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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?

#391

Post by Suppafly »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #342
feoren wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 latt…

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.

>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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#393

Post by Suppafly »

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…

>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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#394

Post by techpineapple »

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…

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#395

Post by kmeisthax »

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#396

Post by chilmers »

al_borland wrote: post #368
bloppe wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that different from Spotify? Am I using Spotify wrong? I mostly just curate and listen to my own playlists

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 r…

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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#397

Post by notatoad »

furyg3 wrote: 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 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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#398

Post by n_ary »

wholinator2 wrote: post #149
bluGill wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

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…

> 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.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#399

Post by amarant »

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…

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!

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#400

Post by Suppafly »

red_admiral wrote: post #190
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 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 ev…

>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.

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