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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?

#551

Post by kowbell »

crote wrote: post #512
dswalter wrote: post #184

There's a fundamental reality that shapes both Netflix and Spotify's trajectory: content licensing. 2012 Netflix had access to vastly more of everyone else's library, so it was closer to an indexed search of what was available that one could watch and then getting that video onto your screen. Over time, other companies understood that they were underpricing their content and Netflix was reaping the benefits. Once ext…

> They each had to change species or die, and they chose to keep living. Did they, though? 2025 Netflix is extremely close to having a worse UX than piracy, and it's already far more expensive. Are people going to pay a fortune for Netflix when their handy nephew can hook them up to his far superior Jellyfin instance for a sixpack of beer? It's a tragedy of the commons, really. The whole value is in having a complete…

You are overestimating how many people have access to a piracy nephew by a very, very large margin. And even if we all knew a privacy nephew, they're very quickly going to stop responding to incessant requests for more content. And they won't be available 24/7.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#553

Post by inkyoto »

Fripplebubby wrote: post #517
hennell wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much. No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite open about it - the strategy is to maximize user consumption for every user, because that keeps them subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to decide what…

> Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time […]

Except they don't. Only Netflix has a vague reminiscence of ML/analytics-driven recommendations. The rest of streaming platforms offer anything but personalisation, which is particularly bewildering considering the financial and engineering resources available to the streaming behemoths. I do not have subscriptions for each streaming platform out there, but out of the several ones I do, Disney+ and especially Prime are the worst offenders that throw random trash either into the home screen or into the «personalisation» section, e.g. «because you have watched The Expanse, we thought you would like an NBA season / rugby World Cup» and stuff like that. You would think that obsessively clicking the «Like» button after watching something you actually liked would influence the personalisation, except it does not. Disney+, again, fills up the home screen with garbage I would never fathom could even exist.

The thing is that with the currently available technology, building a capable (it does not have to be perfect) recommendation is not that hard. At work, we almost daily design and build solutions that employ semantic similarity search / something, and with the current crop of multimodal LLM's that can generate vector embeddings with ease, it is relatively easy to build out a recommendation engine or algorithm tailored for the needs of a specific streaming platform.

Granted, specific optimisations are required and there will be unique new challenges in there; however, crafting such a solution is well within the realm of possibility. And the amount of money required is not even that high considering that many building blocks are available as mature, managed services, or creating a bespoke and tailored in-house solution does not require starting off from the clean slate by leveraging the prior art. That was not the case, say, back in 2018, but in 2025 it is a reality. For a bizarre reason that is beyond my comprehension, almost no streaming platforms do that.

> […] that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic […]

That is the aspiration and the high ideal; however, something else is going on, and it is not entirely inconceivable that the marketing department is complicit in the foul play.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#554

Post by wpm »

freedomben wrote: post #451

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…

I can't wait for the day my hiking trails aren't festooned with piles of horseshit.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#556

Post by abaymado »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #177
_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…

This is the kind of thing David Chapman described with his post Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution [1] [1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Very interesting read.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#557

Post by physicsguy »

mr_mitm wrote: post #381
al_borland wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can like songs, which will then be added to your playlist of liked songs. Sounds like that's waht you want.

It’s not the same because with Apple Music you still have an iPod like library you can go through with artists/albums/songs.

If you like a song on Spotify it just adds it to the massive playlist. It only adds it to its library management thing if you like the Album. If you click an artist in your library it takes you to their main page rather than to your library of saved songs by them.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#559

Post by rsanheim »

al_borland wrote: post #546
chilmers wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This is from the Spotify support page for the web player (what I was using): > 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 li…

This.

Spotify hides the ability to just have your own stuff in favor of their algorithm they want to shove down your throat. It isn't just library management, but every part of their UI feels more like algo-driven exploration and recommendations as opposed to 'I'm in the drivers seat, and I decide when I want to explore'.

Its so frustrating, and I find it hard to explain to folks who have never had their own music collection finely curated - whether physical, in mp3s carefully renamed and organized (probably to be played thru winamp), or now in something like Roon or Apple music or one of the winamp-like local music apps.

Don't get me wrong, I've discovered great stuff via the various algo-radio things every service offers now and auto-plays if your queue ends. But I find much more great music via friends or music sites or reddit. And I want to be in the drivers seat when choosing music - starting with things I've added or favorited or added to playlists.

Anytime I have to use Spotify (typically to share w/ friends) its clear their product is all about _them_ and the stuff they want to push, and not about me.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#560

Post by throwaway290 »

krisoft wrote: post #464
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 desi…

By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable. I doubt that would happen. Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.
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