Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

But what if I want a faster horse?

rakhim.exotext.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 632 posts

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#431

Post by badc0ffee »

setgree wrote: post #170
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…

"Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars. Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's the key driver of the carcinisation story here, the thing for which "what the median user wants" is ultimately a proxy. Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava, which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is n…

I think your link is broken (missing the l in html) and should point here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#432

Post by Suppafly »

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…

>As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true.

As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#433

Post by dowager_dan99 »

eadmund wrote: post #269
donatj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.

> Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything. I think that’s Netflix’s actual goal: deliver nothing anyone wants to watch, but keep on promising the possibility of something one might want to watch in the future. Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.

This doesn't really mesh with SaaS economics, or in this case how Netflix spends billions on producing their own content. A set of subscribers that don't use the service is locally maximized but has a lower lifetime total value. It is much easier to model & optimize your LTV with given costs (ex: assume the user watches 24/7) and then figure out "how do I make a user watch Netflix 24 hours a day?" than it is to solve "how do I grow my constantly churning user base?". Keeping customers is much less expensive than winning new ones.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#434

Post by dowager_dan99 »

mattnewton wrote: post #215
donatj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.

The marginal cost to serve you more videos is real, but it’s negligible compared to the fixed costs or cost of people not re-subscribing. So I assume that people at Netflix were optimizing for usage/engagement just like the ad driven services as a proxy for subscribe rate.

This is the correct mental model. Minor COGS increase < Churn.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#435

Post by greatgib »

I just hate so so so much the Netflix of nowadays, they manage to keep me because of a few good movies/series and releasing new seasons of shows that I watched previously.

But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so badly designed and unergonomic.

The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different levels. Some times you can't even find it, sometimes it lacks the movie that you were just watching and that reappears later.

It is very hard to find something to watch because they still show you the hundred of things that you saw already, or that old crappy movie that anyone saw ten times on tv, or things that you are not interested anyway.

And there is absolutely no way to filter to not be a frustrating experience.

In addition you have the asshole dark patterns like showing multiple times the same movie/series in a given category when you scroll.

My hypothesis is that they used to have a lot of great content, so that was their strength, and no they have very little valuable and recent content and as they don't want to be upfront about that, they use a lot of dark patterns to confuse you to still give the impression that they have an impressive catalog.

But that has the consequence of the user being frustrated, impossible to find something proper to watch, but still having to spend hours browsing in the app as you might think that the good thing exist but it is just you that can't find it.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#436

Post by dowager_dan99 »

dcrazy wrote: post #272
donatj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.

Netflix’s ad-supported tier makes so much more money per user than their ad-free tier that they had to raise the price of the ad-free tier to make it competitive on ARPU.

Spotify is doing this as well. If they can "downgrade" users from paid all-you-can-eat plans to cheaper plans that also serve ads they're overall way more lucrative.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#437

Post by dowager_dan99 »

Suppafly wrote: post #388
hinkley wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Netflix would probably be better if it learned a few lessons from gyms. I have to go wash my mouth out now. Brb. Some of these companies are trying to go for status now as well. They’re trying to strengthen their brands by picking up epic storylines and making them into the show everyone is watching. Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven’t figured out that nobody watches the…

>Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven’t figured out that nobody watches the first season of a Netflix show until the second is announced because they know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time. What's funny is that HBO is worse about that, but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big budget and look really appealing. Netflix is also really bad about taking way too long to make additional sea…

>> but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big budget and look really appealing.

This doesn't feel as true anymore. There's still the odd HBO blockbuster but they're producing a lot more garbage as they search for the next hit. And they're not immune to the Marvel approach of strip mining a profitable franchise well past there being any gold left.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#438

Post by badc0ffee »

echelon wrote: post #224
_kush wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Seinf…

There was the original Netflix-produced hit, House of Cards. Making a Murderer was also huge (although I didn't watch it). And then Tiger King blew up during the pandemic (although again, I never saw it myself).

I think the Jeffrey Dahmer one was also big, because there have been so many stupid memes about him since then, from people who weren't around to hear about him on the news.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#439

Post by dowager_dan99 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #243
donatj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.

Ads are embedded into the media Netflix sells. See almost any car chase scene, either wholly unnecessary or unnecessarily long to advertise the car brand, many times with the actors’ speaking lines solely to advertise the car. Even critically acclaimed shows like Slow Horses from a supposedly prestige media seller like Apple has scenes where you watch actors put on AirPods Max headphones (obviously with no relevance…

product placement is the very foundation of TV, it's just a little more subtle now. Originally shows were brought to you by XYZ and had an intermission to advertise their products. Radio did this as well.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#440

Post by HWR_14 »

cestith wrote: post #316
echelon wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Seinf…

Nobody Wants This; Bridgerton; Wednesday; Man on the Inside; 3 Body Problem; Emily in Paris; the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender; Love, Death, and Robots; How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast); Is It Cake?; Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney; and some others I’ve definitely had conversations about outside my own household. Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on Netflix and TenCent. They also have contin…

Also, Netflix kicked off the streaming premium shows with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.
Post reply on HN