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But what if I want a faster horse?

rakhim.exotext.com

71–80 of 632 posts

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#71
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...)

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#74
post #16

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 car…

> 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…

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#75
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The most valuable businesses have desirable net income trends, not “engagement”.

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would say they're popular because they are expensive. It's bragging rights, conspicuous consumption…

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#77
post #16

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 car…

> 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…

> 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!

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#78
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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#79
post #16

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 car…

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#80
post #9

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 subscr…

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.

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