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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?

#221

Post by hedora »

soco wrote: post #38
krige wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix was changing a lot to drain more money out of users recently, which is why income rose recently. What I'd like to see is active / recurring users instead.

It's important to look at the competition as well for this. I think we can all agree that streaming is here to stay. But how are the others faring here? In a more and more fragmented landscape, Netflix still has the fattest offering. Also the quality of the service (aka, search, languages offered, subtitles, trailers, stream quality, own productions...) is way better than say Prime or Disney+. So why shouldn't they b…

#2 is youtube. #3 (BitTorrent) saw 40% 6-month growth in 2024 (the same year Netflix had 60% YoY growth):

https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-traffic-increases-40-in-...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#222

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

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 irony is that he argued for a faster horse and that’s what all his providers are doing. TikTok is the faster horse. What he really is asking for is a step out of the paradigm, although he argues for a romantic conservative product instead of an innovative product like Ford.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#223

Post by nthingtohide »

dijit wrote: post #17

I don't really know how to form this into words on a short-form text medium like this. So please read charitably. I'm by no means a conspiracy theorist, however as I've risen the ranks of my chosen technical field I see more and more that what George Carlin said was really poignant. "You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align"[0]. And incentives align really easily. Every company has some form of market…

> And incentives align really easily.

Today incentives align more easily. All these CEOs are in the same whatsapp group. That's how we got the RTO mandates from all CEOs at the same time. There was story here a year or two ago.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#224

Post by echelon »

_kush wrote: post #205
beloch wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To simplify: 1. Innovate. 2. Exploit. You start by innovating a "fast horse". This gains you early adopters who pull in a larger audience. A horse can only be so fast, so continued innovation might lead to something more like a car. This will only cause you to bleed users. Stick to the horse. Instead of continuing to innovate endlessly, you switch to exploitation. Fire the visionaries. They're just a waste of payroll…

Porsche is easy to replace only if you bought it as just another fast car. If you bought it for the design, the legacy, or what the brand means to you, it’s not so easy. Netflix has their content as their moat. Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching. Porsche h…

> Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching.

What, apart from Stranger Things and Squid Game, has been enough of a cultural touchstone that it keeps people on Netflix? Those aren't things you keep coming back to again and again.

Netflix doesn't own Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, Community, Parks and Rec, etc.

I'd argue Max (nee HBO) has better legacy titles and franchises. They have both enduring IP as well as the reputation of being "destination television".

The thing that keeps people from cancelling Netflix is that they have a better content slate of licensed classics paired with new originals. And they do it in the greatest volume of all the streamers, so there will be "something" on, even if it isn't particularly good.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#225

Post by klabb3 »

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…

Overwhelmingly, products are designed to maximize total recurring user interaction, aka engagement or attention grabbing. This is the proxy for ad revenue, the most popular business model (even if Netflix is different). Look at Quora, LinkedIn and even SO, which essentially degraded into content farms for these reasons, largely downstream of the Google search funnel.

But engagement maximization looks the same everywhere – it’s communicating with the amygdala of the user, not their consciousness. And in a way, everyone’s amygdala is kind of the same and generic (sugar foods, violence, rage bait, boobs, chock value etc). Products that are largely designed for higher consciousness are more varied, such as most books. But those drive less engagement.

The amygdala wants more of the same, and the prefrontal cortex seems to want variation. My view is that you can’t have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines. You have to compartmentalize to protect yourself from your own amygdala. Same goes for media. Even well meaning product managers will be completely fooled if they simply follow the metrics.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#226

Post by bsoles »

cjs_ac wrote: post #61
soco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, how could a business identify its (or market's) trend-setters, enthusiasts, or whatever we call them, which will push towards something new? I see this as essential for either making the business better, shinier, or to avoid losing users.

By participating in the community. Content moderation on HN is so much better than on Facebook because dang is one of us, whereas on Facebook, it's a team of people in a developing country, in a different cultural context. Netflix needs to be run by film enthusiasts, not UX engineers trying to disguise the fact that all the good IP has been pulled back to the streaming platforms of the original producers. Spotify nee…

> ... because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve.

That is indeed a big problem with software engineering/engineers today. No other expertise other than being a framework monkey.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#227

Post by Tistron »

Nothing has ever felt better than my student days with DC++. The whole campus had a server we all used and I could search for stuff I liked and see what other people who had that on their disks also had, and explore that. I found a lot of music that way, as well as other stuff. Before that we had had a list of ftp servers which was also good once I wrote an indexer, but DC automated all that and made more people able to participate.

I hate the Netflix interface enough that I prefer to watch movies other ways even though I have access to it.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#228

Post by bryanhogan »

Great read!

I think what we must keep in mind with many modern products and services, especially popular ones, is that they are not becoming TikTok, they are becoming things competing for our attention in the most perverse ways possible. The potential to make these systems even more manipulative and exploitative is there, I see great potential for UX design that is even "worse" than what we already know.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#229

Post by hedora »

IshKebab wrote: post #151
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... :(

Are you running Linux or something? I installed Win 11 in a VM, and no one that's seen its first boot screen would claim the experience has improved since the day of shovelware-bloated XP desktops. It only gets worse and worse from there.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#230

Post by patapong »

I am astonished by how much less delightful software has become. Computers used to feel like a magical tool, that would respond instantly and allow me to perform complicated transformations at the press of a button.

Now, I feel like I am fighting against software most of the time, having to compete with someones vision for how I should be using their program, which is likely aimed at the least technically sophisticated user. Nothing wrong with allowing such users to use the software, but please retain the functionality and speed for the power users!

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