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Flappy Bird by the Numbers

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Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#31

Post by karmelapple »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #13
antics wrote: post #2

What's interesting about a by-the-numbers account of Flappy Bird's success is how starkly apparent the weaknesses of the app store model of surfacing and distributing apps seem to be in retrospect. Think about it: the app store organizes apps almost exactly like web directories organized websites in the 90's -- there are human-curated catalogs, and a single store acts as a directory for essentially all known apps. It…

Discovery in general is still a pretty knotty problem. Even Netflix, which has a relatively small pool of things to sort through, doesn't do a particularly good job of it. It often recommends things I have no interest in whatsoever, and conversely never recommends things I very much want to watch but have to find manually. It's practical to manually sort as a Netflix customer precisely because their pool is relativel…

> Even Netflix ... doesn't do a particularly good job of [discovery].

I see this message repeated by a lot of tech people, but I feel like I get fairly good recommendations. Am I alone?

What is it about the recommendations that seem bad? Is it because you know there is better content there but the metadata has somehow not categorized it properly for cross-referencing, or does it seem more like it's guessing from a shallow pool and trying to bubble up whatever content it can find, even if it's not a great match?

Is there any kind of open source recommendation framework or standard? Couldn't Netflix publish the details of its algorithm, including which metrics it has, to help the community think up more ways to analyze? The value in Netflix right now is in the content, not in the recommendation engine.

Looks like the competition Netflix used to host was ended in 2009... would be great if they started it again: http://www.netflixprize.com

Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#32

Post by waterlesscloud »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #26

I think the most interesting part of this is what the author points out: this is a story about a normal developer riding one hell of a roller-coaster. On top of that, let's face it: the game ain't that much. It's not like there was some special secret sauce he put in there. I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there. So this story, aside from…

"I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there."

I don't know that this is true. Or maybe it's true for "simple and playable", but maybe they're missing the "fun and addictive" qualities that made Flappy Bird work.

There's a lot of subtle things that made Flappy Bird a game people enjoyed- the exact responses of the control, the timing and spacing of the obstacles, the quickness of the games, the ease of restarting, and so on. If any of that had been slightly off, it might not have made it.

I'm not at all sure he got all that right intentionally, it might well be he just got the balances right through accident.

But I do think the precise qualities of the game did matter, and I don't think there's a huge number of games out there that could have done just as well.

Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#33

Post by rismay »

rismay wrote: post #3

I don't know if I agree with this. I was just talking to my friend about Flappy Bird reviews. When I first got Flappy Bird in early February, the button to rate the game was in the same place where I usually tapped to make the bird fly. Since the "Rate this App" button appeared so quickly after losing the game, I almost rated the app like 5 times in just a couple of minutes. I would like to see the different versions…

I should maybe add his response, "I knoooow, WTF. It's annoying. Why doesn't he just make that button, the "Play Again button?"

Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#34

Post by jamesaguilar »

jmduke wrote: post #19
jamesaguilar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say, given what money can do for you in this world -- how much easier it can make your life, the doors it can open -- that it is at the very least surprising that anyone would turn down this kind of success. In fact, I'll bet you'd have trouble finding one person out of a hundred who would not be willing to suffer pretty significant pain for two weeks if it meant they'd make $50,000 a day. Given that people a…

Average monthly salary for a software developer in Vietnam is, what, $600/mo? Nguyen was making around seven years' salary per day for two weeks. A lot of the doors that could be opened with money were already opened at that point.

This random dude makes $1200/mo. I don't know what the average is. Maybe he is set for life, but it's only been really big for a couple of days, and I'd imagine he's not quite yet, and certainly not as set as he could be.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23497561

Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#35

Post by jmduke »

10feet wrote: post #21
blackhole wrote: post #4

What disturbs me most about this is the complete lack of empathy people have for the guy. Just look at the comments on the link explaining that Flappy Bird was removed from the app store. Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. They hurl insults like "weak" and "fragile"…

> Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. It is not obsession with money, it is just confusion over it. I mean, it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails, and a small price to pay for riches. There must be something else going on, and that is the bit th…

it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails

The gravity and emotional toll of receiving death threats and verbal harassment is often incredibly underestimated by those who haven't received them.

Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#37

Post by jmduke »

karmelapple wrote: post #31
waterlesscloud wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovery in general is still a pretty knotty problem. Even Netflix, which has a relatively small pool of things to sort through, doesn't do a particularly good job of it. It often recommends things I have no interest in whatsoever, and conversely never recommends things I very much want to watch but have to find manually. It's practical to manually sort as a Netflix customer precisely because their pool is relativel…

> Even Netflix ... doesn't do a particularly good job of [discovery]. I see this message repeated by a lot of tech people, but I feel like I get fairly good recommendations. Am I alone? What is it about the recommendations that seem bad? Is it because you know there is better content there but the metadata has somehow not categorized it properly for cross-referencing, or does it seem more like it's guessing from a sh…

I'd argue that Netflix is high-precision, low-recall: the quality of recommendations are usually good, but the recommendations themselves usually don't reflect the entire library.

Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#39

Post by waterlesscloud »

karmelapple wrote: post #31
waterlesscloud wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovery in general is still a pretty knotty problem. Even Netflix, which has a relatively small pool of things to sort through, doesn't do a particularly good job of it. It often recommends things I have no interest in whatsoever, and conversely never recommends things I very much want to watch but have to find manually. It's practical to manually sort as a Netflix customer precisely because their pool is relativel…

> Even Netflix ... doesn't do a particularly good job of [discovery]. I see this message repeated by a lot of tech people, but I feel like I get fairly good recommendations. Am I alone? What is it about the recommendations that seem bad? Is it because you know there is better content there but the metadata has somehow not categorized it properly for cross-referencing, or does it seem more like it's guessing from a sh…

I had a response written to this, but realized I haven't thought it through enough to respond meaningfully.

I know I'm dissatisfied. I know it doesn't show me movies I very much want to see, and that it clutters my recommendations with a lot of things I'll never watch.

My feeling is that it doesn't capture why I like the movies I like.

The categories they've been refining over the years are likely an attempt to address that, but they seem to be missing the important information still.

Hmm.

PS- re the contest, there was a problem with the anonymized data being de-anonymized by researchers, so they couldn't make it available any more.

Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers

#40

Post by drabiega »

karmelapple wrote: post #31
waterlesscloud wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovery in general is still a pretty knotty problem. Even Netflix, which has a relatively small pool of things to sort through, doesn't do a particularly good job of it. It often recommends things I have no interest in whatsoever, and conversely never recommends things I very much want to watch but have to find manually. It's practical to manually sort as a Netflix customer precisely because their pool is relativel…

> Even Netflix ... doesn't do a particularly good job of [discovery]. I see this message repeated by a lot of tech people, but I feel like I get fairly good recommendations. Am I alone? What is it about the recommendations that seem bad? Is it because you know there is better content there but the metadata has somehow not categorized it properly for cross-referencing, or does it seem more like it's guessing from a sh…

Given my anecdotal experiences of this problem I would guess that Netflix's problem isn't a matter of figuring out what I would like, it's a matter of figuring out what I may not have seen yet. The problem is that the things that I am most likely to like based on my viewings are also the things that I am most likely to have already seen somewhere other than Netflix.
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