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But what if I want a faster horse?

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Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#291

Post by echelon »

eadmund wrote: post #269
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.

> 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.

> 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).

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#292

Post by swiftcoder »

agent281 wrote: post #245
mattnewton wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#293

Post by nicbou »

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#294

Post by feoren »

dcrazy wrote: post #272
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.

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.

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?

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#295

Post by zonkerdonker »

patapong wrote: post #230

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 sophisticat…

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#296

Post by FinnLobsien »

klabb3 wrote: post #225
FinnLobsien wrote: post #81

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 wha…

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 everywh…

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...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#297

Post by FinnLobsien »

cubefox wrote: post #231
FinnLobsien wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experi…

A substantial fraction of us might indeed have some degree of ASD or ADHD.

Or maybe we're just nerds, not everything needs to qualify as a clinical diagnosis

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#298

Post by abustamam »

echelon wrote: post #291
eadmund wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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).

That's pretty much Rocket Money

https://www.rocketmoney.com/

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#299

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #243
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.

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…

> 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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#300

Post by dogleash »

pal9000i wrote: post #82

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.

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?

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