But what if I want a faster horse?

> "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.

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...

>"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,

Non sequitur. For the longest time, Netflix had no advertisements. Do they even now? (I don't subscribe... all their shows end up on my Plex anyway.)

NYT link goes 404, here it is fixed: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...

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. Bring in people who can squeeze every last dime out of your user base.

-----------------------

The above isn't anything new. However, it's clear that some companies are better at maintaining quality while exploiting. Are they doing something different, or is it just that their customers have to choose them repeatedly? e.g. Most people don't sign up with one car company for life. They'll buy several cars over their life and that's a choice that the car company must win each time. Meanwhile, people sign up for Netflix or Spotify and stay subbed. They don't look at the alternatives every few years. Porsche needs to keep up with the latest and fastest horses to continue exploiting their reputation, while Netflix can focus purely on making more money from their users. A faster horse may come along, but Netflix doesn't break down and need to be replaced.

Can can git rich by growing slowly in many cases - but it will be a long hard road. You could instead sell out today and get rich instantly.

If you start the slow growth path at 30 and retire at 65 you will overall make more money from that thing vs someone who sells out at 35. There are some catches though. The person who sells out can go on to the next thing which in sum total may be more sell out enough to make far more over their lifetime, while the slow growth plan you are stuck. The slow growth is over very slow at first, you often spend 10 years making far less than someone who is "working for the man", then 15 more years more or less even, and only then start making good money. There is no guarantee that you will be successful, some people spend their entire life making less than they could "working for the man"; others go bankrupt when a new VC competitor suddenly gets better by enough to take your customers.

There is no right answer. VC money sometimes is the best answer - but many people who reaching for VC money when their better long term answer would be to grow slow.

Thank you, that makes so much sense to me. Spotify has, for quite a long time, seemed like a product for people who want to hear music, but don't really like music.

It hadn't occurred to me that that might actually be exactly what's happening.

Doesn't even have to involve VC funding coming in. Just need a clueless product manager.

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.

right, all that and increasing regulation and enforcement, ( SAFTEY SaFTEY SaFETy, agggghhhhh) marginalises, and criminalises anyone looking for something out on the edge and the edge gets crazyer.....think , the street raceing/drifting sceen, where, somebody gona die and nobody much cares, it's way too fucked up too even make a movie on the real mofo's and mofo'ets, are working as "contractors", anything goes, again...no movie's or branding possible at the other end are hard core solder iron in hand hackers, ocd'ing on PWNE'ing everything in sight And with my own fucking eyes, I have seen amish boys in town, whipping there horses into a frenzy as they drag race there buggys down main street, not making a movie on that either, cant brand it, it's all thats left. The market is starving for something authentic, but, every single thing is stolen, branded, comodified, and wrung dry as fast as you can spit so we get small legions of people who have fetishised things like listening to white noise

> 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.

I am immediately reminded of when Slack got rid of markdown-style inline formatting, in favor of a WYSIWYG interface, and the internet (or at least, the corner I live in) collectively (and, imo, correctly) lost its shit at them.

maybe just maybe that's just how things life do, like I mean we seeing it on every single thing and not just tech industry

I missed that post the first time around... and it's great. Thanks for re-posting it.

a mouse could easily do that with just it's nose

I would say they're popular because they are expensive. It's bragging rights, conspicuous consumption…

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.

I agree, and I feel the beauty oftentimes comes from the intrinsic love evident in the machine. Looking at a Ferrari it's evident Enzo had a passion for autos. This can also cross boundaries (eating at fine dining restaurants, fine art gallery layouts, etc.) and is probably discernible in MOST things people put out.

> 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!

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.

Honest question: are you not a "car guy/girl"? Lexus people absolutely love Lexuses. I recently sold mine (needed something larger after having another kid) and I miss it every day.

It always surprises me how quickly people forget nuance.

OK so we're discussing niche vs mainstream, or "what most people want" vs "what a few want".

The few cars you listed are not popular in the ownership sense, but they are well-known and aspirational.

People can buy them to show off status / money / exclusivity, or perhaps beauty. Speed is table stakes, of course. They have to objectively be better than most cars but also special. They can be strikingly beautiful or strikingly hideous but they must not be ordinary.

If you watch / read reviews of those cars, then it tends to be from the enthusiast driver point of view. Is it good at racing, cornering, reading the driver's intentions and reacting instantly and accurately? But then more often than not, those that can afford them do not buy them to use them for that purpose (or at least not frequently.) Many are treated a bit like investments or merely items in a collection.

What a long-winded way to get back to the original point of faster horses and enshittification of software, eh?

Netflix and Spotify might as well be a Toyota Corolla or Prius. I lost my train of thought. I think I just wanted to pontificate about exotic cars for a while.

(I drive a Polestar 2. It looks like a Volvo, is heavy as a dump truck, but damn is it fast as hell.)

You keep using the word "should", but what makes you think these business parasites aren't getting exactly what they want by making their products complete garbage? The CEO caste doesn't care about making good or unique products; they don't care about their users; they don't care about company culture; they don't care about their effects on society or the environment; they don't even care about the long-term financial success of their company. They only care about the immediate short-term gains that directly benefit them, and clearly paint-by-metric is a tried and true way of optimizing for that at the expense of everything else. If it rots the company from the inside out (or even society as a whole), who gives a shit? They just fly off and find a different company to parasitize.

By the time our society is collapsing and our rivers are catching fire and our government is being overthrown and our oceans are boiling and our bodies are full of plastic and we can't even escape to another planet because of Kessler syndrome -- all due to their actions -- they'll be old. That will be their kids' problems, and we know the CEO caste fucking hates their own kids.

Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default browser on the most common networked computing devices in the world (android phones).

>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.

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?

Huh, why should “continue watching” be the first row?

If I don’t care enough to finish a movie I may as well start a new one. At the very least it’s not a clear choice.

To this point, I've been using Qobuz as an alternative and it's recommendation engine is laughably bad, but the experience is somehow better. I'll get the most random songs pop up in the list, and sometimes it's a very pleasant surprise.

In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.

> if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice"

I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.

Is that different from Spotify? Am I using Spotify wrong? I mostly just curate and listen to my own playlists

On the other hand they are sometimes bad keeping content matched when you add an album to your library and, I assume, the distributor replaces the album with a different version. This also happens with "matched content" when you added a ripped version of music you own.

It’s less obvious than with Netflix because the songs don’t completely disappear. Spotify pays different rates for different songs depending on the label so there are certain songs they’d rather you not listen to and other content it’s much cheaper for them if you listen to so they push you to that content.

Just today two of the albums Spotify recommend to me as "Discover this" were unavailable, so they seem to be having some sort of issue with that.

If they do then it's not noticeable by the average user.

didnt neil young pull his stuff from spotify in protest?

You are overestimating how many people have access to a piracy nephew by a very, very large margin. And even if we all knew a privacy nephew, they're very quickly going to stop responding to incessant requests for more content. And they won't be available 24/7.

I think you're right!

A short while ago, I noticed I only used Netflix to watch 2 classic comfort shows, and I started to doubt if it was worth a 2-classic-comfort-shows-as-a-service subscription. I tried looking through the catalog to see what else I was paying for and ended up cancelling my subscription.

Netflix does an amazing job in giving the impression that they have an endless library of top quality content, but in reality, it seems like it's only a handful good shows and some filler, but presented in a way that makes it look like there's way more than it actually is.

Yep. If they can’t get you to watch unknown, b/c grade content - you will quickly exhaust everything on the top shelf and log off.

This. The absolute worst case scenario for streaming is you open the app scroll for a minute or less then close it. If you scroll for 10 minutes instead of just 1 the streaming service has much larger mindshare and youre more likely to check again tomorrow.

But this doesn't explain what the incentive for Netflix is if you pay for subscription regardless.

At this stage the cost is probably more in licensing fees and production costs than data streaming though.

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

I can't agree.

Because my netflix subscription is cancelled specifically because the "Finding something I want to watch drains my energy" phenomenon. Gradually over the course of like a year I got more and more frustrated with being suggested things, and not having a good way to find things.

I wish Netflix and other streaming services had more information about a movie or show for me to base my decision on. I would like more text. Maybe, some reviewer snippets. The full major cast members, not just the top names. The director should be prominently displayed. Let me easily see what else that director has done, even if it's not on that streaming channel.

Apple TV is the worst, because it dumps you right into the program, and you have to back out in order to get more information.

They all just want me to trust them that I'll love it. I end up having to pull up reviews on my phone.

> the users want to doom-scroll.

That's depends on your definition of "want". They might not want to on, but their monkey brain does.

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

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.

Existing userswon't leave when you tick them off, if you lock them in somehow (say, by having their social network all using your platform, or maybe by having previously sunk lots of time into curating a library of their favourite X on your platform).

oh, that's extra dumb, since there's no canonical[1] Linux desktop. that said they should offer shortcut presets, like JetBrains products. changing the default is just whack.

[1] oh, what the hell!? pun unintended, but now at least the name makes sense

Yep, totally. Also, much of Netflix's growth now comes from their ad-supported tier, so they're definitely part of that attention economy.

And part of the problem is that if somebody (TikTok) has the most engaging format possible (vertical short-form video) and you (Substack, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) don't, you're at a strict disadvantage. So you enable short-form video, boost it in the algorithm, etc. no matter if it's a fit with your product because people will watch it if it's put in front of them.

> 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.

And the problem is that in media, the prefrontal cortex stuff will never make as much money as the amygdala stuff, so few platforms will survive by focusing on the prefrontal cortex stuff.

A big reason HN is still so cozy and surfaces cool articles and discussions is because YC doesn't have to monetize it or optimize for engagement.

But imagine trying to start HN today...

Coat the carrots in chocolate?

One can always do as in "The good place" show: put a bunch of hotties to talk about and play with moral philosophy. I think the show was somewhat evil in that approach, but at the same time, it was also morally sound...

I hate that more than McDonald's. The restaurants making mediocre-tasting but instagramable food in a place that spent more on the interior design consultant than the chef who created the menu.

At least McDonald's doesn't pretend.

This is the idea of premium mediocre: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

Right, so I might have to update my statement to "they design for the most likely behavior of the average person."

No, I totally don't mean that people are idiots, I think it's largely ignorance. I, for instance am fully ignorant of audio stuff. I'm mostly happy with Sony/Apple audio products, which audiophiles probably feel the same way I feel about chain restaurants.

It's true that it's also increasingly easier to be presented with an average choice because everything is aggregated somewhere and will mostly converge on a few options.

To your other point, a lot of this is also on an indifference curve. I said what the average person wants, not what the average person is ecstatic about.

But most people don't spend time seeking out the best possible experience and go with the good enough experience they're presented with.

True. Though I wouldn't even say it's rare to not like McDonald's. But McDonald's is an option most people are kinda okay with, which is what they optimize for.

Nobody will ever describe McDonald's as a transcendental experience. But it's consistent (same everywhere) and everyone can agree on it (vs. convincing a group to order from a random Indian place).

On HN, we're obsessive weirdos who WILL seek out niche experiences (the interface of this very website is a case in point). But most people aren't.

The problem is either network effects (in social media) or massive CapEx (Spotify, Netflix).

In categories where neither is the case, you can usually find beautiful alternatives from indie makers or small businesses.

The issue with streaming and social media is that they represent 90%+ of our cultural narrative now, so it feels like there's no escape.

Why should I appreciate a company's exploitative and extractive experimentation on its customers?

The cost of maximizing "value" for the company to the nth degree degrades the customer experience once it exceeds a certain threshold.

It's greedy tunnel vision that makes the world worse for everyone in the long term.

The classical answer of why more hardware resources are needed for the same tasks is that the new system allows for way much more flexibility. A problem domain can be thoroughly optimized for a single purpose, but then it can only be used for that purpose alone.

This is quite true for LLMs. They can do basic arithmetic, but they can also read problem statements in many diverse mathematical areas and describe what they're about, or make (right or wrong) suggestions on how they can be solved.

Classic AIs suffered the Frame problem, where some common-sense reasoning depended on facts not stated in the system logic.

Now, LLMs have largely solved the Frame problem. It turns out the solution was to compress large swathes of human knowledge in a way that can be accessed fast, so that the relevant parts of all that knowledge are activated when needed. Of course, this approach to flexibility will need lots of resources.

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.

it's ridiculously worse. getting things done on the computer got more tiresome, almost every part (booting is still slow, login is still slow, after login starting the browser is slow, rendering the start menu is slow - which should be in cache, the browser starts fast, but then it takes some time to somehow start loading and rendering the last opened page - which should be in cache, and so on) and yes, you can do a lot more things nowadays "on the computer", but it's mostly "online"

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.

Sure, spotify has maintained a near-complete catalogue where Netflix hasnt.

But I no longer find Spotify any good at finding new music, beyond manually looking through artist catalogues.

For context, try out Pandora's recommendations. They haven't improved, yet they're orders of magnitude better than Spotify. The songs are hand annotated for style, content, etc. As a result, they recommend truly new songs with regularity that truly match the vibe.

Compare with Spotify, where everything is based on statistical "people also listened to X". Everything converges on some pop form of whatever genre and songs you've listened to a lot. It'll play odd, out-of context songs from the same artist before it'll find you new artists. Sure they have a few manicured playlists, but its nothing compared to the value Pandora has provided for years.

Spotify only has about half of the music that I like. A lot of it is remixes and jams from Japan that can only be found on youtube, soundcloud, or in some cases it's actually only available on private trackers.

I think I am in the same boat as you. Knowing how the sausage is made only makes the flaws noticed even more offensive.

But I do think the GP has a point about the intentional friction and bullshit introduced into lots of modern software that wasn't even a twinkling in some CEOs eye way back when. Software has become adversarial to the user. Psychology has been weaponized to induce behaviors in users. Instead of users feeling utility and choice in using the software, they feel burdened, controlled. Or at least, I do. I try to make smart choices about what software I use to maintain my own volition.

These kinds of flaws are fundamentally different from the kinds of flaws in software from the past if only because of the order of magnitude increase of resources that can be mustered to accomplish it. And because they are exploitative.

I have a lot more patience for flaws when I know they are not the result of a profit motive. For example if Linux deletes my graphics driver and I have to spend an hour reading up on fixing it.

If on the other hand I know that a flaw is a result of intentional, adversarial rent seeking behavior (eg ads in the search menu on Windows; introducing shitty UI design; dark patterns), my patience is non-existent.

Modern tech problem seems to land in the second category a lot more often than it did 15+ years ago. It is the environment that has changed, not me.

One aspect of this that I think deserves more attention is the reasons.

It's one thing when the flaws are there because of the limitations of hardware (and you understand the reasoning behind it). It's very different when you know that limitations are artificially imposed on you for the sake of someone's profit.

And mind you, it certainly did exist back then - stuff like early DRM schemes with hardware keys etc. And I was just as annoyed by them.

I think it's about software, just because back then there was a lot less of it. It was easier to navigate when the OS didn't have a million and one features and you just launched an app you wanted to you and could mostly trust that there wasn't going to be an ad or another feature in the way.

Regardless of the degree that is true for the parent poster, those (and more) qualitative differences can also be felt among different pieces of software that are all quite new.

> Is this about software or is it about you?

about and not about

Kids nowadays are suprisingly proficient and using phones and computers.

...because they just click "AGREE" to every popup. They sign up. They give away their phone number or their one email address or they do the subscription, then cancel it later (or forget). They enter their credit card because they don't have any money to take anyway.

Yeah definitely. I'm not oblivious to the potential gain to the business. I'm just frustrated with the user experience of the core banking products. And it seems like this is the direction other banks might like to follow.

It's the same with mobile payment. AFAIK there isn't a single bank left in The Netherlands which has its own mobile tap-to-pay app, everyone has switched to Google Wallet.

Good for them that they want to save a few bucks on developers, but why do I have to give my payment info to the devil? It's a third party which has nothing to do with the payment itself, and the fact that some banks used to have their own tap-to-pay apps shows that it clearly isn't a technical requirement.

Did a quick stalk based on your Brazilian name... I am talking about your competitor ofc!

I have an account with you guys too but haven't kept up with the developments at all. I do wonder what direction you're going in - particularly given the tech company valuation the US market has given ya.

(I don't expect you to reply to this)

Sounds like NuBank

DVD and BluRay, yes.