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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?

#571

Post by FinnLobsien »

conductr wrote: post #382
FinnLobsien wrote: post #81

I also dislike the TikTokification of everything, but I also know that all of us on this platform are wrong in the sense that we're not the user being designed for. Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't design for nerds like us, they design for the average person. Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person. And most people on this planet are more or less happy with wha…

> Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person. They're generally designed for engagement. Nobody is particularly asking for this type of experience it's just that Tiktok has discovered the most addictive - eh hum, I mean engaging - experience thus far. So they're being copied. Netflix is a little different though as if people open the app and always see the same top titles listed due to it be…

Right, so I might have to update my statement to "they design for the most likely behavior of the average person."

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#572

Post by FinnLobsien »

techpineapple wrote: post #394
FinnLobsien wrote: post #81

I also dislike the TikTokification of everything, but I also know that all of us on this platform are wrong in the sense that we're not the user being designed for. Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't design for nerds like us, they design for the average person. Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person. And most people on this planet are more or less happy with wha…

I think I understand the economics here, but it bugs me there aren't more slow-growth self-funded places to fill in these niches.

The problem is either network effects (in social media) or massive CapEx (Spotify, Netflix).

In categories where neither is the case, you can usually find beautiful alternatives from indie makers or small businesses.

The issue with streaming and social media is that they represent 90%+ of our cultural narrative now, so it feels like there's no escape.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#573

Post by rendaw »

myself248 wrote: post #128

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…

The implication here is appeal to a wider audience _at the expense_ of the existing customer base, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be a tyranny at all.

What I don't get is at some point the marginal user increase for a change has got to be smaller than the number of customers you tick off and lose by changing things.

Is the idea that all services converge on the same N billion people target audience who wants something almost entirely unlike the initial product? I feel like "marginal" doesn't really capture this nuance if so.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#574

Post by dragonwriter »

tuna74 wrote: post #569
kelnos wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem specifically with Netflix is that they lost the rights to most of the good stuff, or at least the stuff that everyone wants to see, because the Disneys of the world set up their own streaming services and pulled their content from Netflix. So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a cata…

"So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed." They could try. The budget for the first seasons of Friends was the same as any other sitcom of that era. Sitcoms would be perfect…

> Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason.

The second longest (by episode count) non-animated, scripted original series at Netflix is a sitcom, The Upshaws. I’m not aware of any streaming service that doesn't do original sitcoms.

I’m not convinced, though, that sitcoms are all that great a fit for streaming—I don't think any genre other than maybe talk shows has been more dependent for initial launch on pre-streaming broadcast/cable viewership habits and viewing block placement to catch people already watching already-successful similarly targeted shows.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#575

Post by swiftcoder »

lovich wrote: post #452
swiftcoder wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wouldn’t say they are hardly incentivized now. They were never incentivized. What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already

Indeed. It was however expedient to pay lip service to the idea of promoting user wellbeing at various times (i.e. shortly post-Cambridge analytica at Facebook)

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#576

Post by swiftcoder »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #463
swiftcoder wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 qui…

Yeah, I was working at Oculus when the wellbeing narrative started to fall apart across Meta. Was a good time to get out.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#577

Post by xigoi »

karn97 wrote: post #541
xigoi wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah you are talking about yourself and only yourself.

Surely I’m not the only person on the planet who finds it useful, otherwise there would be no cheap watches because nobody would buy them.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#578

Post by throw0101d »

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…

> Can can git rich by growing slowly in many cases - but it will be a long hard road.

Most people don't have the patience for it and it's not as flashy. Morgan Housel (author of The Psychology of Money) on what a lot of people don't get about Warren Buffett:

> He's 90 years old. But if you look at the course of his life 99% of his net worth came after his 50th birthday and something like 97% came after his 65th birthday. That's just how compounding Works compounding is not something where the big Returns come in a year or in a decade. It's something that takes place over the course of a lifetime and it's important for someone like Warren Buffett to say look, he's 90 years old. He's been investing full-time since he's been 10 years old. So he's been investing for 80 years now. It's really important. Is that the Math on this is very simple. You can hypothetically say, okay if Warren Buffett did not start investing when he was 10. Let's say hypothetically he started investing when he was 25 like a normal person and let's say hypothetically he did not keep investing through age 90 like he has let's say hypothetically he retired at age 65 like a normal person and he would say he was just as successful and investor during that period that he was investing and he earned the same average annual Returns. What would his net worth be today? If you started investing at 25 and retired at 65 the answer is about Million dollars not 90 billion 12 million. So we know that 99.9% of his net worth can be tied to just the amount of time. He has been investing for that's how compounding works it is. So incredibly powerful, but it is rarely intuitive. Even if you understand the math behind compounding it's almost never to it intuitive how powerful it can be.

* https://podclips.com/ct/RhYCoA

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#579

Post by edanm »

_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…

I think this is just taking the common-on-HN refrain of "boostrap good, VC bad" and trying to apply it to everything. I don't particularly agree with the refrain in the first place, and definitely don't think it applies so broadly.

There are many reasons for products getting worse; sometimes it's because the company making it is trying to appeal to a broader base, so the original enthusiasts are no longer the target. Sometimes it's because different people are involved and they can't produce to the same level. Sometimes things don't really deteriorate, but new innovations make other things more appealing.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#580

Post by edanm »

tristor wrote: post #424
Suppafly wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better. As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built int…

This is completely wrong. Chrome won initially because it was a much better browser in terms of user experience. I remember the original discussions around it, they innovated a bunch of features like processes-per-tab so if one tab crashed you wouldn't have to restart the whole browser.

It also had a much cleaner UI - that's why it was called "Chrome" in the first place, because it only had the chrome. You can see that these were true innovations because everyone else copied them.

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