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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?

#461

Post by bluGill »

crazygringo wrote: post #389
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.

This is the correct answer. The more you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe. If you haven't watched a streamer in a couple of months, that's the first thing you'll cancel when you glance at your credit card statement.

Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just automatically not charging people who didn't use their service at all as to be worth it. No hassle, we just keep rolling your subscription over until you watch something again (of course they make interest in the month you paid but didn't use services - that $0.05 should pay for the email and other infrastructure costs needed for a customer that doesn't even use the service). The real benefit of this is when someone does watch something there is no hassle - they are already subscribed and so they don't even think about should the re subscribe.

Of course with their ad supported tier they probably don't agree.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#462

Post by BwackNinja »

derefr wrote: post #413
Suppafly wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually work?

In a limited sense, yes. But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which it doesn't. So no. Same as a dating site/app — a dating system truly designed in spirit to accomplish its claimed purpose, would seek to minimize the time anyone spends using th…

The professional matchmaker angle as a contrast is fascinating. The subscription model not only removes the incentive to provide quality quickly -- it reverses it. Doing a worse job is encouraged if you can leverage that to convince people that the future (which is only available by continuing your subscription) is worth waiting for. It's also more attractive because it has smaller up-front costs for the consumer.

It would be an interesting world if we outlawed auto-renewal for services that you need to actively use in order to get any value from them. When you're paying for Netflix, you aren't paying to watch movies, you're paying for /access/ to movies you can watch. The flip side is that the maximum potential service quality would decrease if revenue decreases -- which is also why ad-supported services prevail. If all players are subject to the same rules, that would either end up as a decrease in licensing costs or a focus on quality content over quantity. If they aren't producing exclusive content, they are beholden to the quality of the market. Either way, that should encourage quality content to be made over saturating the market with content.

Unfortunately, pipe dreams will remain pipe dreams.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#463

Post by kridsdale3 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #292
agent281 wrote: post #245

Earlier 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 used to own a part of the Facebook homepage and maximizing its metrics was my job.

They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of data and surveys etc to prove it.

But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete it. That started my disillusionment process that eventually made me quit.

Money is the only thing that matters to them.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#464

Post by krisoft »

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…

> very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH

I agree with that.

> but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars

I agree with that too.

> because the people who are into cars like those marques.

I think that is not true. I don’t care about cars. Never had one. Don’t even have a driving licence.

The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool. They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street i notice it. I couldn’t care less about the opinion of gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa’s skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn’t even hear about it.

It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity of course.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#465

Post by s3p »

This is such a good article. No notes. I share the same annoyance with how often algorithms are used - if we could give power users an ability to say "yes, I know what I want" and bypass all the recommendations, that would be ideal.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#466

Post by CivBase »

Sometimes I want a faster horse. Problem is horses are no longer in high demand. It's a niche market now. I may have to pay a premium or put in some extra work to get the horse I want. It's just the way of things.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#467

Post by kilroy123 »

greatgib wrote: post #435

I 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…

Same. I gave up on netflix and just use Plex. Usually, I use this app on Android TV to play my plex library https://www.quasitv.app.

Sooo much better.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#468

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

sokoloff wrote: post #403
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: are you not a "car guy/girl"? Lexus people absolutely love Lexuses. I recently sold mine (needed something larger after having another kid) and I miss it every day.

I am ~98th percentile car guy. I own two classic Mustangs, one stock, one restomodded by me, and have had a variety of interesting daily drivers over the decades, including dailying an 80s Alfa Spider year-round including 4 winters in Boston. It’s comfortable, safe, and dead-nuts reliable, but no one gives a shit about or even notices my hybrid RX450h.

hahahaha, yeah the RX450h is soulless

You're more of a car guy than me

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#469

Post by econ »

swiftcoder wrote: post #292
agent281 wrote: post #245

Earlier 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,…

While it initially makes a reasonable proxy you end up polluting the measurements gradually by engineering for maximum screen time. The Artificialy created screentime is increasingly unrelated to satisfaction and ultimately not at all.

Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is also the main source of "popularity".

The word means something different now.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#470

Post by wg0 »

Product Managers that have nothing better to do than A/B testing.

And the curse of "AI" and extensive machine learning. As if machine learning can adequately represents a person's tastes and preferences.

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