gets worse and worse from there.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I think they were designed at the time of less powerful
| machines so they had to be designed better. Nowadays there is
| not as much push to eke out every last bit of performance
| because there is loads of power at everyone's disposal and
| developers are pushed to focus on features first without being
| given time to refine performance because features mean
| adoption. So the bloat creeps up, and hardware makers keep
| designing more powerful machines which further enables the
| bloatiness. It is a vicious cycle.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| This is part of why I still have a MacBook2,1 running Snow
| Leopard. Even with its 4GB of memory and Core2Duo, it's
| optimized to prioritize my input. It also never changes, which
| is a form of stability I've come to cherish.
|
| Another point is that you can train a horse, or even eat it if
| in dire straits. You own that horse. I can't disable things I
| want to disable, and names, locations, and features change (or
| are removed) with no notice between minor version updates. I
| can't tell you the last time I built something for a new Mac,
| or wanted to.
|
| I don't know MacOS today, and it certainly doesn't make me feel
| like I own my computer.
|
| I'm less harsh about modern Windows because I view it as amends
| for Microsoft causing the bot/ransomware crisis of the last 15
| years. Still not for me, but at least I neuter it into
| usefulness.
| Gud wrote:
| My setup(FreeBSD+XFCE) hasn't changed at all over the last 20
| years and is just as fast as it's always been.
|
| I use virtualisation for the rest.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| I also dislike the TikTokification of everything, but I also know
| that all of us on this platform are wrong in the sense that we're
| not the user being designed for.
|
| Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't
| design for nerds like us, they design for the average person.
| Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average
| person.
|
| And most people on this planet are more or less happy with
| whatever they're presented with because they don't care about
| technology.
|
| And when you control what's presented to people, not they (and
| they don't care), you can push them to consume what you want them
| to consume.
|
| I heard a YC group partner once that he's worked with a ton of
| delivery apps. Many of them start out as differentiated apps for
| ordering from the best "hole in the wall" places or the app for
| authentic foreign cuisines, only to discover that the best growth
| hack is getting McDonald's on the app, because that'll be your
| top seller, instantly.
|
| Most people just do the default thing everyone does--and we're
| probably all like that in one aspect or another of our lives, and
| that's who many experiences are designed for.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a lot of money to be made in letting people order
| takeout from McDonalds while not feeling like the kind of
| person who orders takeout from McDonald's.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| I hate that more than McDonald's. The restaurants making
| mediocre-tasting but instagramable food in a place that spent
| more on the interior design consultant than the chef who
| created the menu.
|
| At least McDonald's doesn't pretend.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This is the idea of premium mediocre:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-
| mediocre-l...
| mppm wrote:
| > And most people on this planet are more or less happy with
| whatever they're presented with because they don't care about
| technology.
|
| I think this is a debatable statement. It _could_ be true, but
| I am increasingly convinced that enshittification,
| TikTokification, AIfication, etc. is proceeding _despite_ what
| the average person wants. Average does not mean gaping,
| uninspired idiot. I think people in general do notice that
| everything is broken, short-lived, watered down and ad-ridden.
| But what to do? When every company does it, voting with your
| wallet becomes practically impossible.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| No, I totally don't mean that people are idiots, I think it's
| largely ignorance. I, for instance am fully ignorant of audio
| stuff. I'm mostly happy with Sony/Apple audio products, which
| audiophiles probably feel the same way I feel about chain
| restaurants.
|
| It's true that it's also increasingly easier to be presented
| with an average choice because everything is aggregated
| somewhere and will mostly converge on a few options.
|
| To your other point, a lot of this is also on an indifference
| curve. I said what the average person _wants_ , not what the
| average person is _ecstatic about_.
|
| But most people don't spend time seeking out the best
| possible experience and go with the good enough experience
| they're presented with.
| bluGill wrote:
| Which is a real problem for the rare person (ie me) who doesn't
| like McDonalds. Go to a new city and I get recommendations of
| McDonalds, and the dozen "you won't believe we are not
| McDonalds" - never mind that I don't like burgers, that is
| about all I can find when looking for a meal.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| True. Though I wouldn't even say it's rare to not like
| McDonald's. But McDonald's is an option most people are kinda
| okay with, which is what they optimize for.
|
| Nobody will ever describe McDonald's as a transcendental
| experience. But it's consistent (same everywhere) and
| everyone can agree on it (vs. convincing a group to order
| from a random Indian place).
|
| On HN, we're obsessive weirdos who WILL seek out niche
| experiences (the interface of this very website is a case in
| point). But most people aren't.
| cubefox wrote:
| A substantial fraction of us might indeed have some degree
| of ASD or ADHD.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Or maybe we're just nerds, not everything needs to
| qualify as a clinical diagnosis
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| This comment is distinctly incurious. Sure, it doesn't
| have to be a clinical diagnosis but that's also kinda the
| point of talking about it so casually: it doesn't always
| have to rise to the level of a clinical diagnosis. Some
| people will not be satisfied with the "we're just nerds"
| explanation and that's okay too. (Indeed, obsessive
| weirdos, eh?)
| cubefox wrote:
| Exactly. And noticing that you might have some degree of
| ASD, or the like, enables you to also to notice typical
| symptomatic weaknesses, aside from strengths. Which might
| not be obvious to you otherwise. Addressing a weakness is
| much easier once it is identified. ("weird nerd" is too
| vague a diagnosis)
| klabb3 wrote:
| Overwhelmingly, products are designed to maximize total
| recurring user interaction, aka engagement or attention
| grabbing. This is the proxy for ad revenue, the most popular
| business model (even if Netflix is different). Look at Quora,
| LinkedIn and even SO, which essentially degraded into content
| farms for these reasons, largely downstream of the Google
| search funnel.
|
| But engagement maximization looks the same everywhere - it's
| communicating with the amygdala of the user, not their
| consciousness. And in a way, everyone's amygdala is kind of the
| same and generic (sugar foods, violence, rage bait, boobs,
| chock value etc). Products that are largely designed for higher
| consciousness are more varied, such as most books. But those
| drive less engagement.
|
| The amygdala wants more of the same, and the prefrontal cortex
| seems to want variation. My view is that you can't have the
| chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a
| bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines. You have
| to compartmentalize to protect yourself from your own amygdala.
| Same goes for media. Even well meaning product managers will be
| completely fooled if they simply follow the metrics.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Yep, totally. Also, much of Netflix's growth now comes from
| their ad-supported tier, so they're definitely part of that
| attention economy.
|
| And part of the problem is that if somebody (TikTok) has the
| most engaging format possible (vertical short-form video) and
| you (Substack, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) don't, you're at a
| strict disadvantage. So you enable short-form video, boost it
| in the algorithm, etc. no matter if it's a fit with your
| product because people will watch it if it's put in front of
| them.
|
| > My view is that you can't have the chocolate muffins and
| raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both
| Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines.
|
| And the problem is that in media, the prefrontal cortex stuff
| will never make as much money as the amygdala stuff, so few
| platforms will survive by focusing on the prefrontal cortex
| stuff.
|
| A big reason HN is still so cozy and surfaces cool articles
| and discussions is because YC doesn't have to monetize it or
| optimize for engagement.
|
| But imagine trying to start HN today...
| famahar wrote:
| >But imagine trying to start HN today...
|
| Reddit is a good example of what a monetized version could
| look like. It's a shell of its former self. NFT avatar
| customization, engagement achievements, ads in feed and
| comments, layers of friction to simplify the experience.
| Such a mess.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Yeah, for sure. And yet the numbers are up. This is
| precisely what happens when products cross into the
| mainstream. They get worse for enthusiasts and get better
| for the average person (and more profitable).
| dsign wrote:
| Coat the carrots in chocolate?
|
| One can always do as in "The good place" show: put a bunch of
| hotties to talk about and play with moral philosophy. I think
| the show was somewhat evil in that approach, but at the same
| time, it was also morally sound...
| conductr wrote:
| > Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average
| person.
|
| They're generally designed for engagement. Nobody is
| particularly asking for this type of experience it's just that
| Tiktok has discovered the most addictive - eh hum, I mean
| engaging - experience thus far. So they're being copied.
|
| Netflix is a little different though as if people open the app
| and always see the same top titles listed due to it being an
| alphabetical index, then they quickly think nothing new is ever
| there. Or, it's too hard to find. So they're tricking people
| into thinking there's a bunch of fresh/good content. There's
| also a cultural phenomenon where everyone discusses "what shows
| have you been watching lately?" so the Trending aspects of
| their recommendations is to help people get on board with the
| trend; and, to push momentum and create the trend too
| obviously.
| techpineapple wrote:
| I think I understand the economics here, but it bugs me there
| aren't more slow-growth self-funded places to fill in these
| niches.
| pal9000i wrote:
| Companies work on averages, statistically what retains, engages
| the users.
|
| But Spotify is far better now than it was 10 years ago. I still
| have playlists, I can still instantly find any song I want. The
| added bonus is the discovery engine. So the UX now is a superset
| of what it was before.
| dogleash wrote:
| Oh come on. I have this thing open all day when I'm working,
| you can't bullshit me like that. It's a not good UI, its
| serviceable.
|
| It's not good by any conceivable metric other than those they
| have internally decided represent business goals. If you want
| to have a tautological argument that makes it good, because
| those goals are the only goals that matter. That's a boring
| response to an article about how business incentives have
| turned the UI into trash.
|
| FFS the Play button frequently breaks requiring a refresh. And
| as much as I appreciate the inevitable response that I'm
| holding it wrong, how is that my problem?
| darkshark wrote:
| did anyone try taste dot io?
|
| It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on
| your taste.
| darkshark wrote:
| did anyone commenting here did a shot to taste dot io?
|
| It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on
| your taste.
| raldi wrote:
| People overuse the original quote as an excuse to never listen to
| customers, but the real wisdom is to ask _why_ they're asking for
| a faster horse (to get around quicker) and see if you can think
| of a better way to meet that goal.
| 9rx wrote:
| Overused and misattributed. What Ford actually said was: "If
| there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to
| get the other person's point of view and see things from that
| person's angle as well as from your own"
| billmalarky wrote:
| ^ this guy knows Jobs To Be Done theory ;)
|
| For those who don't, reading "Competing Against Luck" by
| Clayton Christensen will dramatically improve your ability to
| create successful products/services.
| deepsun wrote:
| > Spotify today is... basically Netflix
|
| Yep, Spotify keeps showing me podcasts right at the top, even
| though I've never listened to one on their platform ever.
| Sometimes with titles like "how we f**ed yesterday", while I keep
| it open on my work computer. It looks like they know better what
| I want!
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| A mention for Amazon search here. Which is a very slow horse and
| always has been, when even a horse that can walk would greatly
| benefit their customers.
|
| I can only guess that for some reason Amazon think they make more
| money by not making search work. Work, generally, like only
| actually returning things with the search term or, work
| specifically, like letting you specify hard drive sizes above
| 6TB.
|
| But I find it hard to believe this shit horse actually drives
| sales. I always end up looking elsewhere in frustration.
| ramses0 wrote:
| "Lisp and Email" ... all languages grow a half-baked lisp, all
| programs expand to read email. Now: all content/social sites
| devolve to tik-tok?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
| bambax wrote:
| If you want a faster horse, your best bet is to make it yourself.
|
| For media library, I use Jellyfin and host all my media files
| locally on a NAS.
|
| I self-host all my projects on that same NAS, which works just
| fine and and makes me not need to subscribe to some offer or
| other from hosting providers.
|
| I quit SmugMug last year, because it turns out, hosting my photos
| on the NAS costs nothing, and remaking the small part of the
| SmugMug web interface that I need is trivial.
|
| And for vehicles, I also made myself a faster horse, by bolting a
| Bafang motor on an ordinary mountain bike. Things break
| occasionally on that thing, but I know how to fix them, and so I
| do.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| There is a flip side to this graph.
|
| Every entertainment platform becomes video centric.
|
| Every discussion platform becomes political.
|
| As someone who prefers text and static images and doesn't like
| politics, this is really bothering me right now.
|
| Adding to the list: image-sharing platforms, Instagram, Pinterest
| and Imgur, are also Tiktok now, specially if you use the apps
| instead of the website.
|
| Tumblr and Flickr somehow have resisted Tiktok-fication so far.
| qoez wrote:
| I feel like they just want the era of movies that existed in 2012
| (as opposed to the ones they get on the front page today). The
| experience hasn't changed _that much_
| chanux wrote:
| > An inconsistent stream of ever-changing content
|
| Instagram. I have clicked through an ad, yes AN AD, and came back
| to get to another ad and had it refreshed away.
|
| I hope they are doing this because it works for them, somehow.
|
| PS: LinkedIn does this too.
| mushufasa wrote:
| The examples in this blog are of online streaming media changing
| from a wide searchable library to an unsearchable tailored
| recommendation feed.
|
| As I understand, licensing dynamics were the main reason for
| Netflix's change, not pure product design. In 2012, most movie
| studios licensed their catalog to Netflix, while 7 years later
| they took away the licensing to compete with proprietary walled
| streaming platforms. Due to the smaller catalog, Netflix could
| not design that open searchable streaming library; they changed
| their design to make the best of the more limited library.
| myself248 wrote:
| I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User".
|
| To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and
| wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of
| a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But
| if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a
| quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads
| ago but is now mysteriously gone from the very same list it
| appeared in, then you've clawed one additional user into your
| metrics and the VCs give you a treat.
|
| These people don't care about the service and they're the worst
| users to cater to, but everyone caters to them because they're
| the only ones left. Hence, TikTokization.
| fergie wrote:
| OP is dunking on Tiktok, but the comments and quality of dialog
| on Tiktok are far better than any other social network, even with
| more than a billion users.
| mattskr wrote:
| I just want to pile in that the old netflix layout was top tier.
| I LOVED it and because of it, stumbled onto tons of awesome
| movies I never heard of at the time and were actually
| interesting. Their algorithm back then was the best. I never had
| a problem finding movies to ACTUALLY WATCH. The whole reason I
| quit my subscription a few years ago was for the fact I end up
| burning up time "looking" for something to watch. Then don't. I
| stopped paying for the "movie browsing simulator" a little after
| The Witcher 1st season. A few months ago, I got another month
| because I thought it might be better. Ha. No.
|
| In this case, it's less "faster horse" and more "quit with the
| stupid fucking song and dance, and give me the damn thing I paid
| for without all this extra stupid bullshit that makes the
| experience worse."
| jmull wrote:
| If people can't find a sustainable business model around that
| thing you want, it's just not going to be widely available.
|
| It's hard to say for sure if Netflix could have/should have kept
| going in the direction they were going in 2012. But they didn't
| seem to think so.
|
| You can't necessarily count on businesses springing up to satisfy
| your personal interests and tastes. Especially large-scale
| businesses, which are always going to gravitate toward the center
| of large markets. It's great when it happens, but it's basically
| just luck when it does.
| joshuaturner wrote:
| The problem is with the definition of "sustainable business
| model."
|
| Could you maintain a profitable business and continue steady
| growth? Sure. Could you become a unicorn and IPO within the
| next 5 years? Unlikely.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Or, in other words, our entire society is focused on creating
| fake business that can only survive in a monopolized market
| (or can't even then).
|
| That's because the money is concentrated into a few dumb
| people with limited capacity to invest it. So they'll push it
| into a handful of companies that will destroy whatever
| sustainable companies that exist on the same market.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| >The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new
| markets instead of just new products in existing ones
|
| It's interesting that SV outwardly says it "wants to create
| entirely new markets instead of products in existing ones",
| meanwhile the actual experienced outcome for users is the same
| experience across multiple markets.
|
| SV is somehow failing on both of its metrics here. It's creating
| entirely homogeneous products across all existing markets.
| ikanreed wrote:
| By "create new markets" they've always meant "Become useless
| middlemen by displacing the existing bridge between makers and
| consumers"
|
| Usually their new bridge is modestly more convenient in some
| way, but opens the door to the worst kind of enshittification.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Henry Ford's point wasn't that people didn't want faster horses
| but that they'd buy the car they never knew they needed - instead
| of a horse.
|
| With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and
| it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something
| else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It
| might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But
| judging from the lack of successful things in this space,
| probably not.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It comes down to less is better. You don't want a faster horse,
| you want less horses on the road so your horse isn't traffic,
| it's a horse. You don't want less TikTok, you want less crap
| using TikTok. Horses were the same, leaving crap all over the
| cities until Henry Ford's Model A. So we can solve this problem
| by inventing a lot better, much cleaner TikTok. In the meantime,
| sell manure shovels.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Welcome to the world of restoration and restomods!
|
| Remember Google Reader?
|
| What if I want a better Google Reader?!
|
| * beats dead horse * ... sorry, horsey.
| jerf wrote:
| Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm lucky enough to
| have had a CD collection before music streaming is a thing. Now
| my phone has enough capacity (since I still use phones that can
| take SD cards) to casually carry my entire collection around. I
| can play it in any order I want.
|
| I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on,
| since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing
| I have my own collection though since it tracks my interests
| poorly.
|
| I've gotten back into buying my own video too. I don't consume a
| ton of video and I dropped Netflix streaming a while ago because
| the delta between me marking something for the queue and actually
| getting to it was becoming _routinely_ larger than the amount of
| time Netflix would still have the thing I wanted to see.
|
| The problem is, I don't even see the second derivative on this
| trend turning, let alone the first. Metric-driven development, by
| its very nature, will take away every knob from you that you
| could conceivably use to drive their metrics lower. I think
| that's a reasonable approximation of the root cause of the
| reality observed in the OP. If you happen to agree with their
| metrics then hey, good times for you, but the odds of that are
| low since you're probably not looking to maximize the
| monetization they can extract from you as priority one.
|
| Therefore, the only option is, get off metric-driven-development
| platforms. There is no alternative and will be even less of one
| as time goes on.
|
| I suspect in the very long run this metric-driven development
| will eventually die off as all consumers come around to this
| realization one way or another and start turning to other
| alternatives, but it can easily be 5-10 years before there's
| enough of us for those "alternatives" to be able to survive in
| the market. Fortunately, MP3 players haven't gone anywhere.
| (Although it takes some searching to find ones that aren't also
| trying to match the streaming services and stick to old-school
| "play what you ask for and not anything else, unless you ask for
| shuffling or randomness explicitly".)
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Where do you buy videos from? Do you mean new films and shows?
| How, I thought practically all of it is locked down DRM only
| streaming? Or do you mean DVD/BluRay?
| jerf wrote:
| DVD and BluRay, yes.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| > I still use phones that use SD cards
|
| I can't tell you how much I miss removable storage
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| This is the way. If I care about watching something in the
| future, I buy the Blu-ray and rip it. I _already_ have
| basically all the music I could ever want in mp3 format. Plex
| (or Jellyfin if you prefer that) provides a pleasant UI, and I
| don 't need those services any more.
| rambambram wrote:
| This. Masterfully written down, by the way. I subscribed to
| your blog through RSS, because I also want to do 'the
| algorithm' myself. Interesting story about the intersection of
| law and tech you have on your blog!
| robertclaus wrote:
| Is this the logical conclusion of the marginal user effect? If
| your business model depends on growth, you need to keep changing
| the product to attract new users even at the cost of quality to
| old ones that are unlikely to leave.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I feel that it basically comes down to promotion driven
| development. Things are changed because they are justifications
| for someone promotion. Cut the bloat!
| MortyWaves wrote:
| That Netflix screenshot looks _fucking great_ : clear, usable, no
| distractions, more than 5 items on a page. What a mess "modern"
| UX/UI has turned into.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| truly the mcMaster-Carr of video
| hollywood_court wrote:
| Dang. Now I've got to go listen to Tom T Hall.
| scotty79 wrote:
| tiktokification of content sites ... tinderisation of dating apps
| ... similar interaction model
| fifticon wrote:
| I hate the modern dark-pattern shop UIs, which tries to make it
| as difficult as possible to enumerate what is actually available.
| One example is when queries reply with 'what is most like' what
| you asked for, instead of honestly answering "no, even though
| movie X exists, we dont currently have it in our offering". Even
| though amazon prime is the poorest streaming option, I appreciate
| that they make it possible to exhaustively page through their
| entire offering, which I have done on a few occasions
| ("possible", because it is the usual user-intelligence-hostile
| ajax-javascript cursorless experience, where your browser is
| staggering in gigabytes as you approach the 3000-movie mark)
| dswalter wrote:
| There's a fundamental reality that shapes both Netflix and
| Spotify's trajectory: content licensing. 2012 Netflix had access
| to vastly more of everyone else's library, so it was closer to an
| indexed search of what was available that one could watch and
| then getting that video onto your screen. Over time, other
| companies understood that they were underpricing their content
| and Netflix was reaping the benefits. Once external forces
| adjusted, the TV/film bidding wars began. Today, netflix doesn't
| have nearly as much content as they used to have.
|
| That risk (losing all content and facing extinction) is what
| pushed Netflix in the direction of being a content-producer,
| rather than a content aggregator. I agree with everyone's points
| on the influence of the median user in diluting the quality of
| the content Netflix produces, but that's not the only forced that
| pushed us here. Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to
| broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for
| licensing.
|
| Being a faster horse wasn't an option available to either Netflix
| or Spotify; there is no path for a 'better 2012 version of
| netflix or spotify' in 2025. They each had to change species or
| die, and they chose to keep living.
| esperent wrote:
| > Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden
| beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for
| licensing.
|
| I wasn't aware that Spotify lacked much in the way of
| mainstream western music.
|
| _Are_ they having licensing issues?
| barbazoo wrote:
| If they do then it's not noticeable by the average user.
| VanTheBrand wrote:
| It's less obvious than with Netflix because the songs don't
| completely disappear. Spotify pays different rates for
| different songs depending on the label so there are certain
| songs they'd rather you not listen to and other content it's
| much cheaper for them if you listen to so they push you to
| that content.
| lazystar wrote:
| didnt neil young pull his stuff from spotify in protest?
| al_borland wrote:
| Apple Music still offers library management, with their entire
| catalog to choose from. They try to play all sides, with
| algorithmic playback, radio, add to library, and playlists.
| Adding to library and playlists do seem to be core features,
| but I'm curious how many people put in the effort when it's not
| explicitly required.
| bloppe wrote:
| Is that different from Spotify? Am I using Spotify wrong? I
| mostly just curate and listen to my own playlists
| cpmsmith wrote:
| Apple Music's library features much more closely mirror the
| iTunes style, i.e. you have a library you can browse
| outside of just the "liked songs" pseudo-playlist. For
| instance, in Spotify (AFAICT) there's no way to browse all
| the songs in your library by artist; you can only list the
| artists you've followed, which is unrelated to whose songs
| you've liked, and go to their general artist page.
|
| Personally, this is the top contender for a reason for me
| to switch away from Spotify.
| al_borland wrote:
| Does Spotify have a library option? I haven't been a heavy
| Spotify user, but last time I tried it, it seemed like I
| could "follow" artists as a proxy to adding something to a
| library, but I found it all pretty confusing.
|
| I know they have playlists, but I was looking more of the
| feature like, "these are all the songs I'm interested in,
| that I will use to build my playlists or shuffle... because
| I don't want to try and remember everything as I wade
| through a 60m track library of all the songs available on
| Spotify."
| mr_mitm wrote:
| You can like songs, which will then be added to your
| playlist of liked songs. Sounds like that's waht you
| want.
| chilmers wrote:
| Um, yes they do. The left sidebar on the desktop app is
| titled "Your Library". On the mobile app, it is the third
| nav icon at the bottom right of the screen.
|
| You can save albums to the library by opening the album
| page and clicking the circled-plus "Save to Your Library"
| button. It then appears in your library under "Albums".
| You can search the library, sort by recently played,
| recently added, alphabetical, creator. You can also save
| singles, playlists, podcasts and artists to your library.
| If you go into settings, you can connect your library to
| locally stored files.
|
| I could go on. This took me literally 1 minute of opening
| up Spotify and looking at the UI.
| cg5280 wrote:
| If you only stream your music then the difference is
| negligible, but Apple Music blends Spotify-like streaming
| music with your personal library of music you own. It's
| built off of iTunes in this regard. One perk of this is
| that you can upload your own music and it shows up
| everywhere matched to the real albums and artists;
| Spotify's support for streaming local files is much
| clunkier.
| Manfred wrote:
| On the other hand they are sometimes bad keeping content
| matched when you add an album to your library and, I assume,
| the distributor replaces the album with a different version.
| This also happens with "matched content" when you added a
| ripped version of music you own.
| titzer wrote:
| So glad I collect physical media of all the good stuff.
| crote wrote:
| > They each had to change species or die, and they chose to
| keep living.
|
| Did they, though? 2025 Netflix is _extremely_ close to having a
| worse UX than piracy, and it 's already far more expensive. Are
| people going to pay a fortune for Netflix when their handy
| nephew can hook them up to his far superior Jellyfin instance
| for a sixpack of beer?
|
| It's a tragedy of the commons, really. The whole value is in
| having a complete catalogue available for the casual viewer,
| and making $10-$20 from someone wanting to watch a random
| decade-old movie twice a month or so. Break up that catalogue
| into twenty different services each charging $15, and that same
| casual viewer isn't going to subscribe to a single one of them.
|
| If the streaming industry doesn't get its shit together they
| are either going to lose viewers to piracy, or to a completely
| different medium.
| buyucu wrote:
| This is why I pirate movies and shows. The user experience is
| infinitely better than Netflix and Disney.
| anarticle wrote:
| I'm not really sure the metaphor holds up, Netflix was a jetliner
| compared to a minivan. We still had movie rental stores in the
| late 00s.
| skybrian wrote:
| Spotify doesn't seem like a good example. I use Spotify to search
| for artists and listen to songs from their albums. I make my own
| playlists. If you basically want a better iTunes, it seems like
| it still works for that.
|
| (You do have to ignore the other features, but that doesn't seem
| very hard.)
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation
| are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok
|
| You have given every product team a set of parameters and asked
| them to optimize the product around those parameters. Namely, how
| much time and attention the user spends staring at your app. Is
| anyone surprised that convergence has taken place, when everyone
| is after the same thing, with the same tools, in the same
| environment?
|
| The only question is: who is "you" in this scenario?
| Instinctively, it's the leadership team. But in one of my least
| popular takes, I tend to think the responsibility is ultimately
| "you", the user who refuses to stop scrolling. Tech leadership
| doesn't have vision or a moral compass, they take their direction
| from the metrics which ultimately measure your choices.
| Tistron wrote:
| Nothing has ever felt better than my student days with DC++. The
| whole campus had a server we all used and I could search for
| stuff I liked and see what other people who had that on their
| disks also had, and explore that. I found a lot of music that
| way, as well as other stuff. Before that we had had a list of ftp
| servers which was also good once I wrote an indexer, but DC
| automated all that and made more people able to participate.
|
| I hate the Netflix interface enough that I prefer to watch movies
| other ways even though I have access to it.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Great read!
|
| I think what we must keep in mind with many modern products and
| services, especially popular ones, is that they are not becoming
| TikTok, they are becoming things competing for our attention in
| the most perverse ways possible. The potential to make these
| systems even more manipulative and exploitative is there, I see
| great potential for UX design that is even "worse" than what we
| already know.
| patapong wrote:
| I am astonished by how much less delightful software has become.
| Computers used to feel like a magical tool, that would respond
| instantly and allow me to perform complicated transformations at
| the press of a button.
|
| Now, I feel like I am fighting against software most of the time,
| having to compete with someones vision for how I should be using
| their program, which is likely aimed at the least technically
| sophisticated user. Nothing wrong with allowing such users to use
| the software, but please retain the functionality and speed for
| the power users!
| sureIy wrote:
| Is this about software or is it about you?
|
| I loved my computer when I was a kid, now I only see flaws. I
| don't think software was flawless at the time, it's just that I
| became very keenly aware of its current issues because _this is
| my field._
| okwhateverdude wrote:
| I think I am in the same boat as you. Knowing how the sausage
| is made only makes the flaws noticed even more offensive.
|
| But I do think the GP has a point about the intentional
| friction and bullshit introduced into lots of modern software
| that wasn't even a twinkling in some CEOs eye way back when.
| Software has become adversarial to the user. Psychology has
| been weaponized to induce behaviors in users. Instead of
| users feeling utility and choice in using the software, they
| feel burdened, controlled. Or at least, I do. I try to make
| smart choices about what software I use to maintain my own
| volition.
|
| These kinds of flaws are fundamentally different from the
| kinds of flaws in software from the past if only because of
| the order of magnitude increase of resources that can be
| mustered to accomplish it. And because they are exploitative.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think the harsh practical reality is that a lot of end-
| user computing needs have been met for a long time: word
| processing, media playback, communications, etc. Unless you
| need live collaboration or some specialized package, most
| things you can do in modern Google Sheets you can do just
| as well in LibreOffice Calc or Excel 97.
|
| How does one build or maintain a viable software business
| in a world where most people's software needs have been
| met? It's to pivot away from delivering value towards
| extracting value. Hence all the push towards cloud-based
| services instead of stadalone local programs. Online
| connectivity allows the developer to arbitrarily change the
| balance of value between them and the user, which is where
| the gross adversarial feeling of modern computing comes
| from. The computer is no longer serving you exclusively.
| dogleash wrote:
| Regardless of the degree that is true for the parent poster,
| those (and more) qualitative differences can also be felt
| among different pieces of software that are all quite new.
| techpineapple wrote:
| I think it's about software, just because back then there was
| a lot less of it. It was easier to navigate when the OS
| didn't have a million and one features and you just launched
| an app you wanted to you and could mostly trust that there
| wasn't going to be an ad or another feature in the way.
| m463 wrote:
| > Is this about software or is it about you?
|
| about and not about
|
| Kids nowadays are suprisingly proficient and using phones and
| computers.
|
| ...because they just click "AGREE" to every popup. They sign
| up. They give away their phone number or their one email
| address or they do the subscription, then cancel it later (or
| forget). They enter their credit card because they don't have
| any money to take anyway.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| How much has been lost to the altar of shareholder value? And
| how much gained?
|
| It will be interesting to see how these first decades of the
| millennium will be remembered.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Delightful software is still there and still being made. It's
| the industry that targets average Joe, who doesn't care about
| technology.
| amiga386 wrote:
| If it didn't fuck about with things and act like it's here for
| you, why would you pay a recurring fee for it?
|
| "Recurring revenue stream" is an answer in search of problems,
| and it's ready to destroy all alternatives.
| stanisouce2 wrote:
| That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they
| want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
|
| Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new
| ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this
| quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
|
| I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for
| a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure
| if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't
| mind.
| hedora wrote:
| I don't understand the draw of Spotify. There's no network effect
| that I can see (even if it is built into your car, the other
| services have good experiences in your car too), everyone
| complains about it, they pay less per stream to artists than
| their competitors, and their library isn't any bigger than the
| competition. (It was smaller the last time I compared.)
|
| On top of that, their recommendation algorithms are (were?)
| terrible compared to the other services (since then, they added
| more payola), and they're actively trying to burn down the last
| open corner of the internet (podcasts).
|
| Also, the pricing is comparable, even if the other options feel
| more premium.
|
| What am I missing?
| dharmab wrote:
| Spotify has a free tier. Apple Music and YouTube Music do not.
| Young people start on the free tier and don't want ti have to
| move their libraries/playlists. And young people share Spotify
| playlists, not Apple or Youtube playlists, because they know
| their friends have Spotify.
| skerit wrote:
| I unfortunately pay for Spotify.
|
| I also pay for Youtube premium, but I can't even switch to that
| because their music player is even worse than Spotify.
|
| I really miss the good old days of music players that were
| _packed_ with features. The players of current streaming
| services are so basic. And as long as I can't find a
| replacement that fits my needs I don't really want to bother
| switching.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| I have used Tidal, Deezer and Amazon Music in the past, but
| I've always went back to Spotify. I prefer the UX, but not only
| that, the recommendations are WAY better for me than other
| streaming services. However, my music taste is very eclectic,
| so maybe that helps a lot to recommend something within my
| taste.
| metabagel wrote:
| My local music format public radio station provides song links
| to: Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon.
|
| https://www.kcrw.com/playlists
| stanisouce2025 wrote:
| That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they
| want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
|
| Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new
| ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this
| quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
|
| I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for
| a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure
| if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't
| mind.
| stanisouce2bag wrote:
| That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they
| want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
|
| Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new
| ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this
| quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
|
| I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for
| a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure
| if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't
| mind.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| All of the examples listed have something in common: they are
| services for accessing content you don't own. So it is in the
| provider's interest to find ways to satisfy you with less and/or
| cheaper content.
|
| The Netflix changes aren't attempts to make their product better.
| They are attempts to save money by obscuring the amount and/or
| quality of available content.
|
| By contrast, if you buy BluRays from one company and BluRay
| players from another company, everyones incentives are better
| aligned.
| phh wrote:
| > It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you
| satisfied with less and/or cheaper content.
|
| After getting annoyed by their interface that was showing 80%
| of content I have already seen, I've come to a realization:
|
| Their incentive is not even to make me watch crap. No! Their
| best outcome for them is for me to watch nothing and still pay.
|
| Showing me old shows gives me the warm feelings and make me
| associate them with Netflix, making me keep the subscription
| even
|
| Hypnodrones are corporate dreams
| barbazoo wrote:
| Personally I wouldn't even bother with old shows on netflix
| since they could go away, and do, all the time. I download
| and put on my local plex instance, especially with bangers
| like The Office, there's no harm done.
|
| Netflix et al are good for those high profile miniseries you
| want to watch once and then never again. The rest, download
| and enjoy without ads, without dark patterns, especially
| content that kids watch (youtube).
| ryandrake wrote:
| > It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you
| satisfied with less and/or cheaper content
|
| If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think that all these
| "content companies" are colluding in a mass "Taste Removal"
| campaign, deliberately getting users used to bland, vanilla,
| generic "content" so they can one day just shove AI slop at us
| all day and only people who were alive in the 90s would
| remember when movies and TV were great. The rest happily will
| watch _Ow, My Balls_ and ads for Carl 's Jr.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| countdown to "welcome to costco I love you"
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| And the Blurays show ads for the first company's other
| products.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| So many of the burrs on my experience with anything are that I
| still expect the paradigm I had with my discman as a kid to the
| nth degree, back then I would load my favorite songs onto a disc,
| then play them, or play an album on repeat. I-tunes lets me do
| this still, but it's trying to push more of its streaming
| features on me like when I search my library, it defaults to
| searching Apple's network music volume, that I'm not interested
| in. I fear that the iphone will continue to hamper one's efforts
| to download media until you are forced into more fiscally
| expedient platforms like Spotify, where my favorite PM dawn song
| was replaced by a "superior" remaster where the artist was much
| older and lost the tone of his voice. Sadly one of the
| consequences of convergence is that so much else in the phone is
| done right I'd probably still have to use it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, iTunes (renamed Apple Music) is getting bad. The only
| thing I care about is what I've cared about since 2000: Playing
| a bunch of MP3 files in my collection. That functionality is
| now relegated to "third tab from the left," shoved aside behind
| a glass case like a relic from a former era.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| Worse yet it's the only effective way to sync music to the
| iphone over a wired cable. I can tell they've abandoned their
| USB sync software because of how annoying the dialogs are
| when you plug your phone in and don't authenticate to start
| it, additionally that thay've (likely intentionally to push
| I-cloud) never added automatic usb photo sync from phone to
| computer. This probably all originated from when Apple
| shifted their convergence model from all around the desktop
| to all around the phone1
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9_Vh9h3Ohw
| ryandrake wrote:
| The iPhone (and previously iPod), from day one, could never
| simply be mounted as an external USB (or networked) file
| system. You always had to do the ridiculous "sync" song and
| dance and use their proprietary software, instead of just
| copying files using the OS like every other external
| storage device. Maddening.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| more maddening yet is you can actually mount it as a
| limited storage device using
| https://libimobiledevice.org/ under linux, but not
| MacOs(to my knowledge)
|
| EDIT: perhaps it's time I make a utility that I could use
| to achieve these ends:
| https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/libimobiledevice
| ryandrake wrote:
| Unfortunately, from their FAQ: How do I
| copy music to my device? Sorry, music
| synchronization with newer devices is currently not
| supported but if you are a keen developer why not
| contribute a new service implementation for the ATC
| Service?
| ghusto wrote:
| So happy to read this and all the comments in agreement. I
| thought it was just me.
|
| In my bombastic opinion, Spotify has the _worst_ goddamn user
| interface of anything I have ever used, including my dishwasher
| with a single button. Netflix is less frustrating, but that's
| likely because "here are some films" is more acceptable than
| "here are some songs, but fuck you if want to listen by album".
|
| Smashing content into my face isn't making me love you.
| metabagel wrote:
| To me, Spotify's UI is super counterintuitive.
| acyou wrote:
| That quote is pretty dumb, I see it quoted a lot. It's arrogant,
| assuming, demeaning, elitist. And I don't think it's true. Who
| would say "a faster horse"? It doesn't make any sense, because
| people know/knew that horses are what they are.
|
| A better, more constructive approach is to proactively identify
| how emerging technology can fit people's needs. And for sure, you
| need to verify that there is an actual need for what you are
| building, and then go build it.
|
| Netflix and TikTok are not the "faster horse" here. Generative AI
| is clearly the "faster horse". It's a disruptive technology that
| will change the entire structure of society, much like the
| internal combustion engine. And no one said they wanted that
| either, that doesn't make people dumb, or user surveys pointless.
| Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?
|
| Henry Ford saying that would probably be like hearing Sam Altman
| say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said
| a faster computer". It's not true, it doesn't match reality.
| solumunus wrote:
| I think you're taking things a little too literally.
| hooverd wrote:
| I wonder if like cars, LLMs will be as equally destructive to
| our social fabric.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| > Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?
|
| well... I definitely want more performance per watt. And I
| stress "performance", because more MIPS are useless if wasted.
| SirFatty wrote:
| You should probably read the article... the author did not say
| that Netflix and TikTok are the faster horse, the opposite
| actually. You seem really focused on the quote for some reason.
| acyou wrote:
| The article says that 2015 Netflix and 2015 Spotify were
| better, my point is that 2025 Netflix and Spotify are better
| for the actual customers (the advertisers), but they are not
| transformatively better in the way that generative AI is.
| eadmund wrote:
| > YouTube. YouTube: Once a video catalog with social discovery.
| Now? TikTok.
|
| I hate YouTube Shorts with a passion. They are low-effort
| engagement bait. They cannot be disabled.
|
| Even worse, my Google TV will not play them when my phone is
| connected to it, and my phone will not play them when it is
| connected to my TV. Both devices can play them fine, they just
| don't want to play them when they are connected.
|
| There can be no good technical reason for this. It's just
| delivering a bad experience because it can.
| dcrazy wrote:
| Many channels seem to use Shorts as a vehicle to get you to
| their long-form content. I don't mind that as a discovery
| mechanism; it's introduced me to some fun stuff. Other channels
| make Shorts-specific content, which I really dislike.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > They cannot be disabled.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/156lw72/the_be...
| barbazoo wrote:
| > They cannot be disabled
|
| Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-
| youtu...
|
| Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| CA/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
| eadmund wrote:
| I want to disable them in the phone and TV apps. I haven't
| used YouTube in the browser much for almost a decade! It's
| kind of surprising to me.
| nicbou wrote:
| I feel strongly like this about Google Maps. The underlying
| product is nothing short of miraculous, but the UI is
| infuriating. If I create a route, my markers disappear. Clicking
| on the map doesn't show businessses anymore. Why can't I navigate
| to another city _and_ browse the map at the same time? Why hasn
| 't Maps graduated to the equivalent of tabbed browsing?
|
| Every trip, I'm reminded of how disappointing Google Maps is.
| Simple things like trying to find a laptop-friendly cafe and
| getting random cafes represented by a close up picture of
| someone's cappuccino. Realising that I'm driving 10 kilometres to
| do a U-turn. Having no way to bypass a blocked road. The very
| clunky waypoint management. Aagh!
|
| I want quality of life improvements more than I want new
| features. It's weird that a company with so much resources can't
| create powerful tools.
| gokayburuc_dev wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| The main problem here is that the systems are starting to look
| more and more alike every day. Systems that are oppressed by
| algorithms turn into a Hollywood porn star: they are just trying
| to show what they like the most. This makes the systems uniform
| by wiping out all other beautiful and valuable things.
|
| Instead of really making a system better, we're trying to make it
| look like the most popular one available. As a result, we have
| copies with silicone lips, silicone breasts, plenty of
| aesthetics, but cheap and soulless. Instead of improving existing
| systems, we corrupt them by copying them.
| sebastianz wrote:
| Highwaymen still have those fast horses, up on the lawless
| mountain passes... ;)
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| As others have said, the "faster horse" analogy only goes so far.
| Even more than a century after cars became practical, you can
| still go get a faster horse.
|
| The analogy would be "I want to go back to the pre-ensh*ttified,
| simple version of X that we used to have. But with an updated web
| experience, or smartphone app, there's no way to go back. I have
| at least three apps on my phone that I wish I could still have
| the older version of. But I can't.
| chrsw wrote:
| We don't fight enough to keep software that works for us.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Then we need start optimizing for horse-speed, and stop
| optimizing for "engagement". The first step is to get away from
| building ad-funded widgets. Until we do that we will always have
| to listen to somebody who cares less about what the user wants
| and more about what can be profitably done to that user.
| sambeau wrote:
| Self driving cars, where you have to supervise and occasionally
| have to reign in from going off the path, are essentially faster
| horses.
|
| So they are finally here.
| codexb wrote:
| I've never thought about it this way, but it's funny to think
| that horses are largely self driving on roads.
| hinkley wrote:
| That graph at the end is brutal. But perhaps not incorrect.
|
| Tubi has a better exploration system and catalog than Netflix
| does but it's still not as good as Netflix used to be.
| pier25 wrote:
| Everything is converging on TikTok because it's unregulated
| addiction. The Chinese hit the sweet spot on how to hook people.
|
| Given everything we've seen with kids and teenagers exposed to
| phones, social media, etc this is the next tobacco. Thank god
| there are countries already banning phones from schools and
| there's talk of banning minor from social media.
| volumo wrote:
| This is pretty much why we are taking this "faster horse"
| approach when building Volumo, our music download store for pro
| DJs (an alternative to Beatport - if you know, you know)[1].
| Downloads, not streaming (you get FLAC files right into your
| hands); pay as you go instead of a subscription (why don't you
| pay a lump sum for this track you want, of which 75% will go
| straight to the author); gentle human curation instead of the
| ubiquitous "we make decisions for you" algorithms.
|
| [1] https://volumo.com
| paulorlando wrote:
| That carcinisation convergent evolution effect is real. But so is
| the reality that outside of network dependent companies like the
| Netflix example in the post, those faster horses do still exist,
| just in niches. In Kevin Kelly's book What Technology Wants he
| writes about going through a 100-year old catalog and then
| finding that there are people today who still make all the items
| (some now obscure) that were popularly sold back then. But the
| difference is that if you're talking about individual companies
| like Netflix, YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack in the post, you won't
| see that.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| The diversity of mediums chart at the end doesn't make any sense.
| What are the multiple lines? And at the end if he is saying
| everything converges to TikTok, wouldn't the TikTok point on the
| graph be on the axis for 0 diversity?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I simply hate that good services get ruined because there's money
| to be made by providing a different service to a broader group of
| people. It's not quite enshittification, it's companies making
| something that serves a relatively small group of folks well into
| a thing that serves a very large group of people in the highest-
| ROI way possible.
|
| Companies no longer have a target user. The target user is
| whoever can be juiced for as many pennies or eyeball-seconds as
| possible. There's no persona for user stories, it's "literally
| whoever we can get this in front of for as long as possible".
| It's about the lowest common denominator.
|
| Which implies, these products are not "designed" anymore.
| "Designed" implies that the creator made choices to make the
| product better for a target user. But there's no target user.
| When your service has a billion users, it's not possible to
| design for _anyone_. Mouse traps aren't "designed" for the mice,
| they're built for the people who don't want mice around. Services
| aren't "designed" for a billion people to interact with, they're
| built for the owners to make as much money as possible.
| ehsankia wrote:
| As bad as Netflix is, honestly the UX is the best amongst major
| streaming services.
|
| For me, the cardinal sin of a streaming service is, if I open
| your service every single day and watch the next episode of ONE
| show, then the next time I open your service, PLEASE HAVE MY SHOW
| AT THE TOP OF THE HOME PAGE.
|
| This is such a simple and obvious user journey, but the majority
| of streaming services, on purpose or not, fuck it up. The number
| of times I've opened a streaming service, scroll through the
| entire home page with the shitty tv remote, then had to type the
| name of my show manually in search. Makes me want to unsubscribe
| right then and there and just use Plex instead.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| They want you to start a new show so you have something in the
| queue when you finish the show you turned the tv on to watch.
| taneq wrote:
| On trips to remote sites I never miss an opportunity to explain
| to the younger guys that "when I was younger Spotify was called
| MP3s and it was made of files that you had on your device!" and
| then proceed to play late 90s EDM until we get back into mobile
| range.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The "faster horses" comment is unfortunate, both because Henry
| Ford was a huge Nazi and because it's a dramatically _wrong_ idea
| of what people actually wanted that only makes sense if you 're
| already so car-brained[0] to think that the only alternative to a
| car is a horse. At least in cities, you had trains, trams, and
| omnibuses; not to mention walking was also an option.
|
| There's a tendency in consumer tech companies to look at TikTok
| as the ultimate goal: everyone wants a pipeline to pump
| entertainment slurry into, and the old versions of the product
| are just worse slurry pipelines. But this is wrong. Old Spotify
| and Netflix aren't "faster horses". They're the train connecting
| a walkable urban core that got replaced with a never-on-time bus
| route[1] while the government encouraged everyone to move into
| car-dependent suburban prisons.
|
| Like cars, entertainment slurry pipelines exist for the benefit
| of the pipeline owner, not the creator nor the viewer. Nobody
| asks for TikTok, it's just a global minima in the reward
| function[2] of "how do we most actively exploit creative
| industry". The platform owners want you to forget about the
| artists on their platforms so that those artists can't tell you
| to move to another platform. It's akin to one of the nightmare
| scenarios trotted out by copyright maximalists during the Napster
| Wars of the early 2000s, except the owning class now has
| significant economic interest in the platforms, so it's OK now.
|
| [0] I have a pet theory that cars were a fascist long-con to
| destroy cities and atomize society to avoid the creation of class
| solidarity and durable political movements against large business
| interests.
|
| [1] Remember when Netflix rented DVDs? And had _almost
| everything_ , because physical media has really robust consumer
| protections?
|
| [2] If you think my "cars are fascist" theory is insane, wait
| until I talk about AI.
| jedberg wrote:
| OPs specific complaints about Netflix and Spotify are mostly a
| result of their success. Back in 2012 Netflix had a lot of movies
| because Hollywood didn't value streaming and were willing to sell
| the streaming right for most of their content for tiny amounts of
| money. And there were no other streamer.
|
| Spotify is in a similar boat. The music companies didn't value
| streaming and were willing to sell their entire catalog to the
| one player in the ecosystem (or in the case of music, to everyone
| for the same low price)
|
| But also, personalization actually drives a ton of revenue. When
| I worked at Netflix, when the recommendation system went down and
| we defaulted to curated lists, streaming would drop 20%. And that
| was in 2013. I can only imagine what the drop is today when that
| system goes down.
|
| Personalization drives a ton of revenue, and TikTok is the best
| at it, so it's no surprise that OP sees everything "going to
| TikTok"
| tobr wrote:
| Weren't the big record labels terrified that streaming would
| cannibalize CD sales? I think it was a pretty huge thing that
| Spotify got them onboard at all. I'm not sure how much that
| matters to your overall point but saying they "didn't value
| streaming" doesn't seem quite right with how I remember the
| discussion at the time - they were afraid of it because they
| could see its value, and how that might disrupt their lucrative
| plastic disc business.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Enshitification ensues
| zombiwoof wrote:
| What if I still believe in leaches to fix my headache
| synergy7 wrote:
| I am not sure Netflix 2025 is a car. I would go with a carnival
| ride on a bunch of ponies analogy.
| greatgib wrote:
| I just hate so so so much the Netflix of nowadays, they manage to
| keep me because of a few good movies/series and releasing new
| seasons of shows that I watched previously.
|
| But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to
| me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so
| badly designed and unergonomic.
|
| The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be
| almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different
| levels. Some times you can't even find it, sometimes it lacks the
| movie that you were just watching and that reappears later.
|
| It is very hard to find something to watch because they still
| show you the hundred of things that you saw already, or that old
| crappy movie that anyone saw ten times on tv, or things that you
| are not interested anyway.
|
| And there is absolutely no way to filter to not be a frustrating
| experience.
|
| In addition you have the asshole dark patterns like showing
| multiple times the same movie/series in a given category when you
| scroll.
|
| My hypothesis is that they used to have a lot of great content,
| so that was their strength, and no they have very little valuable
| and recent content and as they don't want to be upfront about
| that, they use a lot of dark patterns to confuse you to still
| give the impression that they have an impressive catalog.
|
| But that has the consequence of the user being frustrated,
| impossible to find something proper to watch, but still having to
| spend hours browsing in the app as you might think that the good
| thing exist but it is just you that can't find it.
| peeters wrote:
| It feels to me like they poached some high-level product
| executive from an intrusive ad company, trained in the art of
| dark patterns, and pointed them at their paying customers. It's
| a truly offensive way of looking at your user base, as solely
| engagement metrics to be optimized. It's what happens when an
| entire business is built around gamifying one KPI.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Same. I gave up on netflix and just use Plex. Usually, I use
| this app on Android TV to play my plex library
| https://www.quasitv.app.
|
| Sooo much better.
| boznz wrote:
| I spent my last 3 months using Amazon Prime on my smart TV,
| opening the app, scrolling for 15 minutes through the same
| stuff as last time, turning off the TV and reading a book. I
| cancelled and now have 15 extra minutes reading time, though I
| do miss the cheap delivery it got me.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > The most important thing is "continue watching", that should
| be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at
| different levels
|
| This seems to be common among the streaming services. I can't
| imagine any reason other than they want to force people to see
| their other content.
| 3minus1 wrote:
| I really don't think bad Product Manager's is a good
| explanation for the UI. Any big company like Netflix is going
| to heavily A/B test any and every change to the UI. They will
| only ever add things that boost metrics like engagement. You
| may not like the UI; it may annoy you, but you should have some
| appreciation for the fact that they are using sophisticated
| techniques to optimize for what they care about.
| Hj8Rd2Qw wrote:
| The article beautifully captures the tension between innovation
| and addressing immediate needs. Sometimes incremental
| improvements (faster horses) are exactly what's needed, not
| paradigm shifts. As engineers, we should evaluate whether we're
| solving real problems or just chasing novelty for its own sake.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://youtu.be/vQDhzbTz-9k
|
| Not quite the point of the article, but Kawasaki recently
| announced the Coreleo, a (faster?) robot horse you can ride and
| holy shit I want one. No chance this thing sees the light of day,
| and the video is a CGI render, but oh man.
| groby_b wrote:
| If you want faster horses, breed your own horses.
|
| Ford wasn't interested in either your horse, or your
| transportation need. Ford was interested in what you'd buy. That
| means when there was ample competition, you'd likely get
| something that very much felt like a faster horse, because... you
| did want to go faster than your existing horse, and you didn't
| care the new thing wasn't horse-shaped.
|
| Fast-forward until meaningful local competition is gone, and you
| get the F150, the Bronco, and the Mustang. It isn't really what
| you want (for most people, I know some of you love yours, moving
| on), but given the other choices, general availability, and
| popular sentiment, it's close enough that enough people will say,
| "OK, fine, definitely not a horse any more, but still sorta works
| for me."
|
| You'll get bland pablum that's smeared out across the average
| opinion of a sufficient amount of people while maximizing total
| profit under the curve. That's the logical outcome of any mass
| production.
|
| IOW: If you care about what _you_ need, support open source
| authors. Write open source. And be prepared to tinker to tailor
| it to your needs. Horses are individual, and need care and
| support more than your car does.
| keeptrying wrote:
| With LLMs the ability to create your own experience whilst using
| services as "databases" is really possible.
|
| My crazy though is that this is where the internet will go.
|
| One of the big problems with SaaS is that the apps are tuned to
| increase company profit - not user agency.
|
| All that will flip. Agents are the first barrage in that
| direction but the movement is only just starting.
|
| One barrier is configuration (code at scale) - ie a way to
| communicate exactly what you want.
|
| Once we have that we compile from our needs (configuration) to an
| app thats exactly what we want backed by our accounts on amazon,
| uber, google, openai as databases and processing.
| freedomben wrote:
| This gets especially interesting when you consider that horses
| are _still_ better than motorized vehicles at accessing certain
| terrain. For example, a horse can trivially climb a steep hill in
| the wilderness with no road, or ford a river with no nearby
| bridges, that even rugged ATVs can 't really handle. The vast
| majority of transportation needs are better served by motorized
| vehicles, but horses still have some unique advantages and in
| some areas are unbeatable. Now that said, some of the freaky AI
| robots with legs might finally render horses inferior, but those
| are pretty inaccessible to most people.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Developer steps:
|
| 1. Make useful product for smart people
|
| 2. Change product to be useful for average people.
|
| 3. Change product to be handy for dumb people.
|
| 4. Let investors think even dumb people can rule the world.
|
| 5. Cash out.
| s3p wrote:
| This is such a good article. No notes. I share the same annoyance
| with how often algorithms are used - if we could give power users
| an ability to say "yes, I know what I want" and bypass all the
| recommendations, that would be ideal.
| CivBase wrote:
| Sometimes I want a faster horse. Problem is horses are no longer
| in high demand. It's a niche market now. I may have to pay a
| premium or put in some extra work to get the horse I want. It's
| just the way of things.
| wg0 wrote:
| Product Managers that have nothing better to do than A/B testing.
|
| And the curse of "AI" and extensive machine learning. As if
| machine learning can adequately represents a person's tastes and
| preferences.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Netflix and Spotify are designed this way because they're
| subscription services. They need to convince you they always have
| a lot of new stuff, all the time, so that you don't cancel your
| subscription.
|
| They don't want you to think they're some static libraries of
| content. They make their websites like interactive billboards.
| lakrikor1 wrote:
| Is Spotify TikTok-ifying itself? I don't use either app. I wonder
| if songs will get shorter now that video content is getting
| preferably shorter.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Welcome to the web 3.0 mindset: changing for the sake of changing
| and having more bullet points on advertising, moving fast and
| breaking things because the innovation behind a fancy page can't
| be wrong even when it ruins the experience of most users. Thank
| you, Open Source, for giving me the tools and freedom of choice I
| can use to completely ignore or at least make less painful the
| experience.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Well, I see it sort of like, yes, people might want faster
| horses. And maybe they'd prefer cars to horses. But if your cars
| start poking me in the eye and flashing blinding lights at me,
| I'm going to consider going back to a horse.
|
| Part of the process of enshittification is changing the set of
| needs served by a product, and, almost invariably, adding _new_
| functionality that no one asked for and that they probably don 't
| want. And usually that new functionality is a sort of Trojan
| horse (a faster Trojan horse?) that offers something
| superficially interesting but is really just a means of wedging
| some kind of revenue generation into the experience the user
| really wants to have.
|
| People often do want cars rather than faster horses, but they
| want the cars _they_ want, not the ones that will make someone
| else the most money.
| ewgoforth wrote:
| https://www.whats-on-netflix.com is a good way to search for
| stuff.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Me too, but you and I cannot afford a faster horse, or even the
| same horse we once had. The horse they use to offer was an
| illusion, a bait for the new Tiktok thing. Sooner or later,
| people will forget that horses once exist.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Quote Investigtator has a nice piece on the "faster horse" quote
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/
| dhosek wrote:
| There seems to be some laws of (human) nature about these sorts
| of things at work here like how all programs eventually evolve
| into either Microsoft Excel or an operating system (or both) or
| how all basic cable channels eventually end up programming _Law &
| Order_ reruns.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| For over 100 years, people have been focused on faster cars.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| Here is the thing: netflix and spotify are not in the "my X
| collection" business. They sell subscriptions to content and the
| apps reflect that. I am 100% in your/OPs boat but i would expect
| (niche and /or open source) apps to pop up that just make my
| collections of my content from other sources nice and the way
| nerds like us want. We have a right under EU data portability
| laws to do exactly that BUT companies break the laws to prohibit
| users taking control of their data. The only reason this is not
| changing is that we are not organised and there is no funded
| organisation suing the crap out of these companies until the
| final instance to give us our data.
| m463 wrote:
| I definitely want a plaid horse with a dashboard, a round
| steering wheel and turn-signal/drive-select stalks.
|
| and I want to use a buggy whip to smack the fingers of people
| reaching for their touchscreens to spring for the in-car-
| purchases and seat-warmer subscriptions
| somethingor wrote:
| What frustrates me is that many people that claim to want a
| faster horse don't actually use them where they are available
|
| Bandcamp to me is the ideal "horse" for music (and I'm praying it
| stays a horse)
|
| Those complaining about Chrome dominance but still not
| _personally_ using Firefox is another example (even with all of
| Mozilla's controversies, Firefox is still the "fastest horse"
| available imo)
|
| Not being satisfied with the horse selection is understandable,
| but actively furthering the obsolescence of the available horses
| is not (even if the impact is minimal)
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