541–550 of 632 posts
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I think you're quite underestimating how many times a person takes their phone out and it's way more than they turn their wrist around to see their watch
I bought a watch about half a year ago just because I was tired of taking out my phone to check the time, so I know what I’m talking about.
I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User". To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone fr…
I finally know what to call these idiotic trends that I've learned to recognise but couldn't name.
The one that grind my gears the most has been Microsoft breaking decades-old Windows paradigms to cater for Linux-developers-on-Windows, which is a very marginal, even actively disinterested group. All this at the expense of the 99.9% of their loyal user base.
For example, VS Code had the opposite shortcut (literally with the arrow keys going in opposing directions) for "go back in search history" to every other editor ever made for Windows... but matching the Linux equivalent.
Similarly, they recently broke "cls" to match the broken(!) behaviour of "clear" in Linux because of basically just one or two Linux users complaining in a GitHub Issue ticket. Windows users weren't listened to, because they're already users, not potential new users.
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> Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing. I wasn't aware that Spotify lacked much in the way of mainstream western music. Are they having licensing issues?
didnt neil young pull his stuff from spotify in protest?
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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…
there have been many e-commerce players that have come in to the gap there and specialize in these “niche” products or services that deliver fast as Amazon and it isn’t hard to do so if you’re willing to invest. i would not personally be surprised if amazon saw long term growth loss in their e-commerce sector, especially given the competetion from other retailers that have adjusted - like walmart and target.
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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…
I'm arguing because I have used /both/ Chrome and Firefox in parallel since the initial release of both pieces of software, including regularly benchmarking them. In the sum totality of the data I have seen, there have been many moments of back and forth where one was "better" than the other, but in the end they are roughly equivalent. When Chrome /first/ released, it had a huge performance advantage explicitly due t…
You're replying to a post which claimed that Chrome was better than Firefox for years, with a rebuttal that claims Chrome was better than Firefox for years, but then Firefox improved. That doesn't change anything! Those early years from 2008 onward were critical for early adoption and gave Chrome inertia which it was able to ride to market dominance. I don't think any of your posts, while correct, have addressed that initial argument.
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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.…
> To add something to Your Library:
> - Click Like on any song, album, or playlist to save to your Liked Songs playlist
> - Click 3 horizontal dots on any song or album to add them to a new or existing playlist
> - Click FOLLOW on any artist, podcast or show
So the “Library” is a proxy for artists I follow, songs in a playlist, or songs I like.
I find that confusing and it’s not really what I want. For example, there are songs I wouldn’t say I like enough to click the heart on them, as I wouldn’t want them inflicting my recommendations, but I might still want them in my library for easy access. Others I might like well enough without loving them.
The alternative would be to make playlists where I just throw stuff for storage, which seems like a messy way to managing things.
Then the followed artists seem like a wrench in the whole system, as it’s a totally different concept.
For mobile it mentions the + to add to Library, without mentioning the 3 bullets for doing it on the desktop/web. Why would mobile have a completely different mechanic for managing the library than the web, when it’s managing the same collection for the user? That also makes 0 sense.
I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for like a decade. Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a T…
> I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". I'm curious to know the name of that digital bank.
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>Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything. There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members , not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for…
There were people who only had HBO subscriptions to watch the new season of Westworld. Given they merged with Cinemax I’m not sure if that worked out for them. But there were also Apple+ subscriptions just to watch Ted Lasso. And I begrudgingly got Prime to watch the Expanse. But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I’m sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at least some of it went to App…
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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…
Having legislators outlaw bad business practices is in general very slow; if competition works then it seems there should be a niche for a lump-sum/fixed commission-based dating service where they match you with the people in their database most likely to actually be compatible with you. But now that creates a new problem of measuring "successful" outcomes in matchmaking, which will be near-impossible to measure and easy for all parties to game, if it's mostly transacted by app. But it sounds in principle like the business model for traditional introduction-based matchmaking (the matchmaker only gets a good reputation if they have some successes, and most prospective customers will only be willing to pay $ for say 3-12 months).
EDIT: makes me wonder: eHarmony never opened matchmaking offices.