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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?

#351

Post by eadmund »

barbazoo wrote: post #325
eadmund wrote: post #266

> 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…

> They cannot be disabled Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#352

Post by metabagel »

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…

My local music format public radio station provides song links to: Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon.

https://www.kcrw.com/playlists

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#353

Post by hinkley »

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.

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#354

Post by famahar »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #296
klabb3 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#355

Post by safety1st »

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…

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).

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#356

Post by metabagel »

ghusto wrote: post #248

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…

To me, Spotify's UI is super counterintuitive.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#357

Post by paulorlando »

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#358

Post by TuringTest »

svachalek wrote: post #95
andai wrote: post #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.

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.

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#359

Post by names_are_hard »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #331
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#360

Post by hinkley »

hennell wrote: post #320
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. 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…

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.

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