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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?

#91

Post by bombcar »

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…

There’s a lot of money to be made in letting people order takeout from McDonalds while not feeling like the kind of person who orders takeout from McDonald’s.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#92

Post by clan »

hobs wrote: post #18
hackitup7 wrote: post #8

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." This line is especially silly when making B2B products, especially very expensive enterprise ones. It's often used to justify building "great ideas" from some exec or overzealous PM/engineer over concrete asks from customers. Like you really think that a team of 20 experienced people paying >$1M to help run their multi-billion dollar busine…

Have you ... done enterprise sales? The idea that a group of people working for a multi-billion dollar business having no idea what they want and no understanding of capabilities of new technologies is ... standard? I have seen it personally ... dozens? of times? Its the reasons startups can even succeed at all given the enormous momentum and cash reserves of these bigger companies - their goals, management, approach…

Been there. Done that.

But it doesn't even stop there. It goes down to the SMB market as well. Granted not the S but in Medium and larger places.

I have been dragged into multiple sales calls with the agenda "we need an app".

Full stop.

Fun day to be the "Solution Architect" on call.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#93

Post by tonightstoast »

nottorp wrote: post #23
kilian wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video costs a lot more money than streaming some JSON to populate a UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.

But they play those previews automatically... and that's still bandwidth used.

And tragically most users prefer the auto playing previews. Theprimeagean has a YouTube video about how he tried to a/b test it before release thinking "no way that's what users would prefer" and was unfortunately wrong.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#94

Post by germinalphrase »

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…

The Hustler and the Nerd are the co-founding duo. Domain expertise is an obvious plus, but a “non-technical” Domain Expert is a third wheel.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#95

Post by svachalek »

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.

It's amazing how fast we can eat up new hardware capabilities. The old 6502 1-MHz CPUs were capable of running much more sophisticated software than most people today imagine, with 1/1000 or 1/millionth the hardware. And now we're asking LLMs to answer math questions, using billions of operations to perform something a single CPU instruction can handle.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#96

Post by bryanlarsen »

sokoloff wrote: post #36
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…

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them). My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful…

But a large portion of their beauty is reflective. The Countach was seen as a very ugly car by many when it was released. But it was lust-worthy for its performance. That lust-worthiness over time transformed the car's image, and now it's seen as iconic.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#97

Post by teeray »

kaoD wrote: post #75
lotsofpulp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most valuable businesses have desirable net income trends, not “engagement”.

In the ad-tention economy, engagement means more eyes on your ads. Advertisers desire engagement which is therefore a proxy for future net income. Then investors transposed that proxy to non ad-tention businesses, driving up engagement-rich stocks in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Also, engagement is a measure of how rich the oil field is for enshittifying the platform to extract ad dollars.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#98

Post by deepsun »

> Spotify today is... basically Netflix

Yep, Spotify keeps showing me podcasts right at the top, even though I've never listened to one on their platform ever. Sometimes with titles like "how we f**ed yesterday", while I keep it open on my work computer. It looks like they know better what I want!

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#99

Post by kilian »

nottorp wrote: post #23
kilian wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video costs a lot more money than streaming some JSON to populate a UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.

But they play those previews automatically... and that's still bandwidth used.

A short, compressed, small video that's edge-cached beats always out a 4K stream, so it even works as a tactic to keep you in that overview longer.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#100

Post by lmz »

jt-hill wrote: post #77
sokoloff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them). My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful…

> No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty Except for the Toyota nerds who will want to come talk to you about the LFA. Ask me how I know!

Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly soulless"?
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