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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?

#481

Post by BrenBarn »

bluGill wrote: post #255
wholinator2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IF you are running a successful business you are probably spending the majority of your time not on the thing you are enthusiastic about, but instead just business work. Many businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend enough time in the office - many businesses owners suddenly became a lot more successful when they spent more time in the office. They likely are good and and like doing what the business is about…

> Many businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend enough time in the office - many businesses owners suddenly became a lot more successful when they spent more time in the office. They likely are good and and like doing what the business is about (running a backhoe, pulling wires, or whatever), but all the office work means they never get to do it.

The alternative here is to hire and train people to spend time in the office, rather than selling the company to someone who will do so. That has its own potential problems, for sure, but getting your soul eaten by VC is not one of them.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#482

Post by BrenBarn »

bluGill wrote: post #129
_kush wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the cycle I keep seeing: Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting. Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions. Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them. So a new product comes out, started…

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…

I'm hard-pressed to believe that there is any situation where VC money is the best answer. It may be the best answer for the person taking the VC cashout, but not the best answer for our world as a whole.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#483

Post by lotsofpulp »

dowager_dan99 wrote: post #439
lotsofpulp wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

product placement is the very foundation of TV, it's just a little more subtle now. Originally shows were brought to you by XYZ and had an intermission to advertise their products. Radio did this as well.

That is not product placement, per my working definition. Product placement is inserting the advertising into the art, where it is not clearly labeled or discernible as advertising.

On the TV show White Collar, the main character is never, shown driving a car, or talking about them, or having any interest in cars whatsoever. He walks around New York City, or is driven in a government employee's car. Yet, in one of the later seasons, he compliments on specific features of a car he is being driven, and has a dialogue about it with another character.

Extremely jarring for anyone paying attention, and obviously advertising. Product placement is sacrificing some portion of the art in exchange for money (or products/services which otherwise reduces production cost).

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#484

Post by boznz »

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…

I spent my last 3 months using Amazon Prime on my smart TV, opening the app, scrolling for 15 minutes through the same stuff as last time, turning off the TV and reading a book. I cancelled and now have 15 extra minutes reading time, though I do miss the cheap delivery it got me.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#485

Post by golergka »

chasd00 wrote: post #79
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…

Luxury watches are a good analogy too. A $5 watch from the gas station will give you the time just fine but there’s a market for watches costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Beauty is worth something.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#486

Post by montagg »

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…

You’re talking both about tastemakers and the silent majority vs loud minority.

I promise it is NOT always a good idea to follow the enthusiasts, because they are not at all like everyone else who uses your thing. Following them will skew your decisions—unless they are your entire customer base, so, have at it.

This article imo is complaining about the effect of middle management product owners at large companies. There are two dynamics that both converge on enshittification:

1. These product managers (or product designers) are early in their careers and want to make a splash. They are given lower priority projects but try to break out by making them bigger, better, more non-horse-like. They over-design and over-complicate the solutions as a result, because they don’t yet know when the right solution is just a refinement of what’s tried and true. They are incentivized to do this because they want to break out of the mold.

2. The managers above them, or a layer or two above depending on company size, are risk AVERSE. They are tasked with delivering results regularly and consistently. If you have the innovation bug or are creative at this layer, you get moved onto projects where this is required, which is not most of them. Overcomplicated is fine sometimes with you but WEIRD is absolutely not okay (the stuff that actually could be innovative), and no one gets fired for following The Metrics.

These two incentives clash to create overcomplicated but functionally poor products that aren’t helping anybody out. A healthy skepticism of complication and a healthy skepticism of engagement as the sole metric (or metrics in general) is necessary to make good shit. Sometimes it is actually understanding and using things as an enthusiast would, but you need to bring in an understanding of how the rest of your users are distinctly different from the enthusiasts, too. Using your thing yourself and actually following your own subtler feelings is what produces really useful innovation, slowly and surely over time.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#487

Post by billmalarky »

raldi wrote: post #87

People overuse the original quote as an excuse to never listen to customers, but the real wisdom is to ask why they’re asking for a faster horse (to get around quicker) and see if you can think of a better way to meet that goal.

^ this guy knows Jobs To Be Done theory ;)

For those who don't, reading "Competing Against Luck" by Clayton Christensen will dramatically improve your ability to create successful products/services.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#488

Post by zerd »

tristor wrote: post #471
Suppafly wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.

Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we talk about metrics, these are measurable data points. Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically win here. That was essentially the only metric that they won on. If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing.…

It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. It could handle more tabs. It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. Memory usage was lower. I wouldn't call any of those "marketing" and "mindshare".

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#489

Post by BrenBarn »

Well, I see it sort of like, yes, people might want faster horses. And maybe they'd prefer cars to horses. But if your cars start poking me in the eye and flashing blinding lights at me, I'm going to consider going back to a horse.

Part of the process of enshittification is changing the set of needs served by a product, and, almost invariably, adding new functionality that no one asked for and that they probably don't want. And usually that new functionality is a sort of Trojan horse (a faster Trojan horse?) that offers something superficially interesting but is really just a means of wedging some kind of revenue generation into the experience the user really wants to have.

People often do want cars rather than faster horses, but they want the cars they want, not the ones that will make someone else the most money.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#490

Post by sixo »

tristor wrote: post #471
Suppafly wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.

Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we talk about metrics, these are measurable data points. Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically win here. That was essentially the only metric that they won on. If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing.…

The ability to have 20-50 tabs open without slowing the computer to a crawl was the reason I switched, and was highly publicized at the time.

You don't need a "set of metrics", you need to do a good job on the one thing people actually care about enough to switch.

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