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 cars like those marques.
If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.
So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
setgree 3 hours ago [-]
"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 now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0]
I do however think that this is an important insight:
> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.
A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing format a kind of destiny.
> "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.
hennell 45 minutes ago [-]
>Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.
There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members, not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for a slice of pizza...
If there's nothing on netflix people will cancel netflix. So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much.
hinkley 13 minutes ago [-]
There were people who only had HBO subscriptions to watch the new season of Westworld. Given they merged with Cinemax I’m not sure if that worked out for them. But there were also Apple+ subscriptions just to watch Ted Lasso. And I begrudgingly got Prime to watch the Expanse.
But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I’m sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at least some of it went to Apple instead.
eadmund 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
frereubu 59 minutes ago [-]
We immediately cancel our subscription as soon as we subscribe for services like Netflix, Disney+ etc, where you keep the service for the month. It's thankfully really easy to susbcribe and unsubscribe these days, so doing it this way means we never unknowingly renew. Must have saved us hundreds of pounds by now.
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
> Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.
A subscription service to cancel and renew your subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter (for those that live in states that can do that).
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.
agent281 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much the workforce plays into it.
If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?
I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.
Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.
swiftcoder 1 hours ago [-]
> Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction
This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.
The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.
hinkley 17 minutes ago [-]
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 first season of a Netflix show until the second is announced because they know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time. Which means Netflix cancels more shows because the numbers are terrible.
What they should be doing is test audiences. If those people hate it, then yes cancel. And be patient with everything else.
dcrazy 1 hours ago [-]
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.
feoren 1 hours ago [-]
But those two tiers are not really competing with each other, are they? I'd wager that most people are fixed in one group: either they will never watch anything with ads (e.g. me), or they just don't care about seeing ads. The former group will never switch to the ad-supported tier -- they'll just cancel if the price gets too high -- so the only calculation is price vs. retention among that group. Similarly, the latter group will never pay extra for ad-free, so it's a completely different calculation. Why are the two prices in competition?
PaulDavisThe1st 26 minutes ago [-]
Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too. We don't often watch that service on anything other than our "smart" TV, but was watching one episode on a laptop with firefox while travelling and realized afterwards the very brief black screens were where ads would have been.
abustamam 1 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm weird because I pay for Netflix/HBO for no ads, but I'm on the ad supported tier for Peacock and Hulu. I guess it's just what I'm used to (I don't expect to see ads on Netflix, but I do expect to see them on Hulu)
feoren 48 minutes ago [-]
Is there a price point where you'd switch between the two tiers for those services? I mean, I guess if they were literally the same cost.
lotsofpulp 2 hours ago [-]
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 to the plot).
More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.”
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
> More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.”
Yes, or as people call it: "ad-free". We all know what is meant by that phrase, being pedantic about "well actually there are ads regardless" doesn't make communication clearer.
lotsofpulp 39 minutes ago [-]
The point is to bring the knowledge to people that the advertising is incorporated into the product. Lots of people don’t know the extra long car chase scene isn’t due to the director’s artistic preference, but rather economic preference, at the viewer’s expense.
There is a clear conflict of interest that can only be addressed by buyers being knowledgeable.
names_are_hard 14 minutes ago [-]
This is an important point. Readers should remember that what's obvious to them is not necessarily something "everyone knows" until it's pointed out. Personally I will say that when I first starting consuming movies at around age 20 I was not conscious of this dynamic, until I read about product placement in movies and then suddenly I started noticing it. Especially when a car chase scene goes into slow motion at just the moment that the camera gets a closeup of the tires and you can read the brand name...
cess11 39 minutes ago [-]
What would you call actually ad-free broadcasts then?
20after4 19 minutes ago [-]
Propaganda?
_kush 3 hours ago [-]
This is the cycle I keep seeing:
Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting.
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.
So a new product comes out, started again by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. And the cycle repeats - unless someone chooses to grow slowly and sustainably, without raising, and stays focused on the niche.
beloch 2 hours ago [-]
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.
_kush 2 hours ago [-]
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 has to keep earning you as a customer with every new model. Netflix just needs to keep you watching.
Arainach 1 hours ago [-]
>Netflix has their content as their moat.
Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix started producing content they had *no moat*.
That's the big problem with media streaming - the content owners have all the leverage. Any profit you make they can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer to them. If you don't want to pay they can (and will, and have done) start their own competitor since the technology isn't a moat - content ownership is.
echelon 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cestith 47 minutes ago [-]
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 continued series that originated on other networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
I’ve had recommended to me and have recommended to others quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6 Undergound if you’re looking for an action movie.
nthingtohide 2 hours ago [-]
Are you ignoring the benefits of network effects? Network effects should ideally improve recommendations for all subgenres of people.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
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.
darkhorse222 3 hours ago [-]
The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.
ragnese 2 hours ago [-]
> The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
I do agree with your overall criticism of short-sightedness and the short term incentives of VC and the stock market, etc.
But the people involved are not quite as binary as you lay out in the quote above. You can't discount the group of people who really do start out as true believers and who become seduced/deceived by VCs. Some of these VC types are real vultures. They'll convince the founder that the best way to share their vision or product with the most people and do the most good for the world is to let the VC guys use their capital to scale up and expand the reach of the product, etc. The money surely helps to lower one's skepticism/cynicism, but I can imagine that it must be very hard to say no to getting your dream project out to millions of people.
wholinator2 3 hours ago [-]
See, this is the thing that I, as a non-founder, have trouble understanding. Presumably the product is started by an enthusiast, an enthusiast _for the product_. Is it just hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm over time? Is the sum of possible money just too desirable? If feels like we're on this unending treadmill towards constant enshittification of literally every single thing that I interact with on a daily basis. All of the apps on my phone eventually turn into shit piles, all of the business/work software I use is constantly moving towards bullshit, even the houses that I rent, the newer construction is noticeably shittier than the old houses. Wifi got better for a while but now appears to be backsliding to the point of maximum frustration that the user will take (while given no viable second choice).
Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just not possible for a typical human to turn down excess profits and take pride in a project rather than a money machine? People seem to think these things used to be better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore", "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
IF you are running a successful business you are probably spending the majority of your time not on the thing you are enthusiastic about, but instead just business work. Many businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend enough time in the office - many businesses owners suddenly became a lot more successful when they spent more time in the office. They likely are good and and like doing what the business is about (running a backhoe, pulling wires, or whatever), but all the office work means they never get to do it. To the employees it looks like they sold out and don't get it anymore - but the employees don't realize it is because of that office work they get their paycheck on time.
As such it is not surprise things change. You can't go from making less money than you could elsewhere to making a nice income without a lot of office time.
Of course it is common to take the above too far. There is need for office work, but often those office employees forget that it is about the real world.
nonrandomstring 2 hours ago [-]
I see the problem not as VC money, but the ridiculous idea of the
optimised one-size mass-marketable product. The myth of "what people
want" (which is art entirely pulled out of the air of marketing,
public opinion, focus groups in the 1980s) goes against the impetus
that consumer digital technology originally emerged from... namely
that the microprocessor revolution replaced giant fixed-function
pieces of iron with agile, modular, user-definable, technology. We've
gone full circle on that. We're back to a world where 5 giant
monopolies make stuff offering two choices; take it or leave it. Life
happens at the margins, and the only thing in the middle of the road,
is roadkill.
kccqzy 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't even have to involve VC funding coming in. Just need a clueless product manager.
conradev 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t even have to involve project managers. Just someone who isn’t an enthusiast and/or doesn’t care at the helm.
zemvpferreira 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Workaccount2 3 hours ago [-]
I think there is a split here because the enthusiast for iPhone/Macbook is a distinctly different breed than the enthusiast for cell phones/laptop computers.
I think Apple (very intelligently) made products where the average consumer is the enthusiast. Which is very hard to do when your company is a bunch of engineers.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
If I remember clearly, Apple's hiring process low-key also looked for "good taste" and "product sense" even for pure engineers. Subtly different than anywhere else I interviewed. It's really hard to measure and quantify good taste and an intuitive feel for what's great, which is why most companies don't bother trying. "Just make number go up" is the norm.
tonyhart7 1 hours ago [-]
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
pavel_lishin 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
metalman 1 hours ago [-]
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
20after4 6 minutes ago [-]
Amish street racing sounds like an awesome movie / series / video game / pass-time / sport for gamblers to lose their money on.
Since more of our culture is in online, advertising-dominated spaces -- the forces of capital have a lot of incentive to ensure smooth growth straight to the sociopath phase.
Maybe the key is just accepting the cycle of it all and ensuring there's always cool new places for creative/enthusiastic people to do their thing.
EdwardCoffin 3 hours ago [-]
This is the kind of thing David Chapman described with his post Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution [1]
What you are describing is explained beautifully in "The Tyranny of the Marginal User" essay that got a lot of commentary on HN previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507.
My favorite quote ("Marl" is the hypothetical name for the marginal user):
> Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.
ludicrousdispla 2 hours ago [-]
a mouse could easily do that with just it's nose
sokoloff 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 to many, even those who can’t tell the three marques apart or even unaided recall the name Lamborghini.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
I would say they're popular because they are expensive. It's bragging rights, conspicuous consumption…
world2vec 4 hours ago [-]
But people desire them as a conspicuous symbol because some people decades ago were really into fast cars and picked those brands as the best of the best. It was the true enthusiasts that promoted them and then other people copied them because they wanted to be in the same "gang" and over time that evolved into a status symbol, far removed from the original one. But it did start with a small group of true fans.
JKCalhoun 3 hours ago [-]
And professional racing.
shakna 3 hours ago [-]
If it was just expense, then Koenigsegg would be a household name. Most enthusiasts will know them, but the average person won't. There's something more that leads culture in such a way to uphold a particular brand.
teqsun 2 hours ago [-]
I guess the term would be "conspicuous consumption".
As to why Koenigsegg doesn't get the rep, I'll take the outside opinion that it's because their name is too inaccessible whereas "Bugatti" slips easily into rap lyrics.
vladvasiliu 2 hours ago [-]
Don't they make like 5 of those, and for absurdly high prices?
Ferraris, Porsches and similar are somewhat attainable, which, I think, helps with their being symbols, since most people have already actually seen them and know they're real. A Koenigsegg is as good as a story. Hell, I live in Paris and I've never actually seen one. Porches and Ferraris? They're seemingly everywhere.
bzzzt 2 hours ago [-]
Ferrari and Lamborghini predate Koenigsegg by a generation so my guess is it's about the history.
bbor 2 hours ago [-]
Really great, succinct way to make this point. Here's an NGRAM of mentions of these brands in the English Fiction corpus, 1860-2025 -- Ferrari dominates until ~1970, when Porsche gains dominance. Obviously, Koenigsegg is barely on the graph at all.
P.S. I think it's telling that Porsche wasn't mentioned almost at all in English until the mid 1950s, given their role in the war!
I'm not sure what it's supposed to be telling about, but it's probably not about their involvement in the war, which was hardly out of line for any german engineering company at the time. Ferdinand Porsche was arrested for war crimes, but never tried (which IS telling in its own way). Rather, the NGRAM just traces the rise of the company as it's known today:
Up until about 1948, Porsche was a pure development contractor mostly for the government. They only started manufacturing cars under their own brand in the early 50s (a few 356 built basically in a shed notwithstanding) after Ferry Porsche had taken over, and with the introduction of the 911 began a meteoric rise as a volume manufacturer for international markets.
red_admiral 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed, Andrew Tate's tagline when someone criticised him was "I drive a Bugatti and you don't".
thfuran 4 hours ago [-]
If they were cheap, I might have one. As is, I never will.
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
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.
HPsquared 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of Veblen goods are kinda "unpleasant but striking". I mean just look at recent BMW design.
jt-hill 4 hours ago [-]
> 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!
lmz 3 hours ago [-]
Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly soulless"?
jt-hill 3 hours ago [-]
Tbf I don’t think the parent meant all Lexuses (Lexes? Lexi?) are soulless, just theirs. But the brand has its fans.
butlike 3 hours ago [-]
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.
amrocha 4 hours ago [-]
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.
wlesieutre 3 hours ago [-]
Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW. Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name.
There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports cars.
cestith 35 minutes ago [-]
It’s no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It’s also basically a BRZ. It’s a little sad that’s no longer an option.
The WRX has a turbocharged Boxer engine, manual gearbox or optional CVT, and all-wheel drive. It’s a sedan, but it does a 13.9 second quarter mile stock off the showroom floor. That’s not bad.
lloeki 3 hours ago [-]
> There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens
Well there was the NSX
kod 3 hours ago [-]
I get where you're coming from, but describing the fastest production FWD car as the "closest thing" is really funny
wlesieutre 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I mean dedicated sports car models, rather than sportified versions of existing models
rrr_oh_man 3 hours ago [-]
It's funny, really.
My girlfriend thinks my cheap modern shitbox is more expensive than my old 90's 4x4 truck.
rasz 3 hours ago [-]
Are you saying nobody will recognize old NSX as something special? R34?
Zak 1 hours ago [-]
Stylish mid-engine cars like the NSX look exotic because they remind people of Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
The average person who doesn't know much about cars will think a second generation MR2 is more exotic than it is. Toyota probably wouldn't make their top three brand guesses. The R34 GT-R will thrill every car enthusiast (and probably everyone who had a Playstation around the turn of the millennium), but most people won't give it a second look.
amrocha 2 hours ago [-]
An NSX stands out, but anyone who doesn’t know what it is would just think it’s a ferrari.
GTRs absolutely do not stand out. They look like your your average sedan.
darkhorse222 3 hours ago [-]
That is exactly what is happening to Reddit. Made famous by its submitters and moderators. Business decision driven by metrics based on view counts because that sells ads. Let this be a lesson: metrics are not the only way to measure success. I worked at a company where metrics were viewed as a way to cut through dissonance and bias. Newflash: leaders should be opinionated and have visions that do not yet exist. They should be investors in their product and its culture. Metrics should play a role in that decision, but perhaps a tiny one. Because what metrics you choose, how you measure it, and most importantly, what is even measurable, have a tremendous impact on the effect of those metrics.
You cannot paint by numbers.
feoren 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
red_admiral 2 hours ago [-]
I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong.
IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0.
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. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and even in cinemas.
I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?), but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to advertise chrome on their search page.
PaulDavisThe1st 22 minutes ago [-]
Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default browser on the most common networked computing devices in the world (android phones).
which is also what I feel about the Spotify algorthim at times — no matter what I'm listening to, it invariably brings me back to what it thinks are my "old reliables" once it gets onto recommending stuff.
I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice", but it's a million miles away from, say, listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but they're cherry-picking what to play next.
fourneau 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bee_rider 3 hours ago [-]
FWIW good old Pandora now has options to influence their how their stations explore (so, you can for example pick “discovery” to have it try and find similar artists it hasn’t shown you as often).
nthingtohide 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
subpixel 4 hours ago [-]
I’m experiencing this in Peloton-land. They have an app that purports to be for home gym enthusiasts but is actually optimized for people who want to take instructor-led classes on their phone. Certain features don’t work as advertised and I quickly reasoned that while this is a pain in my side most users don’t care. If they did, Peloton would fix it.
safety1st 16 minutes ago [-]
I think when you're a startup, you have to invest in all of these things - you want to hire some experts early on because they'll have insights that help you design a better product, and if your product appeals to experts it will be a PR win. But of course your goal is scale and distribution so you have to respect a certain lowest common denominator as well lest you become too niche.
Once you become a bloated monopolist like the three companies you just mentioned, your distribution strategy is solved in other ways (like, you've done some bundling and some acquisitions, maybe pressured a few companies into exclusivity agreements and are probably breaking some anti-trust law or other but you have lawyers). Then you don't care about the experts, PR or niches anymore, and you serve up slop. When the analytics recommend slop you go with the analytics, when they don't you ignore them.
None of this is to discount your insightful comment, just saying once you're big enough, your strategy is just doing tricky distribution deals, really (a fact no record executive would dispute).
chasd00 4 hours ago [-]
Luxury watches are a good analogy too. A $5 watch from the gas station will give you the time just fine but there’s a market for watches costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
temp0826 2 hours ago [-]
I'm convinced expensive watches are exclusively used as a vehicle for money laundering
nthingtohide 2 hours ago [-]
You don't even need a watch. Smartphones can tell you time (you can configure to show times for many timezones) yet there is a market for watches (luxury or normal)
xigoi 1 hours ago [-]
A watch is more convenient. I don’t need to take my phone out of my pocket to see the time, I just look at my wrist.
karn97 41 minutes ago [-]
I think you're quite underestimating how many times a person takes their phone out and it's way more than they turn their wrist around to see their watch
In the case of watches, the luxury ones will actually be much worse at telling time than the $5 quartz one, by design!
hinkley 23 minutes ago [-]
Some people have claimed that pure A/B testing is an agent for enshittification, both on a quality and ethical dimension. And I can’t see how those people are particularly wrong.
There are systems out there that can do AB/CD testing and those do a better job of finding pairs of changed that have compounding effects.
You cannot A/B test your way from chocolate and peanut butter to cherry and vanilla. So we get to deal with tone deaf companies who feel their analytics are proving that customers either don’t know what they want or are lying about what they want. But that’s not something A/B testing can prove. It takes more sophisticated experiments than that.
4 hours ago [-]
tlogan 3 hours ago [-]
> But who knows - maybe that really
> is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
Yes, I agree. This does seem to be the most profitable model for running a tech business: maximizing user engagement or increasing the time users spend on the platform. Whether that’s achieved through intentionally convoluted UI or by aggressively surfacing certain content, the end goal remains the same.
That said, I don’t think there’s much room left for significant innovation in video streaming interfaces. The core challenge continues to be content — whoever offers the best or most compelling library wins. UI changes might tweak engagement metrics by a few percentage points, but they’re marginal compared to the impact of strong content.
At the end of the day, if there’s a great movie or series to watch, people will show up. If the content isn’t there, no amount of clever interface design will convince someone to spend 30 minutes on something they’re not actually interested in.
raincole 49 minutes ago [-]
> Ferraris, Lamborghini
I think the big difference is that nobody is going to pay $10m for a web service or browser.
rightbyte 2 hours ago [-]
> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.
I think this is a great nuance that is often overlooked when discussing this.
sheepscreek 2 hours ago [-]
You’re way overestimating the effect an enthusiast has. Evangelism only goes far enough to introduce people to the thing. How often someone uses the thing depends entirely on its utility (usefulness).
As long as Netflix was successfully reading the author’s mind, they were satisfied with the experience. However, Netflix assumed that they want to keep watching the same content, oblivious to the author’s desire to discover something entirely new. Netflix failed to meet the expectations of those seeking something entirely different.
I can understand why Netflix made this change. They’ve replaced many shows with their own in-house productions. By doing so, they prevent users from searching for specific shows and then realizing that Netflix doesn’t have them. If this happens frequently, they risk losing customers.
On the other hand, Spotify doesn’t face this issue. Therefore, I’m puzzled by why they’ve made it more challenging to explore content by categories. (Disclaimer: I don’t use Spotify, so my experience is based solely on author’s observations.)
SamBam 4 hours ago [-]
> However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
> In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.
I'm confused as to whether your saying change is caused by catering to the median who doesn't care, or the enthusiast who recommends the latest and greatest. You seem to be saying both.
cjs_ac 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I could have been clearer there. The browser developers started by catering to the enthusiasts, who switched. The enthusiasts then told the majority of the userbase that the new thing was better, and so the majority switched, causing the large-scale changes in market share.
scarface_74 4 hours ago [-]
You’re giving it way too much of a positive spend. None of the companies are using analytics to increase the desirability for the majority of users.
They are doing it to increase “engagement” and so more people will stay on their site longer.
Why else wouldn’t Netflix show the “continue watching” row first instead of forcing you to scroll past algorithmic generated crap?
It is the same reason that Google went from describing success as people getting off their site faster and going to one of the “ten blue links” to the shit show it is today.
bobxmax 3 hours ago [-]
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?
scarface_74 12 minutes ago [-]
The average user wants to watch what they want right now. Netflix wants to surface shows that will keep you subscribed after you watch what you want to watch .
jMyles 3 hours ago [-]
> What's the difference between that which optimized for what you call "engagement" and what the average user wants?
People want joy, education, entertainment, etc. from watching a video.
But there may be other ways of appealing to people (addiction, insecurity, base stimulation) which boost engagement but which do not give users what they want.
Obviously on even slightly longer time scales, users will gravitate toward services that do not trade their health for engagement, but equally obvious is that many of today's apps are not optimizing for long time scales.
signatoremo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago [-]
Well, of it was user-centred then "because that use scrolls to 'continue watching' more often than not".
Why not let users choose? Because, sadly, it's about money and not about users.
butlike 3 hours ago [-]
On the flip side, the only reason I don't finish a movie or TV show is because I run out of time. Either it's time for bed, time to go, or I fell asleep. In all 3 cases I'm still interested in the movie; it's why I put it on in the first place!
scarface_74 3 hours ago [-]
Binge watching TV series. The easiest signal that you don’t want to continue watching a movie would be to thumbs down it.
wouldbecouldbe 2 hours ago [-]
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.
otabdeveloper4 4 hours ago [-]
> the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family
No it wasn't. It was driven by shady crapware distribution schemes and intentionally subtly broken sites under the big G umbrella.
whall6 3 hours ago [-]
Wow - this is great insight. I hadn’t thought of it this way. Thank you for sharing.
heisenbit 3 hours ago [-]
The short term data driven optimizations somehow erode the original product architecture and some of its value. I also think treating the consumer as static. Trick me one shame on you, trick me twice (admittedly I get tricked even more often to click on stuff) shame on me but eventually I learn and what worked turn into a constant irritating torn-off. These irritations accumulate. Good product management should strive to minimize such irritations but I guess we lost that with Jobs.
mlhpdx 3 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I think it’s just simple imitation.
Something is popular, folks are envious of it, they end up building something much like it. Doesn’t matter if it’s houses, logos, or user experiences – seems to be how things work.
whiddershins 2 hours ago [-]
this is such a fantastic comment because it makes a charitable attempt to explain how data driven decisions go off the rails.
and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent phenomenon.
everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with decision making power is executing a specific and conscious strategy that pushes back against it.
soco 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cjs_ac 4 hours ago [-]
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 needs to be run by music enthusiasts, not people pushing covers of pop songs to avoid paying royalties to the original artists. And so on.
Indie Hackers is full of people trying to flog their shit AI-powered marketing SaaS, because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve. There are uncountably many good problems out there, each with thousands of people who would pay you money to solve them, but those people don't know their problems can be solved by a computer, so you have to go out into the world to find them yourself.
germinalphrase 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bsoles 2 hours ago [-]
> ... 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.
ozim 4 hours ago [-]
That’s leg work you have to do on your own.
Just like football scouts need to actually visit some niche teams and watch not that interesting stuff to find talent before it is too late.
With tech it might be easier because you might create niche groups so those people come to you.
Just like PG created HN. Nowadays HN is too mainstream so all ideas here are seem already popular so it is like going to scout high school t am that won local championship everyone already knows which players are lined for pro contracts.
another-dave 4 hours ago [-]
By risk taking on good ideas rather than always trying to pivot your way from the status quo.
Product-Market fit is great if you're developing a SaaS business but it's not necessarily going to give you new inventions — something new is speaking to a potential gap in the market that doesn't currently exist.
_kush 4 hours ago [-]
It has to be built by those enthusiasts
cratermoon 3 hours ago [-]
> if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants
Except you're making the mistake of thinking these services are optimizing for their userbase.
They are not.
They are optimizing for revenue and profit growth,
a very different target.
More ads,
cheaper and easier-to-product content,
lower opex.
They are converging to churning out the least offensive slop at the cheapest cost with the maximum revenue.
None of the analytics are about what people using the product want,
they are about making the most money and growing the fastest.
Nothing would look like the services mentioned in the article if they listened to what the users really preferred.
toss1 2 hours ago [-]
Nice example, but not everything is like automobiles where probably not even one in 1000 people has ever been to a track day let alone actually raced a car, but sporty marques are desired.
A very large portion of people actually cares about what they are searching for, and want the ability to ACTUALLY search and find that, with real parameters, not merely get some not-even-close stuff shoved onto their screen instead. That is NOT the serendipity of browsing the stacks in a great library.
A great example of failure is Amazon. I run a small design & manufacturing business, and years ago started getting pestered by Amazon about "Amazon Business" trying to supply both office staples and parts to businesses. This was an area that had enormous potential. Yet, they have entirely failed. I've never bought a single item, and it has faded.
Their primary competitor is McMaster-Carr [0] who does it right. Well-defined categories of everything, and highly specific search capabilities, at reasonable but not bargain prices. EVERYTHING you might search for is fully parameterized in every dimension and feature. Min/max/exact, width/depth/height/thread/diameter/material/containerType/etc./etc./etc. appropriate for each type of product. The key is McMaster DOES NOT WASTE MY TIME. I can go there, quickly find what I want or determine that they don't have it, and get on with my day.
The smaller company that does it right is still beating the tech giant a decade later. Same for other similar suppliers who actually have a clue about what their customers really want.
They continue to prevail over tech giants and VC-funded sites BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT STUPID.
It would be nice if the tech/vc crowd would also stop being stupid. They started out not stupid, but they really lose the plot when they think a few extra eyeballs this week will really win in the long run. At least provide two modes, a strict and serious search and their new messy UI. But they are stupid and this will not happen. Enshittification rules the day.
The thing that really pissed me off about Amazon Business is that they bought Small Parts and killed it off. Small Parts was a tiny version of McMaster-Carr that specialized in fasteners, small diameter fluid handling, short sections of specialty materials, and in general, quality "small parts."
If I bought directly from Small Parts, I knew I'd get exactly what I wanted. Ordering from Amazon Business? A complete crapshoot.
Going to www.smallparts.com now just redirects to an Amazon 404 page!
[/rant]
pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago [-]
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 visited and already found what I wanted to buy, finding it again, near impossible. Not even basics like search by product manufacturer actually work.
Sites with usable search are a relative joy.
karn97 39 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps there is a trend in letting an algo decide instead of the user.
JohnMakin 1 hours ago [-]
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 see similar-ish decisions made there in the 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.
yapyap 3 hours ago [-]
eh, I feel like this is a nicely typed out comment but it hits some wrong notes.
1. I wouldn’t say the car veands you mentioned are popular because they can hit high speeds. In my experience nearly any car can with the right engine and equipment in it (of course due to weight distribution and other details I assume they’re not all equally safe but that aside).
Personally when I look at those brands I think they’re sleek and pretty and when I feel like wanting one it’s because they’re expensive cars, driven by the rich. They’re not chosen only by the rich cause they have the best taste, they’re chosen by the rich because they are the only ones to have the financial means to afford one.
Also I feel like the changes made based on analytics arent made to please (more) users but to make as much money as possible, whether that be pleasing users in the starting phases of your company or in the latter phases when you already dominate the market squeezing money out of your big existing userbase.
dswalter 2 hours ago [-]
There's a fundamental reality that shapes both Netflix and Spotify's trajectory: content licensing. 2012 Netflix had access to vastly more of everyone else's library, so it was closer to an indexed search of what was available that one could watch and then getting that video onto your screen. Over time, other companies understood that they were underpricing their content and Netflix was reaping the benefits. Once external forces adjusted, the TV/film bidding wars began. Today, netflix doesn't have nearly as much content as they used to have.
That risk (losing all content and facing extinction) is what pushed Netflix in the direction of being a content-producer, rather than a content aggregator. I agree with everyone's points on the influence of the median user in diluting the quality of the content Netflix produces, but that's not the only forced that pushed us here. Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing.
Being a faster horse wasn't an option available to either Netflix or Spotify; there is no path for a 'better 2012 version of netflix or spotify' in 2025. They each had to change species or die, and they chose to keep living.
al_borland 2 hours ago [-]
Apple Music still offers library management, with their entire catalog to choose from. They try to play all sides, with algorithmic playback, radio, add to library, and playlists. Adding to library and playlists do seem to be core features, but I’m curious how many people put in the effort when it’s not explicitly required.
bloppe 1 hours ago [-]
Is that different from Spotify? Am I using Spotify wrong? I mostly just curate and listen to my own playlists
al_borland 56 seconds ago [-]
Does Spotify have a library option? I haven’t been a heavy Spotify user, but last time I tried it, it seemed like I could “follow” artists as a proxy to adding something to a library, but I found it all pretty confusing.
I know they have playlists, but I was looking more of the feature like, “these are all the songs I’m interested in, that I will use to build my playlists or shuffle… because I don’t want to try and remember everything as I wade through a 60m track library of all the songs available on Spotify.”
cpmsmith 4 minutes ago [-]
Apple Music's library features much more closely mirror the iTunes style, i.e. you have a library you can browse outside of just the "liked songs" pseudo-playlist. For instance, in Spotify (AFAICT) there's no way to browse all the songs in your library by artist; you can only list the artists you've followed, which is unrelated to whose songs you've liked, and go to their general artist page.
Personally, this is the top contender for a reason for me to switch away from Spotify.
titzer 45 minutes ago [-]
So glad I collect physical media of all the good stuff.
esperent 2 hours ago [-]
> Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing.
I wasn't aware that Spotify lacked much in the way of mainstream western music.
Are they having licensing issues?
VanTheBrand 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
barbazoo 50 minutes ago [-]
If they do then it's not noticeable by the average user.
furyg3 5 hours ago [-]
The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees.
Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?
I don't get it.
neutronicus 4 hours ago [-]
I assume it's about papering over the gaps in their content library.
You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-month.
mailund 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tsm 50 minutes ago [-]
My wife and I realized we were only really using Netflix to watch Seinfeld. I got a complete set of DVDs for less money than a month of Netflix and canceled my subscription
germinalphrase 3 hours ago [-]
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.
neutronicus 3 hours ago [-]
And even if that isn't the case right at this moment, they have to be prepared for rights-holders to fuck with them and they have to be prepared to cut production costs (or for a rival to spend big on production in a way they don't think they can match).
So regardless of the state of their content library it's necessary future-proofing.
raincole 40 minutes ago [-]
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain
They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old IP owners).
They don't want the customers to search for a specific show. They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them. This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing outside Netflix.
chii 4 hours ago [-]
> More time spent looking for something to watch means less time viewing?
or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.
demaga 3 hours ago [-]
But this doesn't explain what the incentive for Netflix is if you pay for subscription regardless.
munificent 2 hours ago [-]
It's about two things:
1. Cutting costs on the other side.
Studios don't want to license content to Netflix now that they are direct competitors, so Netflix has fewer and fewer movies and shows that they didn't produce themselves. And they want to spend as little as possible on producing their own content.
That way they make as much profit from the subscriptions as they can.
2. Reducing the value of competitors.
They are competing for user time. They want you to spend as many minutes as possible on Netflix because any minute not spent their is a minute you might be spending on Hulu or Apple TV. At the end of the month when you decide that you can't afford that many streaming services and decide to cut one, you'll pick based on which one you use the most. They don't want that to be the other guy.
kilian 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago [-]
At this stage the cost is probably more in licensing fees and production costs than data streaming though.
nottorp 4 hours ago [-]
But they play those previews automatically... and that's still bandwidth used.
tonightstoast 3 hours ago [-]
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.
HeyLaughingBoy 2 hours ago [-]
Well, there is a setting to turn it off.
nottorp 2 hours ago [-]
Who's that and do they work for Netflix?
Tbh I don't mind the previews as long as they don't make the UI lag*. I was just pointing out that they don't save bandwidth.
* I'm also aware that they're blatant lies and have little connection with what's in the actual movie.
kilian 3 hours ago [-]
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.
JackMorgan 4 hours ago [-]
You've got it backwards, Netflix doesn't want people to just doom-scroll, the users want to doom-scroll.
Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.
metabagel 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
ikanreed 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bluetidepro 1 hours ago [-]
Think of it this way, the less time they spend actually WATCHING content, the longer they will pay their monthly service because they have this massive "watch list" that they never actually get through. They just keep paying month after month never getting through a backlog that they inspire to watch. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me. If you can never feel satisfied, you will pay over and over again chasing that satisfaction of watching "everything."
Many people will pay Netflix for years hardly watching content for months just because the convenience factor of not having to subscribe/unsubscribe when they know a new season of X will be out in the next year. It's wild to me, but people are lazy. So again, the more you keep them from actually watching the content and realizing they are "done", the longer they likely just keep their subscription active. Get them to add as much potential content they want to watch to a never ending backlog watch list.
teeray 4 hours ago [-]
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain
Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends upon it, investors have been trained that “engagement” is inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase engagement, stonk price go up.
lotsofpulp 4 hours ago [-]
The most valuable businesses have desirable net income trends, not “engagement”.
kaoD 4 hours ago [-]
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.
teeray 3 hours ago [-]
Also, engagement is a measure of how rich the oil field is for enshittifying the platform to extract ad dollars.
codexb 40 minutes ago [-]
Netflix's primary goal used to be to attract new subscribers. Now it's a more about maintaining subscribers and finding new ways to monetize the existing subscriber base. That's why you're seeing things like "sharing" subscriptions, and advertising, and premium plans.
gnatolf 4 hours ago [-]
Mostly it's to cover up that the catalogue isn't as great anymore, isn't it? Since almost every big label took back the rights and started their own streaming service, Netflix simply doesn't have as much content (that anyone would want to see) anymore.
I quit all those platforms recently and I'm not missing the frustration of having to 'switch channels' through their incomprehensible categories and views anymore.
sanderjd 4 hours ago [-]
I guess my thing with LinkedIn is that there's just no reason to use the feed. It's still a place to connect with people I've worked with and keep up with what they've been doing. It's incredibly useful for that. I really don't find the feed to be either a boon or a hindrance in that use case. I know it's there, I know it annoys some people, but it's just irrelevant to me.
petesergeant 4 hours ago [-]
For some reason I kept opening it up and the feed would irritate me. This has fixed it:
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain
Entertainment is a zero-sum market. More time spent doom scrolling means less time spent on another service, which probably reduces their churn (also, ads)
patapong 2 hours ago [-]
I think Netflix faces the problem that measuring the causality between a user watching specific content and choosing to stay subscribed is super hard. Therefore, they focus on a metric that is easy to measure, namely time spent in the app. This is likely not the metric they should be optimizing for, but since they _can_ measure it, it becomes the target anyway.
Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.
I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.
Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, “reality” TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).
krige 4 hours ago [-]
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.
soco 4 hours ago [-]
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 be leading the stats? Even if you think they suck, compared to the rest of the pack they suck the least.
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
#2 is youtube. #3 (BitTorrent) saw 40% 6-month growth in 2024 (the same year Netflix had 60% YoY growth):
As is always the case, they are high on their own supply. Netflix, and a ton of other companies, are terminally ill gambling addicts.
myself248 3 hours ago [-]
I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User".
To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone from the very same list it appeared in, then you've clawed one additional user into your metrics and the VCs give you a treat.
These people don't care about the service and they're the worst users to cater to, but everyone caters to them because they're the only ones left. Hence, TikTokization.
FinnLobsien 4 hours ago [-]
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 whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.
And when you control what's presented to people, not they (and they don't care), you can push them to consume what you want them to consume.
I heard a YC group partner once that he's worked with a ton of delivery apps. Many of them start out as differentiated apps for ordering from the best "hole in the wall" places or the app for authentic foreign cuisines, only to discover that the best growth hack is getting McDonald's on the app, because that'll be your top seller, instantly.
Most people just do the default thing everyone does—and we're probably all like that in one aspect or another of our lives, and that's who many experiences are designed for.
klabb3 2 hours ago [-]
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.
FinnLobsien 1 hours ago [-]
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...
famahar 16 minutes ago [-]
>But imagine trying to start HN today...
Reddit is a good example of what a monetized version could look like. It's a shell of its former self. NFT avatar customization, engagement achievements, ads in feed and comments, layers of friction to simplify the experience. Such a mess.
FinnLobsien 59 seconds ago [-]
Yeah, for sure. And yet the numbers are up. This is precisely what happens when products cross into the mainstream. They get worse for enthusiasts and get better for the average person (and more profitable).
bombcar 3 hours ago [-]
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.
FinnLobsien 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mppm 3 hours ago [-]
> And most people on this planet are more or less happy with whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.
I think this is a debatable statement. It could be true, but I am increasingly convinced that enshittification, TikTokification, AIfication, etc. is proceeding despite what the average person wants. Average does not mean gaping, uninspired idiot. I think people in general do notice that everything is broken, short-lived, watered down and ad-ridden. But what to do? When every company does it, voting with your wallet becomes practically impossible.
FinnLobsien 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
Which is a real problem for the rare person (ie me) who doesn't like McDonalds. Go to a new city and I get recommendations of McDonalds, and the dozen "you won't believe we are not McDonalds" - never mind that I don't like burgers, that is about all I can find when looking for a meal.
FinnLobsien 3 hours ago [-]
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.
cubefox 2 hours ago [-]
A substantial fraction of us might indeed have some degree of ASD or ADHD.
FinnLobsien 1 hours ago [-]
Or maybe we're just nerds, not everything needs to qualify as a clinical diagnosis
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 minutes ago [-]
This comment is distinctly incurious. Sure, it doesn't have to be a clinical diagnosis but that's also kinda the point of talking about it so casually: it doesn't always have to rise to the level of a clinical diagnosis. Some people will not be satisfied with the "we're just nerds" explanation and that's okay too. (Indeed, obsessive weirdos, eh?)
andai 4 hours ago [-]
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.
svachalek 3 hours ago [-]
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.
TuringTest 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 3 hours ago [-]
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... :(
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
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.
yakkomajuri 4 hours ago [-]
I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for like a decade.
Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a Twitter-like thing inside of it, shopping, and literally dozens of other products. Some core banking features are now hard to find but more importantly I had quite a few issues with investments as well. People who work there also tell me about messy problems on the financial services bits. It's very clear to me that in trying to become everything, they've deprioritized the fundamental products they offer, which are those related to banking. I want to store money, send and receive it, invest it, and have access to credit. But the experience of using those features has become significantly worse as new verticals sprouted up.
rambambram 32 minutes ago [-]
I have the same with my banking app here in The Netherlands. I don't know if they try to be a super app, but since a year or two they put all kinds of annoying ads inside their app and unnecessary notifications on top of my account overview. Just show me the numbers, I pay for your service.
jgilias 4 hours ago [-]
That’s because WeChat has really taken off in China. So there are companies in different markets trying to replicate that. And, well, from business perspective it does make sense. If you manage to pull it off, the reward is massive.
yakkomajuri 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jgilias 2 hours ago [-]
I feel you. Having a chat function is the last thing I want in my banking app lol.
hcarvalhoalves 1 hours ago [-]
I believe the "Peter principle" [1] also holds for companies. A company grows until it eventually outlives its mission and loses focus.
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)
patapong 2 hours ago [-]
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!
sureIy 2 hours ago [-]
Is this about software or is it about you?
I loved my computer when I was a kid, now I only see flaws. I don't think software was flawless at the time, it's just that I became very keenly aware of its current issues because this is my field.
okwhateverdude 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
the_snooze 12 minutes ago [-]
I think the harsh practical reality is that a lot of end-user computing needs have been met for a long time: word processing, media playback, communications, etc. Unless you need live collaboration or some specialized package, most things you can do in modern Google Sheets you can do just as well in LibreOffice Calc or Excel 97.
How does one build or maintain a viable software business in a world where most people's software needs have been met? It's to pivot away from delivering value towards extracting value. Hence all the push towards cloud-based services instead of stadalone local programs. Online connectivity allows the developer to arbitrarily change the balance of value between them and the user, which is where the gross adversarial feeling of modern computing comes from. The computer is no longer serving you exclusively.
ivanjermakov 30 minutes ago [-]
Delightful software is still there and still being made. It's the industry that targets average Joe, who doesn't care about technology.
zonkerdonker 1 hours ago [-]
How much has been lost to the altar of shareholder value? And how much gained?
It will be interesting to see how these first decades of the millennium will be remembered.
Taek 4 hours ago [-]
The root problem seems to be monopoly and fragmentation.
When Ford was working on a car, people who wanted a faster horse could go to the horse store. There were reasonable alternatives to Ford's new method of transportation.
But here, you can't recreate Spotify from 2015. You'll never get the rights to play the music for users. Same with Netflix, you'll never get the rights to show the movies.
Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even if you know exactly what content your user wants, you can't fetch it for them because it was posted in some other walled garden, and that wall stops you from competing.
If you want a faster horse, change the laws so that people can build faster horses and compete.
gampleman 3 hours ago [-]
Good luck riding your fast horse through most urban areas (and parking it... er stabling it). All of those things were routine in urban areas before car adoption (I believe Manhattan for instance often had stables in upper floors, leading to some interesting design to get horses up and down).
ks2048 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe it depends on your listening habits, but for me, Spotify and Netflix are very different experiences.
Spotify has almost anything I look for. Netflix I struggle to find anything of interest.
kmacdough 3 hours ago [-]
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.
draw_down 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
MortyWaves 3 hours ago [-]
That Netflix screenshot looks fucking great: clear, usable, no distractions, more than 5 items on a page. What a mess "modern" UX/UI has turned into.
WorldPeas 1 hours ago [-]
truly the mcMaster-Carr of video
jerf 3 hours ago [-]
Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm lucky enough to have had a CD collection before music streaming is a thing. Now my phone has enough capacity (since I still use phones that can take SD cards) to casually carry my entire collection around. I can play it in any order I want.
I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I have my own collection though since it tracks my interests poorly.
I've gotten back into buying my own video too. I don't consume a ton of video and I dropped Netflix streaming a while ago because the delta between me marking something for the queue and actually getting to it was becoming routinely larger than the amount of time Netflix would still have the thing I wanted to see.
The problem is, I don't even see the second derivative on this trend turning, let alone the first. Metric-driven development, by its very nature, will take away every knob from you that you could conceivably use to drive their metrics lower. I think that's a reasonable approximation of the root cause of the reality observed in the OP. If you happen to agree with their metrics then hey, good times for you, but the odds of that are low since you're probably not looking to maximize the monetization they can extract from you as priority one.
Therefore, the only option is, get off metric-driven-development platforms. There is no alternative and will be even less of one as time goes on.
I suspect in the very long run this metric-driven development will eventually die off as all consumers come around to this realization one way or another and start turning to other alternatives, but it can easily be 5-10 years before there's enough of us for those "alternatives" to be able to survive in the market. Fortunately, MP3 players haven't gone anywhere. (Although it takes some searching to find ones that aren't also trying to match the streaming services and stick to old-school "play what you ask for and not anything else, unless you ask for shuffling or randomness explicitly".)
rambambram 20 minutes ago [-]
This. Masterfully written down, by the way. I subscribed to your blog through RSS, because I also want to do 'the algorithm' myself. Interesting story about the intersection of law and tech you have on your blog!
bigstrat2003 26 minutes ago [-]
This is the way. If I care about watching something in the future, I buy the Blu-ray and rip it. I already have basically all the music I could ever want in mp3 format. Plex (or Jellyfin if you prefer that) provides a pleasant UI, and I don't need those services any more.
WorldPeas 1 hours ago [-]
> I still use phones that use SD cards
I can't tell you how much I miss removable storage
MortyWaves 3 hours ago [-]
Where do you buy videos from? Do you mean new films and shows? How, I thought practically all of it is locked down DRM only streaming? Or do you mean DVD/BluRay?
jerf 2 hours ago [-]
DVD and BluRay, yes.
paulorlando 14 minutes ago [-]
That carcinisation convergent evolution effect is real. But so is the reality that outside of network dependent companies like the Netflix example in the post, those faster horses do still exist, just in niches. In Kevin Kelly's book What Technology Wants he writes about going through a 100-year old catalog and then finding that there are people today who still make all the items (some now obscure) that were popularly sold back then. But the difference is that if you're talking about individual companies like Netflix, YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack in the post, you won't see that.
Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago [-]
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 BluRay players from another company, everyones incentives are better aligned.
phh 2 hours ago [-]
> It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you satisfied with less and/or cheaper content.
After getting annoyed by their interface that was showing 80% of content I have already seen, I've come to a realization:
Their incentive is not even to make me watch crap. No! Their best outcome for them is for me to watch nothing and still pay.
Showing me old shows gives me the warm feelings and make me associate them with Netflix, making me keep the subscription even
Hypnodrones are corporate dreams
barbazoo 45 minutes ago [-]
Personally I wouldn't even bother with old shows on netflix since they could go away, and do, all the time. I download and put on my local plex instance, especially with bangers like The Office, there's no harm done.
Netflix et al are good for those high profile miniseries you want to watch once and then never again. The rest, download and enjoy without ads, without dark patterns, especially content that kids watch (youtube).
ryandrake 1 hours ago [-]
> 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 and TV were great. The rest happily will watch Ow, My Balls and ads for Carl's Jr.
WorldPeas 1 hours ago [-]
countdown to "welcome to costco I love you"
lern_too_spel 1 hours ago [-]
And the Blurays show ads for the first company's other products.
pier25 24 minutes ago [-]
Everything is converging on TikTok because it's unregulated addiction. The Chinese hit the sweet spot on how to hook people.
Given everything we've seen with kids and teenagers exposed to phones, social media, etc this is the next tobacco. Thank god there are countries already banning phones from schools and there's talk of banning minor from social media.
volumo 22 minutes ago [-]
This is pretty much why we are taking this "faster horse" approach when building Volumo, our music download store for pro DJs (an alternative to Beatport - if you know, you know)[1]. Downloads, not streaming (you get FLAC files right into your hands); pay as you go instead of a subscription (why don't you pay a lump sum for this track you want, of which 75% will go straight to the author); gentle human curation instead of the ubiquitous "we make decisions for you" algorithms.
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!
arkh 5 hours ago [-]
All the result of A/B tests. Everything will converge to give you an engaging experience for most people. The only not too bad student is reddit which lets you keep using their older UI if you want to. But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement.
ballenf 4 hours ago [-]
My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling using Youtube and Netflix these days.
IshKebab 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small. They can't let you narrow your search at all because then they wouldn't have any content to give you.
Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and it says "Content related to <thing that you actually wanted>".
Apocryphon 47 minutes ago [-]
Meanwhile, a lot of this content is on places like Tubi.
mcpar-land 2 hours ago [-]
This is absolutely true. Spotify employs "ghost artists" that create the most inoffensive, royalty-free background music possible, and then they prioritize them in their auto-generated playlists.
I think it's very likely this kind of optimization is giving people want they "will" want, instead of what they "do" want.
If you ask a heroine user if they want to use, I suspect most will say no.
But if you A/B test their behavior and build a product based on what they actually do, you're going to start selling more heroin and encourage more heroin use.
To everyone's detriment.
nyclounge 3 hours ago [-]
>But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement
That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.
Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps developer makes better software.
How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!
mxfh 4 hours ago [-]
Not just A/B test but all happening while cost optimizations happen.
The key metric seems to be no longer how many users you can make sign up, but how can I keep an subscription running at lowest cost to serve possible.
The UHD price is not worth it for a long term subscription, and the HD quality is subpar.
AlexandrB 3 hours ago [-]
This is an "old man shakes fist at clouds" opinion, but I think HD video is a huge waste of time/money for living room watching. Your eyes cannot effectively resolve that resolution at normal "couch" viewing distances for common TV sizes. This is kind of like how audio quality peaked at CDish quality. Anything better is largely inaudible.
bflesch 4 hours ago [-]
With the onslaught of Javascript-parsing bots and crawlers, how useful are A/B testing results any more?
wazoox 4 hours ago [-]
"Engaging experience" being actually a weasel word for "sucking your brains out to make you watch ads and valueless nonsense".
MarkusWandel 52 minutes ago [-]
As others have said, the "faster horse" analogy only goes so far. Even more than a century after cars became practical, you can still go get a faster horse.
The analogy would be "I want to go back to the pre-ensh*ttified, simple version of X that we used to have. But with an updated web experience, or smartphone app, there's no way to go back. I have at least three apps on my phone that I wish I could still have the older version of. But I can't.
__MatrixMan__ 43 minutes ago [-]
Then we need start optimizing for horse-speed, and stop optimizing for "engagement". The first step is to get away from building ad-funded widgets. Until we do that we will always have to listen to somebody who cares less about what the user wants and more about what can be profitably done to that user.
Freak_NL 4 hours ago [-]
One upside: by degrading the experience¹ Netflix did make it a lot easier to simply stop your subscription and hop over to another streaming service for a few months.
A very interesting development: in the Netherlands KPN, one of the largest telcos, introduced a feature where any household with several of their products in use (e.g., two cellphones and fiber internet) could choose a free 'gift'². The gift is a choice from a bunch of subscriptions, including Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. And you get to switch monthly if you want to. So we ditched our own Netflix subscription and started watching Disney+ for now. Perhaps we'll switch in a few months.
These services probably realise that their customers are made up of 'hoppers', and 'stackers' (people who take out multiple subscriptions to streaming services at once). I wonder what the distribution for each service is.
1: In part forced upon them by the content owners waking up and wanting to set up their own exclusive shops of course, and in part because of, well, greed (the UI suckiness).
2: The trade-off is obviously that this stimulates consumers to consolidate their telco products with them. In my case this was already so, so for me this is just a small incentive to stay with them (i.e., it saves me €9 a month).
Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised that the services don't seem to have updated for that reality yet; it feels like there's only one or two "hits" on each service per year. They did already adapt a bit by no longer releasing a whole season in one go, so you need at least three months of subscription for a 10 episode weekly series.
But what they need is rolling releases across the whole year, so that once one production is "done", the next one rolls around.
(maybe they already do, I don't know, I'm just thinking of Stranger Things which seems to be Netflix' main seller at the moment)
raldi 4 hours ago [-]
People overuse the original quote as an excuse to never listen to customers, but the real wisdom is to ask why they’re asking for a faster horse (to get around quicker) and see if you can think of a better way to meet that goal.
9rx 4 hours ago [-]
Overused and misattributed. What Ford actually said was: “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”
thih9 4 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t give TikTok too much credit or blame. The process started earlier, with snapchat stories UX dominating platforms, and feeds UX becoming popular before that, etc...
There is an aphorism that with enough A/B testing every website turns into a porn app or a gambling app. I guess we’re observing something similar.
sambeau 42 minutes ago [-]
Self driving cars, where you have to supervise and occasionally have to reign in from going off the path, are essentially faster horses.
So they are finally here.
codexb 37 minutes ago [-]
I've never thought about it this way, but it's funny to think that horses are largely self driving on roads.
ghusto 2 hours ago [-]
So happy to read this and all the comments in agreement. I thought it was just me.
In my bombastic opinion, Spotify has the _worst_ goddamn user interface of anything I have ever used, including my dishwasher with a single button. Netflix is less frustrating, but that's likely because "here are some films" is more acceptable than "here are some songs, but fuck you if want to listen by album".
Smashing content into my face isn't making me love you.
metabagel 16 minutes ago [-]
To me, Spotify's UI is super counterintuitive.
fifticon 3 hours ago [-]
I hate the modern dark-pattern shop UIs, which tries to make it as difficult as possible to enumerate what is actually available. One example is when queries reply with 'what is most like' what you asked for, instead of honestly answering "no, even though movie X exists, we dont currently have it in our offering".
Even though amazon prime is the poorest streaming option, I appreciate that they make it possible to exhaustively page through their entire offering, which I have done on a few occasions ("possible", because it is the usual user-intelligence-hostile ajax-javascript cursorless experience, where your browser is staggering in gigabytes as you approach the 3000-movie mark)
hinkley 29 minutes ago [-]
That graph at the end is brutal. But perhaps not incorrect.
Tubi has a better exploration system and catalog than Netflix does but it’s still not as good as Netflix used to be.
WorldPeas 2 hours ago [-]
So many of the burrs on my experience with anything are that I still expect the paradigm I had with my discman as a kid to the nth degree, back then I would load my favorite songs onto a disc, then play them, or play an album on repeat. I-tunes lets me do this still, but it's trying to push more of its streaming features on me like when I search my library, it defaults to searching Apple's network music volume, that I'm not interested in.
I fear that the iphone will continue to hamper one's efforts to download media until you are forced into more fiscally expedient platforms like Spotify, where my favorite PM dawn song was replaced by a "superior" remaster where the artist was much older and lost the tone of his voice. Sadly one of the consequences of convergence is that so much else in the phone is done right I'd probably still have to use it.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
Yea, iTunes (renamed Apple Music) is getting bad. The only thing I care about is what I've cared about since 2000: Playing a bunch of MP3 files in my collection. That functionality is now relegated to "third tab from the left," shoved aside behind a glass case like a relic from a former era.
WorldPeas 1 hours ago [-]
Worse yet it's the only effective way to sync music to the iphone over a wired cable. I can tell they've abandoned their USB sync software because of how annoying the dialogs are when you plug your phone in and don't authenticate to start it, additionally that thay've (likely intentionally to push I-cloud) never added automatic usb photo sync from phone to computer. This probably all originated from when Apple shifted their convergence model from all around the desktop to all around the phone¹
The iPhone (and previously iPod), from day one, could never simply be mounted as an external USB (or networked) file system. You always had to do the ridiculous "sync" song and dance and use their proprietary software, instead of just copying files using the OS like every other external storage device. Maddening.
WorldPeas 58 minutes ago [-]
more maddening yet is you can actually mount it as a limited storage device using https://libimobiledevice.org/ under linux, but not MacOs(to my knowledge)
How do I copy music to my device?
Sorry, music synchronization with newer devices is currently not supported but if you are a keen developer why not contribute a new service implementation for the ATC Service?
bryanhogan 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mushufasa 3 hours ago [-]
The examples in this blog are of online streaming media changing from a wide searchable library to an unsearchable tailored recommendation feed.
As I understand, licensing dynamics were the main reason for Netflix's change, not pure product design. In 2012, most movie studios licensed their catalog to Netflix, while 7 years later they took away the licensing to compete with proprietary walled streaming platforms. Due to the smaller catalog, Netflix could not design that open searchable streaming library; they changed their design to make the best of the more limited library.
gmuslera 4 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t matter what you want anymore. You are not the client, but the product. They are the ones getting faster horses.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
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 me outliers that can be ignored - there will always be a few people you can't get. However I could be a sign of the end.
cratermoon 3 hours ago [-]
> They are the ones getting faster horses.
To a point, until stage 3 enshittification hits,
and the business claws back all the value.
eadmund 1 hours ago [-]
> YouTube. YouTube: Once a video catalog with social discovery. Now? TikTok.
I hate YouTube Shorts with a passion. They are low-effort engagement bait. They cannot be disabled.
Even worse, my Google TV will not play them when my phone is connected to it, and my phone will not play them when it is connected to my TV. Both devices can play them fine, they just don’t want to play them when they are connected.
There can be no good technical reason for this. It’s just delivering a bad experience because it can.
I want to disable them in the phone and TV apps. I haven’t used YouTube in the browser much for almost a decade! It’s kind of surprising to me.
dcrazy 1 hours ago [-]
Many channels seem to use Shorts as a vehicle to get you to their long-form content. I don’t mind that as a discovery mechanism; it’s introduced me to some fun stuff. Other channels make Shorts-specific content, which I really dislike.
I don't understand the draw of Spotify. There's no network effect that I can see (even if it is built into your car, the other services have good experiences in your car too), everyone complains about it, they pay less per stream to artists than their competitors, and their library isn't any bigger than the competition. (It was smaller the last time I compared.)
On top of that, their recommendation algorithms are (were?) terrible compared to the other services (since then, they added more payola), and they're actively trying to burn down the last open corner of the internet (podcasts).
Also, the pricing is comparable, even if the other options feel more premium.
What am I missing?
metabagel 18 minutes ago [-]
My local music format public radio station provides song links to: Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon.
I have used Tidal, Deezer and Amazon Music in the past, but I've always went back to Spotify. I prefer the UX, but not only that, the recommendations are WAY better for me than other streaming services. However, my music taste is very eclectic, so maybe that helps a lot to recommend something within my taste.
skerit 2 hours ago [-]
I unfortunately pay for Spotify.
I also pay for Youtube premium, but I can't even switch to that because their music player is even worse than Spotify.
I really miss the good old days of music players that were _packed_ with features. The players of current streaming services are so basic. And as long as I can't find a replacement that fits my needs I don't really want to bother switching.
dharmab 2 hours ago [-]
Spotify has a free tier. Apple Music and YouTube Music do not. Young people start on the free tier and don't want ti have to move their libraries/playlists. And young people share Spotify playlists, not Apple or Youtube playlists, because they know their friends have Spotify.
karaterobot 2 hours ago [-]
> Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok
You have given every product team a set of parameters and asked them to optimize the product around those parameters. Namely, how much time and attention the user spends staring at your app. Is anyone surprised that convergence has taken place, when everyone is after the same thing, with the same tools, in the same environment?
The only question is: who is "you" in this scenario? Instinctively, it's the leadership team. But in one of my least popular takes, I tend to think the responsibility is ultimately "you", the user who refuses to stop scrolling. Tech leadership doesn't have vision or a moral compass, they take their direction from the metrics which ultimately measure your choices.
bloak 4 hours ago [-]
This sounds like an economic problem with no obvious solution: network effects => monopoly => "optimising" for typical user. Where there isn't a monopoly (or anything close to a monopoly) you find different firms specialising in different ways. For example, small independent restaurants survive by being distinctive, not by trying to imitate McDonald's.
YouTube and LinkedIn are practically monopolies. Netflix isn't a monopoly in the same way but you usually don't have a choice of streaming services for watching a particular film or series so it's different from being able to buy the same cheese or the same wine from any of several different supermarkets.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, more like Netflix (and we might as well add Amazon here) became popular because of "the long tail". Once, I could easily find 1930's classics like "Stella Dallas" on Netflix (and early Ultravox! on Amazon when they would have to be ordered from brick and mortar music stores at the time).
For some reason (perhaps because it costs money to keep a large catalog?) Netflix retracted the long tail while Amazon at least kept theirs unfurled.
Apocryphon 44 minutes ago [-]
My guess is that Netflix is tried to cultivate a semi-premium brand (but not premium in an Apple TV+ way), which means getting rid of the long tail in favor of what's hip, sexy, exciting, etc. Whereas while Amazon is making expensive boondoggles like Ring of Power, they are also comfortable with keeping dozens of conspiracy theory documentaries on. I guess that's in line with the identity of their main store, and the concept of Amazon being a series of warehouses.
cratermoon 3 hours ago [-]
> no obvious solution: network effects => monopoly => "optimising" for typical user.
ahem. We have a solution for the monopoly part.
We've had it since the 19th century.
We just stopped enforcing it in the 70s and 80s when the Chicago School convinced everyone that as long as judge Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" can be trotted out to prove that the "free market" is working and prices are low.
dijit 4 hours ago [-]
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 analysis going on. CEO's will be invited to rub shoulders with the same groups of people. Conglomerates will have information sharing of some kind across all subsidiaries.
Everyone is acting independently, but towards the same goal. It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
I'm a bit counter-culture in my missive, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but a little nudge across a limited population seems to be enough - and it exists.
Controversially: Blackrocks DEI initiatives are perfect public example of what I mean, no matter if you are pro or con, you can't deny the impact.
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.
miltonlost 3 hours ago [-]
All the shitty CEOs start doing the same shit at the same time, because most CEOs are not exceptional workers or thinkers or innovators. They are simply the (in)human conduits doing as much as possible to siphon money from their users to the shareholders and Board Member class. They follow the trends that their consulting firms tell them to follow (the same consultants that work at multiple companies within the industry), which is why we get massive hiring at the same time, massive layoffs at the same time, RTO at the same time. The US has allowed collusion and market coordination via 3rd parties (so we have, e.g., landlords sharing rental prices with a 3rd party consultant, who then combines this data and illegally collude to set prices but with a Computer instead of Bob). Modern-day capitalism has said "monopolies and huge conglomerates are good because they're EfFiCiEnT!!!" (though what kind of efficiency and to whom the efficiency gain are given is entirely ignored -- the efficiency to max profit is the only one that matters).
> It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
The same thing too when companies hire consultants to look at the "market wage" and then set salaries based on what the consultant said. Every worker at the same "market wage" with no incentives to be above that.
Tistron 2 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
ozim 4 hours ago [-]
I hate algo feeds that change each time I refresh.
On LI I lost already like 3 articles that I really wanted to read but I clicked notification and I can never get that articles back.
robofanatic 4 hours ago [-]
Its like when I go bird watching and finally see that elusive bird. but if I lose my focus for a split second, its gone, never to be seen again.
acyou 2 hours ago [-]
That quote is pretty dumb, I see it quoted a lot. It's arrogant, assuming, demeaning, elitist. And I don't think it's true. Who would say "a faster horse"? It doesn't make any sense, because people know/knew that horses are what they are.
A better, more constructive approach is to proactively identify how emerging technology can fit people's needs. And for sure, you need to verify that there is an actual need for what you are building, and then go build it.
Netflix and TikTok are not the "faster horse" here. Generative AI is clearly the "faster horse". It's a disruptive technology that will change the entire structure of society, much like the internal combustion engine. And no one said they wanted that either, that doesn't make people dumb, or user surveys pointless. Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?
Henry Ford saying that would probably be like hearing Sam Altman say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster computer". It's not true, it doesn't match reality.
SirFatty 1 hours ago [-]
You should probably read the article... the author did not say that Netflix and TikTok are the faster horse, the opposite actually. You seem really focused on the quote for some reason.
acyou 59 minutes ago [-]
The article says that 2015 Netflix and 2015 Spotify were better, my point is that 2025 Netflix and Spotify are better for the actual customers (the advertisers), but they are not transformatively better in the way that generative AI is.
JodieBenitez 2 hours ago [-]
> Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?
well... I definitely want more performance per watt. And I stress "performance", because more MIPS are useless if wasted.
solumunus 2 hours ago [-]
I think you’re taking things a little too literally.
hooverd 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if like cars, LLMs will be as equally destructive to our social fabric.
mattskr 3 hours ago [-]
I just want to pile in that the old netflix layout was top tier. I LOVED it and because of it, stumbled onto tons of awesome movies I never heard of at the time and were actually interesting. Their algorithm back then was the best. I never had a problem finding movies to ACTUALLY WATCH. The whole reason I quit my subscription a few years ago was for the fact I end up burning up time "looking" for something to watch. Then don't. I stopped paying for the "movie browsing simulator" a little after The Witcher 1st season. A few months ago, I got another month because I thought it might be better. Ha. No.
In this case, it's less "faster horse" and more "quit with the stupid fucking song and dance, and give me the damn thing I paid for without all this extra stupid bullshit that makes the experience worse."
jmull 3 hours ago [-]
If people can't find a sustainable business model around that thing you want, it's just not going to be widely available.
It's hard to say for sure if Netflix could have/should have kept going in the direction they were going in 2012. But they didn't seem to think so.
You can't necessarily count on businesses springing up to satisfy your personal interests and tastes. Especially large-scale businesses, which are always going to gravitate toward the center of large markets. It's great when it happens, but it's basically just luck when it does.
joshuaturner 3 hours ago [-]
The problem is with the definition of “sustainable business model.”
Could you maintain a profitable business and continue steady growth? Sure. Could you become a unicorn and IPO within the next 5 years? Unlikely.
marcosdumay 2 hours ago [-]
Or, in other words, our entire society is focused on creating fake business that can only survive in a monopolized market (or can't even then).
That's because the money is concentrated into a few dumb people with limited capacity to invest it. So they'll push it into a handful of companies that will destroy whatever sustainable companies that exist on the same market.
chanux 3 hours ago [-]
> An inconsistent stream of ever-changing content
Instagram. I have clicked through an ad, yes AN AD, and came back to get to another ad and had it refreshed away.
I hope they are doing this because it works for them, somehow.
PS: LinkedIn does this too.
bambax 3 hours ago [-]
If you want a faster horse, your best bet is to make it yourself.
For media library, I use Jellyfin and host all my media files locally on a NAS.
I self-host all my projects on that same NAS, which works just fine and and makes me not need to subscribe to some offer or other from hosting providers.
I quit SmugMug last year, because it turns out, hosting my photos on the NAS costs nothing, and remaking the small part of the SmugMug web interface that I need is trivial.
And for vehicles, I also made myself a faster horse, by bolting a Bafang motor on an ordinary mountain bike. Things break occasionally on that thing, but I know how to fix them, and so I do.
1970-01-01 3 hours ago [-]
It comes down to less is better. You don't want a faster horse, you want less horses on the road so your horse isn't traffic, it's a horse. You don't want less TikTok, you want less crap using TikTok. Horses were the same, leaving crap all over the cities until Henry Ford's Model A. So we can solve this problem by inventing a lot better, much cleaner TikTok. In the meantime, sell manure shovels.
OtherShrezzing 3 hours ago [-]
>The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones
It's interesting that SV outwardly says it "wants to create entirely new markets instead of products in existing ones", meanwhile the actual experienced outcome for users is the same experience across multiple markets.
SV is somehow failing on both of its metrics here. It's creating entirely homogeneous products across all existing markets.
ikanreed 2 hours ago [-]
By "create new markets" they've always meant "Become useless middlemen by displacing the existing bridge between makers and consumers"
Usually their new bridge is modestly more convenient in some way, but opens the door to the worst kind of enshittification.
chrsw 46 minutes ago [-]
We don't fight enough to keep software that works for us.
skybrian 2 hours ago [-]
Spotify doesn’t seem like a good example. I use Spotify to search for artists and listen to songs from their albums. I make my own playlists. If you basically want a better iTunes, it seems like it still works for that.
(You do have to ignore the other features, but that doesn’t seem very hard.)
ramses0 3 hours ago [-]
"Lisp and Email" ... all languages grow a half-baked lisp, all programs expand to read email. Now: all content/social sites devolve to tik-tok?
Highwaymen still have those fast horses, up on the lawless mountain passes... ;)
amiga386 2 hours ago [-]
If it didn't fuck about with things and act like it's here for you, why would you pay a recurring fee for it?
"Recurring revenue stream" is an answer in search of problems, and it's ready to destroy all alternatives.
fergie 3 hours ago [-]
OP is dunking on Tiktok, but the comments and quality of dialog on Tiktok are far better than any other social network, even with more than a billion users.
robertclaus 3 hours ago [-]
Is this the logical conclusion of the marginal user effect? If your business model depends on growth, you need to keep changing the product to attract new users even at the cost of quality to old ones that are unlikely to leave.
andai 4 hours ago [-]
I think Spotify was perfect in 2008. I think people's need to justify their existence by constantly doing things creates an unfortunate incentive where perfect products are mutated beyond recognizability.
(This coupled with the tendency to hire more people as you get more popular, you have more people mutating the thing. Also novelty bias...)
madmountaingoat 3 hours ago [-]
In those early days the Spotify user experience needed to try and differentiate and put up barriers to being copied. Later it suffered from being purely metric driven and tracking things like user-engagement thinking it's a proxy for happiness with the platform. And then later still they start to mostly care about the cost of delivery.
nicbou 1 hours ago [-]
I feel strongly like this about Google Maps. The underlying product is nothing short of miraculous, but the UI is infuriating. If I create a route, my markers disappear. Clicking on the map doesn't show businessses anymore. Why can't I navigate to another city and browse the map at the same time? Why hasn't Maps graduated to the equivalent of tabbed browsing?
Every trip, I'm reminded of how disappointing Google Maps is. Simple things like trying to find a laptop-friendly cafe and getting random cafes represented by a close up picture of someone's cappuccino. Realising that I'm driving 10 kilometres to do a U-turn. Having no way to bypass a blocked road. The very clunky waypoint management. Aagh!
I want quality of life improvements more than I want new features. It's weird that a company with so much resources can't create powerful tools.
totetsu 4 hours ago [-]
I was just thinking today about how much better my media experience had been in 2010s with XBMC on a spare e-waste even then pc plugged into the TV than anything available today, and how much I enjoyed listening to the music of my music neighbors last.fm from my listen history I scrobbled from foobar2000..
pwatsonwailes 5 hours ago [-]
Welcome to what happens when everyone optimises for the same metrics, and looks at the same companies for inspiration as to what to do.
At most of these corporations, over time they've learned to be product and financially oriented, because it's what the markets reward and it's easy to do, rather than customer orientated, because as long as they're not unusably shit for the majority of their customers, then that's good enough.
It's an attempt to reverse backwards to the worst possible thing that works, because that gets you more ad revenue, rather than the best possible thing.
I say this as someone who's walked away from strategy consult gigs for multinationals where the objective was literally to do things like this. Revenue and margin maximisation in ways the stock market and PE/VC investment rewards is frequently orthogonal to building the best thing for the customer.
gokayburuc_dev 1 hours ago [-]
TLDR:
The main problem here is that the systems are starting to look more and more alike every day. Systems that are oppressed by algorithms turn into a Hollywood porn star: they are just trying to show what they like the most. This makes the systems uniform by wiping out all other beautiful and valuable things.
Instead of really making a system better, we're trying to make it look like the most popular one available. As a result, we have copies with silicone lips, silicone breasts, plenty of aesthetics, but cheap and soulless. Instead of improving existing systems, we corrupt them by copying them.
pal9000i 4 hours ago [-]
Companies work on averages, statistically what retains, engages the users.
But Spotify is far better now than it was 10 years ago. I still have playlists, I can still instantly find any song I want. The added bonus is the discovery engine. So the UX now is a superset of what it was before.
dogleash 1 hours ago [-]
Oh come on. I have this thing open all day when I'm working, you can't bullshit me like that. It's a not good UI, its serviceable.
It's not good by any conceivable metric other than those they have internally decided represent business goals. If you want to have a tautological argument that makes it good, because those goals are the only goals that matter. That's a boring response to an article about how business incentives have turned the UI into trash.
FFS the Play button frequently breaks requiring a refresh. And as much as I appreciate the inevitable response that I'm holding it wrong, how is that my problem?
mrbonner 3 hours ago [-]
I feel that it basically comes down to promotion driven development. Things are changed because they are justifications for someone promotion. Cut the bloat!
qoez 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like they just want the era of movies that existed in 2012 (as opposed to the ones they get on the front page today). The experience hasn't changed that much
vanschelven 4 hours ago [-]
The title is a great hook, but it doesn't really cover what's being described... which is the TikTokification of everything and (implicitly) that there's some bait & switch going on.
nthingtohide 4 hours ago [-]
Earlier people used to spend 2-3 hrs watching and absorbing a single movie. Now people spend 5 hrs scrolling tiktok. So in a sense time spent on content has actually increased. People don't need filler and lengthy buildups. People have been exposed to so much culture they can almost predict the general plotline so no need to spend time on that. Give me the plot twist or the drop (in case of spotify) with short relevant context. I remember Balaji saying something to this effect. He said don't give me filler content, just give me "fixed point" content which doesn't change after successively summarization and pruning.
est 4 hours ago [-]
I to miss old internet where everything is placed under a catalog, instead of endless stream of crap I dont like.
hackitup7 5 hours ago [-]
"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 business, both have no idea what they actually want and don't understand the capabilities of new technologies in the market? Totally condescending.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
What I don't like about the line is it only applies when there is a non-horse option. No amount of effort in 1600 would have resulted in either a bicycle or an automobile - there were too many needed things not available. In 1600 most people wouldn't have wanted a faster horse - sure they knew what a horse was but they couldn't afford to feed it and so they were not interested - a car is cheaper than a horse for nearly all uses.
hobs 4 hours ago [-]
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 - it all becomes more diffuse and poorly executed.
1dom 4 hours ago [-]
Strong agree.
I've also seen it a lot: sales person at a small tech startup convinces business person in large tech company to ignore their own engineers. I suspect most engineers at large firms have been on one side of this experience at somepoint, and most engineers at small but successful tech startups have been on the other side (lead engineer to sales: "You told them our our product could do _what?!_ That's fine. I never wanted my PTO anyway...:(")
hobs 4 hours ago [-]
Hell, small in this context can be Snowflake or Databricks, this is the concept of Shadow IT - a slick sales call can convince and move things in a business that an army of engineers will struggle to convince their bosses of.
External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)
External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)
You get the idea.
1dom 4 hours ago [-]
Daily I carry the shame of having been an engineer on both sides. I went from big enterprise to small start up. It's horrible speaking to an engineer at a new client, knowing they can probably do the work you're about to have to do, but better, faster, quicker and cheaper than you. Ultimately we're all just there for "the business" so we just have to get on with it.
Knowing you've built the solution perfectly to the spec, whilst also knowing that the spec wasn't reviewed or endorsed by any technical people so the client's entire engineering team thinks you're incompetent, for just doing what their colleagues asked you to do...
clan 3 hours ago [-]
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.
PaulHoule 5 hours ago [-]
Funny I use the recommmender to listen to music in Plex a lot these days.
jakey_bakey 4 hours ago [-]
Honestly that last sentence about Substack hit me hard.
I just want them to import a syntax highlighting library but instead they are pushing video content into my face
nthingtohide 4 hours ago [-]
Why don't companies have multiple recommendation strategies. One for power-users. One for casual users etc. Have the router infront of these models to intelligent switch between the different styles. In fact, there are times when I want indepth analysis. But after understanding the topic, I need short form content or memes which "update" or "entertain" the same topic in ongoing manner.
cratermoon 3 hours ago [-]
Doing all that would hugely increase opex,
a non-starter for companies,
especially the ones prioritizing growth over everything else.
darkshark 4 hours ago [-]
did anyone commenting here did a shot to taste dot io?
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
damnitbuilds 3 hours ago [-]
A mention for Amazon search here. Which is a very slow horse and always has been, when even a horse that can walk would greatly benefit their customers.
I can only guess that for some reason Amazon think they make more money by not making search work. Work, generally, like only actually returning things with the search term or, work specifically, like letting you specify hard drive sizes above 6TB.
But I find it hard to believe this shit horse actually drives sales. I always end up looking elsewhere in frustration.
darkshark 4 hours ago [-]
did anyone try taste dot io?
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
AlienRobot 3 hours ago [-]
There is a flip side to this graph.
Every entertainment platform becomes video centric.
Every discussion platform becomes political.
As someone who prefers text and static images and doesn't like politics, this is really bothering me right now.
Adding to the list: image-sharing platforms, Instagram, Pinterest and Imgur, are also Tiktok now, specially if you use the apps instead of the website.
Tumblr and Flickr somehow have resisted Tiktok-fication so far.
stanisouce2bag 2 hours ago [-]
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
stanisouce2025 2 hours ago [-]
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
stanisouce2 2 hours ago [-]
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
anarticle 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not really sure the metaphor holds up, Netflix was a jetliner compared to a minivan. We still had movie rental stores in the late 00s.
buyucu 2 hours ago [-]
This is why I pirate movies and shows. The user experience is infinitely better than Netflix and Disney.
They don't care.
They now make more money selling ads and the user data they've collected.
kcatskcolbdi 5 hours ago [-]
Going back to horses sounds so nice.
thijson 22 minutes ago [-]
I see people riding them around the hood here in Philly. There's also pop up stables here and there.
gostsamo 5 hours ago [-]
Sorry, no money in horses, donkeys are all that we can offer you. What color would you like your donkey in?
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
Any color as long it is black (of course).
4 hours ago [-]
scotty79 3 hours ago [-]
tiktokification of content sites ... tinderisation of dating apps ... similar interaction model
hollywood_court 3 hours ago [-]
Dang. Now I’ve got to go listen to Tom T Hall.
api 4 hours ago [-]
What this is describing is not what the Ford quote is talking about. Netflix and all the rest didn't TikTokify because they were trying to create some massive visionary innovation, but the opposite.
They did it because it's more profitable to shovel slop than to distribute quality. Quality content is expensive to make. Slop isn't. The way you do that is by hypnotizing people with addiction. To do that you have to have control over what people see and use algorithms to optimize that to "maximize engagement." You need your users mindlessly scrolling, not searching and categorizing and exploring. You need to disengage the neocortex and engage the brain stem.
TikTok is being copied by everyone because they nailed this formula better than anyone. They didn't invent it, just perfected it. I'd say Meta/Facebook invented it, which is why Zuckerberg should be known as the man who destroyed the Internet.
The next step beyond TikTok is a 100% AI generated algorithmic feed. Drop the human creators entirely. Everyone gets a personalized feed of low-quality AI slop tuned for maximum engagement.
Addiction is the best business model.
kelnos 3 hours ago [-]
Part of the problem specifically with Netflix is that they lost the rights to most of the good stuff, or at least the stuff that everyone wants to see, because the Disneys of the world set up their own streaming services and pulled their content from Netflix.
So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed.
Even the good stuff Netflix has (like say Black Mirror) isn't going to be enough to keep customers unless they get people watching some slop.
LightBug1 3 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the world of restoration and restomods!
Remember Google Reader?
What if I want a better Google Reader?!
* beats dead horse * ... sorry, horsey.
mattmcegg 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Learn2Burn 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
draw_down 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
thej4ck 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
5 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
jillesvangurp 3 hours ago [-]
Henry Ford's point wasn't that people didn't want faster horses but that they'd buy the car they never knew they needed - instead of a horse.
With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But judging from the lack of successful things in this space, probably not.
Rendered at 16:49:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.
So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava, which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0]
I do however think that this is an important insight:
> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.
A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing format a kind of destiny.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...
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.
There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members, not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for a slice of pizza...
If there's nothing on netflix people will cancel netflix. So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much.
But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I’m sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at least some of it went to Apple instead.
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.
A subscription service to cancel and renew your subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter (for those that live in states that can do that).
https://www.rocketmoney.com/
If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?
I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.
Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.
This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.
The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.
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 first season of a Netflix show until the second is announced because they know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time. Which means Netflix cancels more shows because the numbers are terrible.
What they should be doing is test audiences. If those people hate it, then yes cancel. And be patient with everything else.
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 to the plot).
More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.”
Yes, or as people call it: "ad-free". We all know what is meant by that phrase, being pedantic about "well actually there are ads regardless" doesn't make communication clearer.
There is a clear conflict of interest that can only be addressed by buyers being knowledgeable.
Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting.
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.
So a new product comes out, started again by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. And the cycle repeats - unless someone chooses to grow slowly and sustainably, without raising, and stays focused on the niche.
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.
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 has to keep earning you as a customer with every new model. Netflix just needs to keep you watching.
Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix started producing content they had *no moat*.
That's the big problem with media streaming - the content owners have all the leverage. Any profit you make they can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer to them. If you don't want to pay they can (and will, and have done) start their own competitor since the technology isn't a moat - content ownership is.
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.
Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on Netflix and TenCent.
They also have continued series that originated on other networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
I’ve had recommended to me and have recommended to others quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6 Undergound if you’re looking for an action movie.
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.
I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.
I do agree with your overall criticism of short-sightedness and the short term incentives of VC and the stock market, etc.
But the people involved are not quite as binary as you lay out in the quote above. You can't discount the group of people who really do start out as true believers and who become seduced/deceived by VCs. Some of these VC types are real vultures. They'll convince the founder that the best way to share their vision or product with the most people and do the most good for the world is to let the VC guys use their capital to scale up and expand the reach of the product, etc. The money surely helps to lower one's skepticism/cynicism, but I can imagine that it must be very hard to say no to getting your dream project out to millions of people.
Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just not possible for a typical human to turn down excess profits and take pride in a project rather than a money machine? People seem to think these things used to be better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore", "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?
As such it is not surprise things change. You can't go from making less money than you could elsewhere to making a nice income without a lot of office time.
Of course it is common to take the above too far. There is need for office work, but often those office employees forget that it is about the real world.
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.
I think Apple (very intelligently) made products where the average consumer is the enthusiast. Which is very hard to do when your company is a bunch of engineers.
> 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.
Since more of our culture is in online, advertising-dominated spaces -- the forces of capital have a lot of incentive to ensure smooth growth straight to the sociopath phase.
Maybe the key is just accepting the cycle of it all and ensuring there's always cool new places for creative/enthusiastic people to do their thing.
[1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
My favorite quote ("Marl" is the hypothetical name for the marginal user):
> Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.
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 to many, even those who can’t tell the three marques apart or even unaided recall the name Lamborghini.
As to why Koenigsegg doesn't get the rep, I'll take the outside opinion that it's because their name is too inaccessible whereas "Bugatti" slips easily into rap lyrics.
Ferraris, Porsches and similar are somewhat attainable, which, I think, helps with their being symbols, since most people have already actually seen them and know they're real. A Koenigsegg is as good as a story. Hell, I live in Paris and I've never actually seen one. Porches and Ferraris? They're seemingly everywhere.
P.S. I think it's telling that Porsche wasn't mentioned almost at all in English until the mid 1950s, given their role in the war!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ferrari%2CLamb...
Up until about 1948, Porsche was a pure development contractor mostly for the government. They only started manufacturing cars under their own brand in the early 50s (a few 356 built basically in a shed notwithstanding) after Ferry Porsche had taken over, and with the introduction of the 911 began a meteoric rise as a volume manufacturer for international markets.
Except for the Toyota nerds who will want to come talk to you about the LFA. Ask me how I know!
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.
There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports cars.
The WRX has a turbocharged Boxer engine, manual gearbox or optional CVT, and all-wheel drive. It’s a sedan, but it does a 13.9 second quarter mile stock off the showroom floor. That’s not bad.
Well there was the NSX
My girlfriend thinks my cheap modern shitbox is more expensive than my old 90's 4x4 truck.
The average person who doesn't know much about cars will think a second generation MR2 is more exotic than it is. Toyota probably wouldn't make their top three brand guesses. The R34 GT-R will thrill every car enthusiast (and probably everyone who had a Playstation around the turn of the millennium), but most people won't give it a second look.
GTRs absolutely do not stand out. They look like your your average sedan.
You cannot paint by numbers.
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.
IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0.
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. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and even in cinemas.
I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?), but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to advertise chrome on their search page.
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice", but it's a million miles away from, say, listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but they're cherry-picking what to play next.
In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.
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.
Once you become a bloated monopolist like the three companies you just mentioned, your distribution strategy is solved in other ways (like, you've done some bundling and some acquisitions, maybe pressured a few companies into exclusivity agreements and are probably breaking some anti-trust law or other but you have lawyers). Then you don't care about the experts, PR or niches anymore, and you serve up slop. When the analytics recommend slop you go with the analytics, when they don't you ignore them.
None of this is to discount your insightful comment, just saying once you're big enough, your strategy is just doing tricky distribution deals, really (a fact no record executive would dispute).
There are systems out there that can do AB/CD testing and those do a better job of finding pairs of changed that have compounding effects.
You cannot A/B test your way from chocolate and peanut butter to cherry and vanilla. So we get to deal with tone deaf companies who feel their analytics are proving that customers either don’t know what they want or are lying about what they want. But that’s not something A/B testing can prove. It takes more sophisticated experiments than that.
> is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
Yes, I agree. This does seem to be the most profitable model for running a tech business: maximizing user engagement or increasing the time users spend on the platform. Whether that’s achieved through intentionally convoluted UI or by aggressively surfacing certain content, the end goal remains the same.
That said, I don’t think there’s much room left for significant innovation in video streaming interfaces. The core challenge continues to be content — whoever offers the best or most compelling library wins. UI changes might tweak engagement metrics by a few percentage points, but they’re marginal compared to the impact of strong content.
At the end of the day, if there’s a great movie or series to watch, people will show up. If the content isn’t there, no amount of clever interface design will convince someone to spend 30 minutes on something they’re not actually interested in.
I think the big difference is that nobody is going to pay $10m for a web service or browser.
I think this is a great nuance that is often overlooked when discussing this.
As long as Netflix was successfully reading the author’s mind, they were satisfied with the experience. However, Netflix assumed that they want to keep watching the same content, oblivious to the author’s desire to discover something entirely new. Netflix failed to meet the expectations of those seeking something entirely different.
I can understand why Netflix made this change. They’ve replaced many shows with their own in-house productions. By doing so, they prevent users from searching for specific shows and then realizing that Netflix doesn’t have them. If this happens frequently, they risk losing customers.
On the other hand, Spotify doesn’t face this issue. Therefore, I’m puzzled by why they’ve made it more challenging to explore content by categories. (Disclaimer: I don’t use Spotify, so my experience is based solely on author’s observations.)
> In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.
I'm confused as to whether your saying change is caused by catering to the median who doesn't care, or the enthusiast who recommends the latest and greatest. You seem to be saying both.
They are doing it to increase “engagement” and so more people will stay on their site longer.
Why else wouldn’t Netflix show the “continue watching” row first instead of forcing you to scroll past algorithmic generated crap?
It is the same reason that Google went from describing success as people getting off their site faster and going to one of the “ten blue links” to the shit show it is today.
Presumably the best thing for Netflix is to have a happy userbase, so why do you assume it wouldn't optimize for that?
People want joy, education, entertainment, etc. from watching a video.
But there may be other ways of appealing to people (addiction, insecurity, base stimulation) which boost engagement but which do not give users what they want.
Obviously on even slightly longer time scales, users will gravitate toward services that do not trade their health for engagement, but equally obvious is that many of today's apps are not optimizing for long time scales.
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.
Why not let users choose? Because, sadly, it's about money and not about users.
No it wasn't. It was driven by shady crapware distribution schemes and intentionally subtly broken sites under the big G umbrella.
Something is popular, folks are envious of it, they end up building something much like it. Doesn’t matter if it’s houses, logos, or user experiences – seems to be how things work.
and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent phenomenon.
everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with decision making power is executing a specific and conscious strategy that pushes back against it.
Indie Hackers is full of people trying to flog their shit AI-powered marketing SaaS, because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve. There are uncountably many good problems out there, each with thousands of people who would pay you money to solve them, but those people don't know their problems can be solved by a computer, so you have to go out into the world to find them yourself.
That is indeed a big problem with software engineering/engineers today. No other expertise other than being a framework monkey.
Just like football scouts need to actually visit some niche teams and watch not that interesting stuff to find talent before it is too late.
With tech it might be easier because you might create niche groups so those people come to you.
Just like PG created HN. Nowadays HN is too mainstream so all ideas here are seem already popular so it is like going to scout high school t am that won local championship everyone already knows which players are lined for pro contracts.
Product-Market fit is great if you're developing a SaaS business but it's not necessarily going to give you new inventions — something new is speaking to a potential gap in the market that doesn't currently exist.
Except you're making the mistake of thinking these services are optimizing for their userbase. They are not. They are optimizing for revenue and profit growth, a very different target. More ads, cheaper and easier-to-product content, lower opex.
They are converging to churning out the least offensive slop at the cheapest cost with the maximum revenue.
None of the analytics are about what people using the product want, they are about making the most money and growing the fastest. Nothing would look like the services mentioned in the article if they listened to what the users really preferred.
A very large portion of people actually cares about what they are searching for, and want the ability to ACTUALLY search and find that, with real parameters, not merely get some not-even-close stuff shoved onto their screen instead. That is NOT the serendipity of browsing the stacks in a great library.
A great example of failure is Amazon. I run a small design & manufacturing business, and years ago started getting pestered by Amazon about "Amazon Business" trying to supply both office staples and parts to businesses. This was an area that had enormous potential. Yet, they have entirely failed. I've never bought a single item, and it has faded.
Their primary competitor is McMaster-Carr [0] who does it right. Well-defined categories of everything, and highly specific search capabilities, at reasonable but not bargain prices. EVERYTHING you might search for is fully parameterized in every dimension and feature. Min/max/exact, width/depth/height/thread/diameter/material/containerType/etc./etc./etc. appropriate for each type of product. The key is McMaster DOES NOT WASTE MY TIME. I can go there, quickly find what I want or determine that they don't have it, and get on with my day.
The smaller company that does it right is still beating the tech giant a decade later. Same for other similar suppliers who actually have a clue about what their customers really want.
They continue to prevail over tech giants and VC-funded sites BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT STUPID.
It would be nice if the tech/vc crowd would also stop being stupid. They started out not stupid, but they really lose the plot when they think a few extra eyeballs this week will really win in the long run. At least provide two modes, a strict and serious search and their new messy UI. But they are stupid and this will not happen. Enshittification rules the day.
[0] https://www.mcmaster.com/
The thing that really pissed me off about Amazon Business is that they bought Small Parts and killed it off. Small Parts was a tiny version of McMaster-Carr that specialized in fasteners, small diameter fluid handling, short sections of specialty materials, and in general, quality "small parts."
If I bought directly from Small Parts, I knew I'd get exactly what I wanted. Ordering from Amazon Business? A complete crapshoot. Going to www.smallparts.com now just redirects to an Amazon 404 page!
[/rant]
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 visited and already found what I wanted to buy, finding it again, near impossible. Not even basics like search by product manufacturer actually work.
Sites with usable search are a relative joy.
I don't use amazon, but I use AWS every day of my life and I see similar-ish decisions made there in the 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.
1. I wouldn’t say the car veands you mentioned are popular because they can hit high speeds. In my experience nearly any car can with the right engine and equipment in it (of course due to weight distribution and other details I assume they’re not all equally safe but that aside).
Personally when I look at those brands I think they’re sleek and pretty and when I feel like wanting one it’s because they’re expensive cars, driven by the rich. They’re not chosen only by the rich cause they have the best taste, they’re chosen by the rich because they are the only ones to have the financial means to afford one.
Also I feel like the changes made based on analytics arent made to please (more) users but to make as much money as possible, whether that be pleasing users in the starting phases of your company or in the latter phases when you already dominate the market squeezing money out of your big existing userbase.
That risk (losing all content and facing extinction) is what pushed Netflix in the direction of being a content-producer, rather than a content aggregator. I agree with everyone's points on the influence of the median user in diluting the quality of the content Netflix produces, but that's not the only forced that pushed us here. Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing.
Being a faster horse wasn't an option available to either Netflix or Spotify; there is no path for a 'better 2012 version of netflix or spotify' in 2025. They each had to change species or die, and they chose to keep living.
I know they have playlists, but I was looking more of the feature like, “these are all the songs I’m interested in, that I will use to build my playlists or shuffle… because I don’t want to try and remember everything as I wade through a 60m track library of all the songs available on Spotify.”
Personally, this is the top contender for a reason for me to switch away from Spotify.
I wasn't aware that Spotify lacked much in the way of mainstream western music.
Are they having licensing issues?
Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?
I don't get it.
You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-month.
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.
So regardless of the state of their content library it's necessary future-proofing.
They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old IP owners).
They don't want the customers to search for a specific show. They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them. This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing outside Netflix.
or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.
1. Cutting costs on the other side.
Studios don't want to license content to Netflix now that they are direct competitors, so Netflix has fewer and fewer movies and shows that they didn't produce themselves. And they want to spend as little as possible on producing their own content.
That way they make as much profit from the subscriptions as they can.
2. Reducing the value of competitors.
They are competing for user time. They want you to spend as many minutes as possible on Netflix because any minute not spent their is a minute you might be spending on Hulu or Apple TV. At the end of the month when you decide that you can't afford that many streaming services and decide to cut one, you'll pick based on which one you use the most. They don't want that to be the other guy.
Tbh I don't mind the previews as long as they don't make the UI lag*. I was just pointing out that they don't save bandwidth.
* I'm also aware that they're blatant lies and have little connection with what's in the actual movie.
Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.
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.
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.
That's depends on your definition of "want". They might not want to on, but their monkey brain does.
Many people will pay Netflix for years hardly watching content for months just because the convenience factor of not having to subscribe/unsubscribe when they know a new season of X will be out in the next year. It's wild to me, but people are lazy. So again, the more you keep them from actually watching the content and realizing they are "done", the longer they likely just keep their subscription active. Get them to add as much potential content they want to watch to a never ending backlog watch list.
Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends upon it, investors have been trained that “engagement” is inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase engagement, stonk price go up.
Then investors transposed that proxy to non ad-tention businesses, driving up engagement-rich stocks in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I quit all those platforms recently and I'm not missing the frustration of having to 'switch channels' through their incomprehensible categories and views anymore.
Entertainment is a zero-sum market. More time spent doom scrolling means less time spent on another service, which probably reduces their churn (also, ads)
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...
Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.
I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.
Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, “reality” TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-traffic-increases-40-in-...
To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone from the very same list it appeared in, then you've clawed one additional user into your metrics and the VCs give you a treat.
These people don't care about the service and they're the worst users to cater to, but everyone caters to them because they're the only ones left. Hence, TikTokization.
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 whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.
And when you control what's presented to people, not they (and they don't care), you can push them to consume what you want them to consume.
I heard a YC group partner once that he's worked with a ton of delivery apps. Many of them start out as differentiated apps for ordering from the best "hole in the wall" places or the app for authentic foreign cuisines, only to discover that the best growth hack is getting McDonald's on the app, because that'll be your top seller, instantly.
Most people just do the default thing everyone does—and we're probably all like that in one aspect or another of our lives, and that's who many experiences are designed for.
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.
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...
Reddit is a good example of what a monetized version could look like. It's a shell of its former self. NFT avatar customization, engagement achievements, ads in feed and comments, layers of friction to simplify the experience. Such a mess.
At least McDonald's doesn't pretend.
I think this is a debatable statement. It could be true, but I am increasingly convinced that enshittification, TikTokification, AIfication, etc. is proceeding despite what the average person wants. Average does not mean gaping, uninspired idiot. I think people in general do notice that everything is broken, short-lived, watered down and ad-ridden. But what to do? When every company does it, voting with your wallet becomes practically impossible.
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.
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.
It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.
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.
At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(
Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a Twitter-like thing inside of it, shopping, and literally dozens of other products. Some core banking features are now hard to find but more importantly I had quite a few issues with investments as well. People who work there also tell me about messy problems on the financial services bits. It's very clear to me that in trying to become everything, they've deprioritized the fundamental products they offer, which are those related to banking. I want to store money, send and receive it, invest it, and have access to credit. But the experience of using those features has become significantly worse as new verticals sprouted up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
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)
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!
I loved my computer when I was a kid, now I only see flaws. I don't think software was flawless at the time, it's just that I became very keenly aware of its current issues because this is my field.
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.
How does one build or maintain a viable software business in a world where most people's software needs have been met? It's to pivot away from delivering value towards extracting value. Hence all the push towards cloud-based services instead of stadalone local programs. Online connectivity allows the developer to arbitrarily change the balance of value between them and the user, which is where the gross adversarial feeling of modern computing comes from. The computer is no longer serving you exclusively.
It will be interesting to see how these first decades of the millennium will be remembered.
When Ford was working on a car, people who wanted a faster horse could go to the horse store. There were reasonable alternatives to Ford's new method of transportation.
But here, you can't recreate Spotify from 2015. You'll never get the rights to play the music for users. Same with Netflix, you'll never get the rights to show the movies.
Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even if you know exactly what content your user wants, you can't fetch it for them because it was posted in some other walled garden, and that wall stops you from competing.
If you want a faster horse, change the laws so that people can build faster horses and compete.
Spotify has almost anything I look for. Netflix I struggle to find anything of interest.
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.
I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I have my own collection though since it tracks my interests poorly.
I've gotten back into buying my own video too. I don't consume a ton of video and I dropped Netflix streaming a while ago because the delta between me marking something for the queue and actually getting to it was becoming routinely larger than the amount of time Netflix would still have the thing I wanted to see.
The problem is, I don't even see the second derivative on this trend turning, let alone the first. Metric-driven development, by its very nature, will take away every knob from you that you could conceivably use to drive their metrics lower. I think that's a reasonable approximation of the root cause of the reality observed in the OP. If you happen to agree with their metrics then hey, good times for you, but the odds of that are low since you're probably not looking to maximize the monetization they can extract from you as priority one.
Therefore, the only option is, get off metric-driven-development platforms. There is no alternative and will be even less of one as time goes on.
I suspect in the very long run this metric-driven development will eventually die off as all consumers come around to this realization one way or another and start turning to other alternatives, but it can easily be 5-10 years before there's enough of us for those "alternatives" to be able to survive in the market. Fortunately, MP3 players haven't gone anywhere. (Although it takes some searching to find ones that aren't also trying to match the streaming services and stick to old-school "play what you ask for and not anything else, unless you ask for shuffling or randomness explicitly".)
I can't tell you how much I miss removable storage
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 BluRay players from another company, everyones incentives are better aligned.
After getting annoyed by their interface that was showing 80% of content I have already seen, I've come to a realization:
Their incentive is not even to make me watch crap. No! Their best outcome for them is for me to watch nothing and still pay.
Showing me old shows gives me the warm feelings and make me associate them with Netflix, making me keep the subscription even
Hypnodrones are corporate dreams
Netflix et al are good for those high profile miniseries you want to watch once and then never again. The rest, download and enjoy without ads, without dark patterns, especially content that kids watch (youtube).
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 and TV were great. The rest happily will watch Ow, My Balls and ads for Carl's Jr.
Given everything we've seen with kids and teenagers exposed to phones, social media, etc this is the next tobacco. Thank god there are countries already banning phones from schools and there's talk of banning minor from social media.
[1] https://volumo.com
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!
Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and it says "Content related to <thing that you actually wanted>".
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
If you ask a heroine user if they want to use, I suspect most will say no.
But if you A/B test their behavior and build a product based on what they actually do, you're going to start selling more heroin and encourage more heroin use.
To everyone's detriment.
That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.
Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps developer makes better software.
How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!
The key metric seems to be no longer how many users you can make sign up, but how can I keep an subscription running at lowest cost to serve possible.
The UHD price is not worth it for a long term subscription, and the HD quality is subpar.
The analogy would be "I want to go back to the pre-ensh*ttified, simple version of X that we used to have. But with an updated web experience, or smartphone app, there's no way to go back. I have at least three apps on my phone that I wish I could still have the older version of. But I can't.
A very interesting development: in the Netherlands KPN, one of the largest telcos, introduced a feature where any household with several of their products in use (e.g., two cellphones and fiber internet) could choose a free 'gift'². The gift is a choice from a bunch of subscriptions, including Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. And you get to switch monthly if you want to. So we ditched our own Netflix subscription and started watching Disney+ for now. Perhaps we'll switch in a few months.
These services probably realise that their customers are made up of 'hoppers', and 'stackers' (people who take out multiple subscriptions to streaming services at once). I wonder what the distribution for each service is.
1: In part forced upon them by the content owners waking up and wanting to set up their own exclusive shops of course, and in part because of, well, greed (the UI suckiness).
2: The trade-off is obviously that this stimulates consumers to consolidate their telco products with them. In my case this was already so, so for me this is just a small incentive to stay with them (i.e., it saves me €9 a month).
But what they need is rolling releases across the whole year, so that once one production is "done", the next one rolls around.
(maybe they already do, I don't know, I'm just thinking of Stranger Things which seems to be Netflix' main seller at the moment)
There is an aphorism that with enough A/B testing every website turns into a porn app or a gambling app. I guess we’re observing something similar.
So they are finally here.
In my bombastic opinion, Spotify has the _worst_ goddamn user interface of anything I have ever used, including my dishwasher with a single button. Netflix is less frustrating, but that's likely because "here are some films" is more acceptable than "here are some songs, but fuck you if want to listen by album".
Smashing content into my face isn't making me love you.
Tubi has a better exploration system and catalog than Netflix does but it’s still not as good as Netflix used to be.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9_Vh9h3Ohw
EDIT: perhaps it's time I make a utility that I could use to achieve these ends: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/libimobiledevice
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.
As I understand, licensing dynamics were the main reason for Netflix's change, not pure product design. In 2012, most movie studios licensed their catalog to Netflix, while 7 years later they took away the licensing to compete with proprietary walled streaming platforms. Due to the smaller catalog, Netflix could not design that open searchable streaming library; they changed their design to make the best of the more limited library.
The only question are people like me outliers that can be ignored - there will always be a few people you can't get. However I could be a sign of the end.
To a point, until stage 3 enshittification hits, and the business claws back all the value.
I hate YouTube Shorts with a passion. They are low-effort engagement bait. They cannot be disabled.
Even worse, my Google TV will not play them when my phone is connected to it, and my phone will not play them when it is connected to my TV. Both devices can play them fine, they just don’t want to play them when they are connected.
There can be no good technical reason for this. It’s just delivering a bad experience because it can.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/156lw72/the_be...
On top of that, their recommendation algorithms are (were?) terrible compared to the other services (since then, they added more payola), and they're actively trying to burn down the last open corner of the internet (podcasts).
Also, the pricing is comparable, even if the other options feel more premium.
What am I missing?
https://www.kcrw.com/playlists
I also pay for Youtube premium, but I can't even switch to that because their music player is even worse than Spotify.
I really miss the good old days of music players that were _packed_ with features. The players of current streaming services are so basic. And as long as I can't find a replacement that fits my needs I don't really want to bother switching.
You have given every product team a set of parameters and asked them to optimize the product around those parameters. Namely, how much time and attention the user spends staring at your app. Is anyone surprised that convergence has taken place, when everyone is after the same thing, with the same tools, in the same environment?
The only question is: who is "you" in this scenario? Instinctively, it's the leadership team. But in one of my least popular takes, I tend to think the responsibility is ultimately "you", the user who refuses to stop scrolling. Tech leadership doesn't have vision or a moral compass, they take their direction from the metrics which ultimately measure your choices.
YouTube and LinkedIn are practically monopolies. Netflix isn't a monopoly in the same way but you usually don't have a choice of streaming services for watching a particular film or series so it's different from being able to buy the same cheese or the same wine from any of several different supermarkets.
For some reason (perhaps because it costs money to keep a large catalog?) Netflix retracted the long tail while Amazon at least kept theirs unfurled.
ahem. We have a solution for the monopoly part. We've had it since the 19th century. We just stopped enforcing it in the 70s and 80s when the Chicago School convinced everyone that as long as judge Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" can be trotted out to prove that the "free market" is working and prices are low.
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 analysis going on. CEO's will be invited to rub shoulders with the same groups of people. Conglomerates will have information sharing of some kind across all subsidiaries.
Everyone is acting independently, but towards the same goal. It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
I'm a bit counter-culture in my missive, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but a little nudge across a limited population seems to be enough - and it exists.
Controversially: Blackrocks DEI initiatives are perfect public example of what I mean, no matter if you are pro or con, you can't deny the impact.
[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE3sYUJASLY
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.
> It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
The same thing too when companies hire consultants to look at the "market wage" and then set salaries based on what the consultant said. Every worker at the same "market wage" with no incentives to be above that.
I hate the Netflix interface enough that I prefer to watch movies other ways even though I have access to it.
On LI I lost already like 3 articles that I really wanted to read but I clicked notification and I can never get that articles back.
A better, more constructive approach is to proactively identify how emerging technology can fit people's needs. And for sure, you need to verify that there is an actual need for what you are building, and then go build it.
Netflix and TikTok are not the "faster horse" here. Generative AI is clearly the "faster horse". It's a disruptive technology that will change the entire structure of society, much like the internal combustion engine. And no one said they wanted that either, that doesn't make people dumb, or user surveys pointless. Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?
Henry Ford saying that would probably be like hearing Sam Altman say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster computer". It's not true, it doesn't match reality.
well... I definitely want more performance per watt. And I stress "performance", because more MIPS are useless if wasted.
In this case, it's less "faster horse" and more "quit with the stupid fucking song and dance, and give me the damn thing I paid for without all this extra stupid bullshit that makes the experience worse."
It's hard to say for sure if Netflix could have/should have kept going in the direction they were going in 2012. But they didn't seem to think so.
You can't necessarily count on businesses springing up to satisfy your personal interests and tastes. Especially large-scale businesses, which are always going to gravitate toward the center of large markets. It's great when it happens, but it's basically just luck when it does.
Could you maintain a profitable business and continue steady growth? Sure. Could you become a unicorn and IPO within the next 5 years? Unlikely.
That's because the money is concentrated into a few dumb people with limited capacity to invest it. So they'll push it into a handful of companies that will destroy whatever sustainable companies that exist on the same market.
Instagram. I have clicked through an ad, yes AN AD, and came back to get to another ad and had it refreshed away.
I hope they are doing this because it works for them, somehow.
PS: LinkedIn does this too.
For media library, I use Jellyfin and host all my media files locally on a NAS.
I self-host all my projects on that same NAS, which works just fine and and makes me not need to subscribe to some offer or other from hosting providers.
I quit SmugMug last year, because it turns out, hosting my photos on the NAS costs nothing, and remaking the small part of the SmugMug web interface that I need is trivial.
And for vehicles, I also made myself a faster horse, by bolting a Bafang motor on an ordinary mountain bike. Things break occasionally on that thing, but I know how to fix them, and so I do.
It's interesting that SV outwardly says it "wants to create entirely new markets instead of products in existing ones", meanwhile the actual experienced outcome for users is the same experience across multiple markets.
SV is somehow failing on both of its metrics here. It's creating entirely homogeneous products across all existing markets.
Usually their new bridge is modestly more convenient in some way, but opens the door to the worst kind of enshittification.
(You do have to ignore the other features, but that doesn’t seem very hard.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
"Recurring revenue stream" is an answer in search of problems, and it's ready to destroy all alternatives.
(This coupled with the tendency to hire more people as you get more popular, you have more people mutating the thing. Also novelty bias...)
Every trip, I'm reminded of how disappointing Google Maps is. Simple things like trying to find a laptop-friendly cafe and getting random cafes represented by a close up picture of someone's cappuccino. Realising that I'm driving 10 kilometres to do a U-turn. Having no way to bypass a blocked road. The very clunky waypoint management. Aagh!
I want quality of life improvements more than I want new features. It's weird that a company with so much resources can't create powerful tools.
At most of these corporations, over time they've learned to be product and financially oriented, because it's what the markets reward and it's easy to do, rather than customer orientated, because as long as they're not unusably shit for the majority of their customers, then that's good enough.
It's an attempt to reverse backwards to the worst possible thing that works, because that gets you more ad revenue, rather than the best possible thing.
I say this as someone who's walked away from strategy consult gigs for multinationals where the objective was literally to do things like this. Revenue and margin maximisation in ways the stock market and PE/VC investment rewards is frequently orthogonal to building the best thing for the customer.
The main problem here is that the systems are starting to look more and more alike every day. Systems that are oppressed by algorithms turn into a Hollywood porn star: they are just trying to show what they like the most. This makes the systems uniform by wiping out all other beautiful and valuable things.
Instead of really making a system better, we're trying to make it look like the most popular one available. As a result, we have copies with silicone lips, silicone breasts, plenty of aesthetics, but cheap and soulless. Instead of improving existing systems, we corrupt them by copying them.
But Spotify is far better now than it was 10 years ago. I still have playlists, I can still instantly find any song I want. The added bonus is the discovery engine. So the UX now is a superset of what it was before.
It's not good by any conceivable metric other than those they have internally decided represent business goals. If you want to have a tautological argument that makes it good, because those goals are the only goals that matter. That's a boring response to an article about how business incentives have turned the UI into trash.
FFS the Play button frequently breaks requiring a refresh. And as much as I appreciate the inevitable response that I'm holding it wrong, how is that my problem?
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 business, both have no idea what they actually want and don't understand the capabilities of new technologies in the market? Totally condescending.
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 - it all becomes more diffuse and poorly executed.
I've also seen it a lot: sales person at a small tech startup convinces business person in large tech company to ignore their own engineers. I suspect most engineers at large firms have been on one side of this experience at somepoint, and most engineers at small but successful tech startups have been on the other side (lead engineer to sales: "You told them our our product could do _what?!_ That's fine. I never wanted my PTO anyway...:(")
External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)
External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)
You get the idea.
Knowing you've built the solution perfectly to the spec, whilst also knowing that the spec wasn't reviewed or endorsed by any technical people so the client's entire engineering team thinks you're incompetent, for just doing what their colleagues asked you to do...
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.
I just want them to import a syntax highlighting library but instead they are pushing video content into my face
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
I can only guess that for some reason Amazon think they make more money by not making search work. Work, generally, like only actually returning things with the search term or, work specifically, like letting you specify hard drive sizes above 6TB.
But I find it hard to believe this shit horse actually drives sales. I always end up looking elsewhere in frustration.
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
Every entertainment platform becomes video centric.
Every discussion platform becomes political.
As someone who prefers text and static images and doesn't like politics, this is really bothering me right now.
Adding to the list: image-sharing platforms, Instagram, Pinterest and Imgur, are also Tiktok now, specially if you use the apps instead of the website.
Tumblr and Flickr somehow have resisted Tiktok-fication so far.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
They did it because it's more profitable to shovel slop than to distribute quality. Quality content is expensive to make. Slop isn't. The way you do that is by hypnotizing people with addiction. To do that you have to have control over what people see and use algorithms to optimize that to "maximize engagement." You need your users mindlessly scrolling, not searching and categorizing and exploring. You need to disengage the neocortex and engage the brain stem.
TikTok is being copied by everyone because they nailed this formula better than anyone. They didn't invent it, just perfected it. I'd say Meta/Facebook invented it, which is why Zuckerberg should be known as the man who destroyed the Internet.
The next step beyond TikTok is a 100% AI generated algorithmic feed. Drop the human creators entirely. Everyone gets a personalized feed of low-quality AI slop tuned for maximum engagement.
Addiction is the best business model.
So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed.
Even the good stuff Netflix has (like say Black Mirror) isn't going to be enough to keep customers unless they get people watching some slop.
Remember Google Reader?
What if I want a better Google Reader?!
* beats dead horse * ... sorry, horsey.
With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But judging from the lack of successful things in this space, probably not.