This gets especially interesting when you consider that horses are still better than motorized vehicles at accessing certain terrain. For example, a horse can trivially climb a steep hill in the wilderness with no road, or ford a river with no nearby bridges, that even rugged ATVs can't really handle. The vast majority of transportation needs are better served by motorized vehicles, but horses still have some unique advantages and in some areas are unbeatable. Now that said, some of the freaky AI robots with legs might finally render horses inferior, but those are pretty inaccessible to most people.
But what if I want a faster horse?
451–460 of 632 posts
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
I wouldn’t say they are hardly incentivized now. They were never incentivized.
What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#453Earlier 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.
> had to
And that’s why you can’t get a faster horse
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#454For 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…
> you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
This is so spot on. I was a long-time serial entrepreneur who spent a couple decades across three successful startups discovering, shipping and growing new categories of tech products primarily for consumer, prosumer and hobbyists. Then I sold my last startup to a very large F500 silicon valley tech leader and ended up a senior product exec there. While there were a lot of positives like more mature engineering processes, testing and devops as a discipline, the exact issue you describe was a nightmare of product-damaging mistakes I called "analytics abuse." In my startups I valued having increasingly robust analytics over the years. In part because they helped increase my overall understanding of usage but mostly because they provoked good questions to explore. That exploration happened naturally because as the "product guy / founder" I never stopped spending a lot of time with our most passionate, opinionated, thought-leading customers. Over years of iteration I'd learned how to engage deeply and listen carefully to input from these customers. This involved interpreting, filtering and curating the mess of divergent personal preferences and pet feature ideas to tease out the more actionable product signals that could increase broad usage, adoption and passion around our products. I'd then bring those curated signals back to the product teams for evaluation and prioritization.
At BigCo they were diligent about meeting with customers, in fact they had entire processes around it, but their rigorous structures and meeting agendas often got in the way of just directly engaging and actively listening. Worse, the customer meetings the more senior product decision makers actually attended in person were mostly with the highest revenue customers. Junior PMs (and sometimes new grads) were delegated to meeting with the broader base of customers and filing reports. Those reports were then aggregated by ever-helpful program managers into tables of data and, eventually, slides - losing all nuance and any ability to spot an emerging outlier signal and tug on that thread to see where it goes.
I tried to convince everyone that we were missing important customer signals, especially from our smartest, most committed users. Being only one level removed from the CEO and quite credible based on prior success, I was definitely heard and most people agreed there was something being lost but no one could suggest a way to modify what we were doing that could scale across dozens of major products and hundreds of product managers, designers, execs and other stakeholders. In my experience, this general problem is why large companies, even the most well-run, successful ones full of smart people trying their best, end up gradually nerfing the deeper appeal in their own products. Frustratingly, almost every small, single step in that long slide pushes some short-term metric upward but the cumulative effect is the product loses another tiny piece of the soul that made our most evangelistic, thought-leading customers love the product and promote it widely. Ultimately, I ended up constantly arguing we should forego the uplift from some small, easy-to-prove, metric-chasing change to preserve some cumulative whole most people in the org weren't fully convinced even existed. It was exhausting. And there's no fighting the tide of people incentivized on narrow KPIs come bonus season.
I'm sorry to report I never found a solution to this problem, despite my best efforts over several years. I think it's just fundamental. Eventually I just told friends, "It's a genetic problem that's, sadly, endemic to the breed" (the 'breed' being well-run, very large tech companies with the smartest product people HR can hire at sufficient scale). Even if I was anointed CEO, given the size of the product matrix, I could only have personally driven a handful of products. I do think codifying premises and principles from the CEO level can help but it still gets diluted as the number of products, people and processes scales.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#455Developer steps:
1. Make useful product for smart people
2. Change product to be useful for average people.
3. Change product to be handy for dumb people.
4. Let investors think even dumb people can rule the world.
5. Cash out.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#456Earlier 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.
Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW. Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name. There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports car…
Right, they still exist, but now they’re budget sports cars, which isn’t really what I was talking about. A GR86 is cheaper than most SUVs. A miata is even cheaper. The civic type r is neat, but that’s not a sports car. That’s a performance model of a family car.
The comment I was replying to said that people buy porsches because they’re beautiful.
That’s not it, because the NSX is beautiful, the LFA is beautiful, the FD is beautiful, but nobody wants to spend 200K on a Toyota.
Cars are a signifier, and the viewer needs to understand that sign. Luxury car makers bank on that. Put an LFA and a Cayman next to each other and 9/10 people would think the Cayman is worth more.
The original commenters idea works for content, because content is not a signifier of money. Rich people can’t have more expensive media taste than you, so the enthusiasts set the pace.
But they can have a more expensive car, so no matter how awful a car a lamborghini is, nobody envies the Integra type R next to it.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#457For 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 are widely understood as desirable cars
... primarily for their price tag. There are a lot of enthusiasts for money in the world, much more than for driving at 200 mph.
> the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family
It was never about recommendations. MSIE and Chrome were (and are, but with Edge Browser instead of MSIE) shoved into consumers' throats by ads, marketing, bundled distribution and outrageous lies.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW. Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name. There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports car…
> There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens Well there was the NSX
Key word was, because nobody wants to spend 200K on a Honda no matter how many F1 drivers swear by it.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#459I just hate so so so much the Netflix of nowadays, they manage to keep me because of a few good movies/series and releasing new seasons of shows that I watched previously. But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so badly designed and unergonomic. The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, bu…
It feels to me like they poached some high-level product executive from an intrusive ad company, trained in the art of dark patterns, and pointed them at their paying customers. It's a truly offensive way of looking at your user base, as solely engagement metrics to be optimized. It's what happens when an entire business is built around gamifying one KPI.
Re: But what if I want a faster horse?
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe we're just nerds, not everything needs to qualify as a clinical diagnosis
This comment is distinctly incurious. Sure, it doesn't have to be a clinical diagnosis but that's also kinda the point of talking about it so casually: it doesn't always have to rise to the level of a clinical diagnosis. Some people will not be satisfied with the "we're just nerds" explanation and that's okay too. (Indeed, obsessive weirdos, eh?)
Exactly. And noticing that you might have some degree of ASD, or the like, enables you to also to notice typical symptomatic weaknesses, aside from strengths. Which might not be obvious to you otherwise. Addressing a weakness is much easier once it is identified. ("weird nerd" is too vague a diagnosis)