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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?

#151

Post by IshKebab »

andai wrote: post #78

Ironically the old horses were faster! Run XP on modern hardware (if you can get it running at all) and you'll see what I mean. Explorer opens fully rendered in the span of a single frame (0.016 seconds). And XP was very slow and bloated for its time! It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.

To be fair even with modern software bloat the overall experience is a lot better now than it was in the XP days. I think it's mainly due to SSDs. They were a huge step change in performance and we fortunately haven't regressed back to the slowness of the HDD era.

At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#152

Post by madmountaingoat »

andai wrote: post #71

I think Spotify was perfect in 2008. I think people's need to justify their existence by constantly doing things creates an unfortunate incentive where perfect products are mutated beyond recognizability. (This coupled with the tendency to hire more people as you get more popular, you have more people mutating the thing. Also novelty bias...)

In those early days the Spotify user experience needed to try and differentiate and put up barriers to being copied. Later it suffered from being purely metric driven and tracking things like user-engagement thinking it's a proxy for happiness with the platform. And then later still they start to mostly care about the cost of delivery.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#153

Post by heisenbit »

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…

The short term data driven optimizations somehow erode the original product architecture and some of its value. I also think treating the consumer as static. Trick me one shame on you, trick me twice (admittedly I get tricked even more often to click on stuff) shame on me but eventually I learn and what worked turn into a constant irritating torn-off. These irritations accumulate. Good product management should strive to minimize such irritations but I guess we lost that with Jobs.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#154

Post by jillesvangurp »

Henry Ford's point wasn't that people didn't want faster horses but that they'd buy the car they never knew they needed - instead of a horse.

With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But judging from the lack of successful things in this space, probably not.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#155

Post by kod »

wlesieutre wrote: post #115
amrocha wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t explain why japanese manufacturers who used to make sports cars in the 90s don’t anymore. It’s a mixture of enthusiasm and conspicuous consumption. Most enthusiasts love 90s japanese cars, but the average person sees an old mazda and recoils. But put an old ferrari in front of anyone and they have a completely different reaction.

Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW. Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name. There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports car…

I get where you're coming from, but describing the fastest production FWD car as the "closest thing" is really funny

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#156

Post by joshuaturner »

jmull wrote: post #139

If people can't find a sustainable business model around that thing you want, it's just not going to be widely available. It's hard to say for sure if Netflix could have/should have kept going in the direction they were going in 2012. But they didn't seem to think so. You can't necessarily count on businesses springing up to satisfy your personal interests and tastes. Especially large-scale businesses, which are alwa…

The problem is with the definition of “sustainable business model.”

Could you maintain a profitable business and continue steady growth? Sure. Could you become a unicorn and IPO within the next 5 years? Unlikely.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#157

Post by bluGill »

gmuslera wrote: post #25

Doesn’t matter what you want anymore. You are not the client, but the product. They are the ones getting faster horses.

Until I finally get fed up and leave. There is value in my sharing pictures of my kids with distance friends and seeing pictures of their kids - but Facebook has got so bad at that I finally gave up logging in and not I'm not a product that exists for them. And in turn because I'm not there facebook is less valueable for my friends and so they are more likely to leave in the future.

The only question are people like me outliers that can be ignored - there will always be a few people you can't get. However I could be a sign of the end.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#158

Post by IshKebab »

ballenf wrote: post #12
arkh wrote: post #4

All the result of A/B tests. Everything will converge to give you an engaging experience for most people. The only not too bad student is reddit which lets you keep using their older UI if you want to. But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement.

My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling using Youtube and Netflix these days.

I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small. They can't let you narrow your search at all because then they wouldn't have any content to give you.

Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and it says "Content related to ".

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#159

Post by zemvpferreira »

_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…

Some very important things get better because of the mass market and investor dollars. iPhone/Macbook are the canonical example.

The hard bit is to keep taste and discipline at the forefront of design. To not let short-term thinking pollute long-term ambitions. Easier said than done.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#160

Post by 1970-01-01 »

It comes down to less is better. You don't want a faster horse, you want less horses on the road so your horse isn't traffic, it's a horse. You don't want less TikTok, you want less crap using TikTok. Horses were the same, leaving crap all over the cities until Henry Ford's Model A. So we can solve this problem by inventing a lot better, much cleaner TikTok. In the meantime, sell manure shovels.
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