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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?

#611

Post by immibis »

ryandrake wrote: post #271
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #242

All of the examples listed have something in common: they are services for accessing content you don't own. So it is in the provider's interest to find ways to satisfy you with less and/or cheaper content. The Netflix changes aren't attempts to make their product better. They are attempts to save money by obscuring the amount and/or quality of available content. By contrast, if you buy BluRays from one company and Bl…

> It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you satisfied with less and/or cheaper content If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think that all these "content companies" are colluding in a mass "Taste Removal" campaign, deliberately getting users used to bland, vanilla, generic "content" so they can one day just shove AI slop at us all day and only people who were alive in the 90s would remember when movies an…

Nah. They didn't know about the generative AI wave that far back. It's just a happy (for the shareholders) side effect.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#612

Post by immibis »

bluGill wrote: post #157
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…

They don't need you as the product - they found better products their customers would rather buy. My dad is one of the better products. I've seen what Facebook turned him into.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#613

Post by bobxmax »

xp84 wrote: post #536
bobxmax wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between that which optimized for what you call "engagement" and what the average user wants? Presumably the best thing for Netflix is to have a happy userbase, so why do you assume it wouldn't optimize for that?

(Not OP) I can think of many ways where optimizing for greater watch time is unaligned and often opposite to making me happy and giving me what I want. In the case of Netflix, what I want might be to watch one show at a time for one or two hours every night. It may even for some people be about watching The Office or Friends, a show they know well and just watch for comfort. What Netflix wants is for me to start a co…

What you want has nothing to do with what makes you happy

Netflix cannot make you happy

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#614

Post by throwaway290 »

krisoft wrote: post #609
throwaway290 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable. I doubt that would happen. Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.

> Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business. There is a slight sifting of goalpost here. I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. Think of DeLorean. They are absolutely understood as desirable cars, and they very much went bankrupt. > By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sp…

> I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same.

I mean to be widely desirable car requires some business success first.

> Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist?

Yes. You must be a rare carhead to judge the whole thing from just the outside and engine sound. The rest of normal people know they cannot and use reputation as proxy. I don't think it needs proving..,

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#615

Post by DavidPiper »

piperswe wrote: post #607
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.

Hell, my Windows XP system with a nearly 20 year old processor (Q6600, ~17ish years old) still instantly does almost everything.

You just gave me a hell of an nostalgia hit with "Q6600". Remember when clock speed, cache size and core count were all we cared about? AMD hadn't event bought ATI yet.

Maybe I'll spin up an XP VirtualBox off the back of this thread just for old times' sake and see what happens.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#616

Post by krisoft »

throwaway290 wrote: post #614
krisoft wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business. There is a slight sifting of goalpost here. I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. Think of DeLorean. They are absolutely understood as desirable cars, and they very much went bankrupt. > By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sp…

> I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. I mean to be widely desirable car requires some business success first. > Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist? Yes. You must be a rare carhead to judge the whole thing from just the outside and engine sound. The rest of normal peo…

> You must be a rare carhead...

Which I'm not. This is my point. I do not know of the reputation of Porsche. If you tell me they are shitty cars I would shrug and believe you. I do not even recognise the brand of a car. I see flashy car, bright colours, fast looking body, deep bone-shaking engine sound and I conclude "wow, that's a cool car". This is based on how it sounds and looks. Since I don't know anything about the reputation of the car it cannot be based on that.

If you are a carhead maybe you are mistaken about how regular people judge these things.

> I don't think it needs proving..,

Sounds like we disagree on how or why regular, not vehicle enthusiast, people recognise a car to be desirable. I proposed a test how we can figure out which one of ours theory is right. Do you agree in principle if people were to rate fictional cars as highly desirable that would show that reputation of the manufacturer is not what factors into that decision?

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#617

Post by cess11 »

erikerikson wrote: post #600
cess11 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you arrive at this proposal? Is the Mona Lisa propaganda because she isn't holding a branded flask with snake oil?

GP responded to a comment about broadcasts, not paintings. I think the GP wasn't so far off. If you are not selling products you are still presenting viewpoints, experiences, and ideas.

I remember seeing images of paintings on television so I don't agree that it would somehow be impossible.

What definition of propaganda are you using here?

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#618

Post by throwaway290 »

krisoft wrote: post #616
throwaway290 wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. I mean to be widely desirable car requires some business success first. > Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist? Yes. You must be a rare carhead to judge the whole thing from just the outside and engine sound. The rest of normal peo…

> You must be a rare carhead... Which I'm not. This is my point. I do not know of the reputation of Porsche. If you tell me they are shitty cars I would shrug and believe you. I do not even recognise the brand of a car. I see flashy car, bright colours, fast looking body, deep bone-shaking engine sound and I conclude "wow, that's a cool car". This is based on how it sounds and looks. Since I don't know anything about…

I'm not a carhead and most of us use brands to tell if it's good or not. If unknown brand car I see once looks cute that means literally nothing without extra information.

But if I see the same unknown brand car 10x in a day and then I see it in a videogame etc. and it's expensive so many carheads spend a bunch of money on it = endorsement, it's no longer unknown brand.

Same for everything, phones, cameras, whatever. You gotta be discerning to appreciate beyond the brand and most people are not.

If I see a cute car I check what's the brand, how much it costs etc and THEN I can think "yeah I want this cool looking car". I don't think anyone would use just cute shape of a car seen once as a justification for buying it.

Fast body? That means you must be a carhead. How do I know it's a fast body? Why would I even need a fast body?

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#619

Post by htrp »

JohnMakin wrote: post #270
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long wondered why Amazon made it harder to buy products from them, why they've decreased the [customer] value of their search, decreased the value of the filters, decreased the value of the reviews... I mean the answer has to be "they make more money this way" but for me it's means I groan internally before going to Amazon because finding the product I want will be almost impossible - it's even hard if I already…

I've worked for a large e-commerce company, and you're right, search is very important - to the point where effective search was one of the main focuses of the company's development. They had a clear correlation between revenue and how good/relevant the search results were, so they focused on that. Doing what seems like the complete opposite is a... choice. I don't use amazon, but I use AWS every day of my life and I…

> console UI (although admittedly it has gotten a little better) - like, why are you seemingly making this purposely difficult? There's no way this benefits you.

My secret suspicion is that AWS wants everyone to use APIs and deliberately enshittify's the console

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