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But what if I want a faster horse?

rakhim.exotext.com

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Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#241

Post by amrocha »

rasz wrote: post #126
amrocha wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying nobody will recognize old NSX as something special? R34?

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#242

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#243

Post by lotsofpulp »

donatj wrote: post #207
setgree wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 n…

> "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.

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.”

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#244

Post by dharmab »

hedora wrote: post #235

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 (we…

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#245

Post by agent281 »

mattnewton wrote: post #215
donatj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

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.

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#246

Post by ludicrousdispla »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #217
cjs_ac wrote: 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…

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…

a mouse could easily do that with just it's nose

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#247

Post by WorldPeas »

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#248

Post by ghusto »

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#249

Post by pbhjpbhj »

signatoremo wrote: post #112
scarface_74 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

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.

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#250

Post by ryandrake »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #180
zemvpferreira wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.
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