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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?

#501

Post by mncharity »

mrandish wrote: post #454
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 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 giv…

Given several mrandish-equivalents, gathered into a side-channel Customer Advocacy org, is there some way to integrate their output without this problematic constantly arguing against metric-chasing?

I'm groping towards something vaguely ombudsman-y, or WW2 production/logistics trouble shooters. Or maybe even pre-Bush41 ARPA Project Managers - term-limited person-with-a-checkbook and few accountability constraints.

If one accepts this role has to be out-of-band, vs poking big hairy blob in hope of creating and maintaining signal channels with particular properties, and grants CEO-adjacent leverage, then it seems a remaining unresolved challenge is integrating the output signals at scale? If so, maybe (jest) CA granted KPI offsets?

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#502

Post by 3minus1 »

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 really don't think bad Product Manager's is a good explanation for the UI. Any big company like Netflix is going to heavily A/B test any and every change to the UI. They will only ever add things that boost metrics like engagement. You may not like the UI; it may annoy you, but you should have some appreciation for the fact that they are using sophisticated techniques to optimize for what they care about.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#503

Post by crazygringo »

bluGill wrote: post #461
crazygringo wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think they already remind you after a year of inactivity, and automatically cancel your plan after 2 years of inactivity.

But they're a business, so obviously they want you to use it and pay for it.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#504

Post by thesuitonym »

_kush wrote: post #116
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…

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…

Thank you, that makes so much sense to me. Spotify has, for quite a long time, seemed like a product for people who want to hear music, but don't really like music.

It hadn't occurred to me that that might actually be exactly what's happening.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#505

Post by Suppafly »

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 such a better end user experience, I can't believe you're arguing otherwise. I appreciate what Mozilla does, but their history includes multiple periods of being a worse browsing experience than their competitors. You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better experience when you could run them side by side and notice that one would crash far more often than the other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more accurately than the other.

Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#507

Post by Taek »

ks2048 wrote: post #43
Taek wrote: post #31

The root problem seems to be monopoly and fragmentation. When Ford was working on a car, people who wanted a faster horse could go to the horse store. There were reasonable alternatives to Ford's new method of transportation. But here, you can't recreate Spotify from 2015. You'll never get the rights to play the music for users. Same with Netflix, you'll never get the rights to show the movies. Same thing with Twitte…

Maybe it depends on your listening habits, but for me, Spotify and Netflix are very different experiences. Spotify has almost anything I look for. Netflix I struggle to find anything of interest.

Spotify only has about half of the music that I like. A lot of it is remixes and jams from Japan that can only be found on youtube, soundcloud, or in some cases it's actually only available on private trackers.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#508

Post by bluecalm »

temp0826 wrote: post #219
chasd00 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm convinced expensive watches are exclusively used as a vehicle for money laundering

My friend does some trades in watch market as he gets access to limited editions from time to time (if you know right people in dealerships you can sometimes buy a watch out of line if the original "subscribed" buyer doesn't show up). There are quite a few people who want to buy an expensive watch or two to show off on their social media. People just really like shiny status symbols.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#509

Post by yibg »

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.

Not directly, the there is a strong correlation between use of the product and retention. Ideally yes users that pay but don't use are the best, but those are rare. The cost of delivering the service on an incremental basis is also low. So all in all, they want users to be using the product as much as possible.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#510

Post by toss1 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #270
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long wondered why Amazon made it harder to buy products from them, why they've decreased the [customer] value of their search, decreased the value of the filters, decreased the value of the reviews... I mean the answer has to be "they make more money this way" but for me it's means I groan internally before going to Amazon because finding the product I want will be almost impossible - it's even hard if I already…

I've worked for a large e-commerce company, and you're right, search is very important - to the point where effective search was one of the main focuses of the company's development. They had a clear correlation between revenue and how good/relevant the search results were, so they focused on that. Doing what seems like the complete opposite is a... choice. I don't use amazon, but I use AWS every day of my life and I…

>> search is very important - to the point where effective search was one of the main focuses of the company's development.

THIS is what I really do not get.

Of course N=[small_numbers_somewhat_selective], but I have never encountered anyone who wanted anything other than good search. I have only ever heard complaints about the messy Amazon-style searches. In decades I have NEVER heard or seen a written comment about someone finding something great that 'just popped up' in an otherwise failed search. No one likes sloppy search or finds it anything but a waste of time and actually drives them away from the site.

Yet, clearly the search-enshittifiers have some data or usage pattern information indicating it works for them, or they wouldn't keep doing it. Does anyone know what this data might be?

I also don't know why they couldn't do both. Present the sloppy-search but have a small button to switch over to strict search (or even better, a McMaster-style search). I fail to see how that wouldn't be better, since I and everyone I know now actively work avoid Amazon and the like rather than work to try to find stuff in their shitty search. I came originally because it was easy to find stuff. Now, it is hard so I'm elsewhere

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